Listen Now

Alex Charfen is as seasoned as they come, a diverse experience going all the way back to being trained in his fathers business at as a pre-teen, his challenges with standard education and overcoming that through his extensive reading about what it took to be successful in business and to eventually creating an international consulting brand that would peak at $250m in revenue. Alex had a false start at retirement after exiting his consulting business, he re-invested all his gains into real estate quickly which quickly grew into a $40m portfolio, but hurricane weather and the global financial crisis wiped out their portfolio and took him and his family into bankruptcy. In this show Alex takes the time to walk us through three main phases of two plus decades of his entrepreneurial journey, drawing out some key distinctions that any aspiring or seasoned entrepreneur can use to kick start a multiple seven figure business. With literally all odds against them, Alex shares how him and his wife, a real estate professional, designed a course for real estate agents and the financial services companies whose clients were facing foreclosures at the height of the GFC. Armed with real life experience after being served multiple property foreclosure notices, Alex looked for a way to bring all affected parties to a common negotiating table that would help more families keep their home, and help more lenders preserve their investments. This training course was developed while Alex was bankrupt and it was launched with zero money down, yet made a profit on day one and would sell over 48,000 courses averaging $500 per course, multiple millions of dollars from a standing start. Alex breaks down a simple methodology of how anyone can create a valuable information product that has high conversion and a high completion rate. Identify your target audience or gap in the market Research through direct surveys and find out what their pains are. Alex interviewed over 100 real estate brokers and agents, they shared their pain points and frustrations when it came to foreclosures Develop a product that will answer the needs of your audience. No need for perfection here just let the creative juices flow, if using a computer slows your creative process then write it on paper, draw up all your illustrations or image guides and create the blueprint Beta testing – Alex called his target audience and walked them through the course details. With their feedback and additional input he further refined the course and got their committee to to buy once it launched Launch, don’t over complicate or wait too long, get it launched with a few people, see the response and then move on there. Alex went on to be recognised as a key contributor to turning around the home foreclosure industry through the course. If you have any expertise or thought leadership, this methodology above that Alex uses is your guide to creating that service offering your clients want and desire so much they are willing to buy without you “over selling” it to them. We covered other ground during the podcast including: How you can transition from a corporate consulting role into your own business; and A case study of how Alex is helping entrepreneurs grow from $1m to $20m plus in annual revenues: Alex breaks down some of the key strategies that are helping put multiple seven figures in top line revenue for his clients today that you can leverage today Legacy Alex passionately shares about what he would like to leave as a legacy when all is said is done – this was a powerful moment during the show – – – make sure you check it out! Entrepreneurial books Alex recommends for any entrepreneur – – FreeMomentumBook.com – Alex Charfen – ‘This Book Will Help You Understand Yourself Better Than You Ever Have … So You Can Create Momentum” Think and Grown Rich, Napoleon Hill; and The Highest Goal, Michael Ray, Stamford University Professor Connect with Alex Get in touch with Alex at Momentum Podcast on iTunes or his home page at charfen.com

Timo Rein is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pipe Drive which is a simplified sales management tool that is helping over 60,000 sales teams around the world to get more organised, more focused and helping them sell more. You have probably already heard about Pipe Drive because they have done an amazing job marketing their service, this is a great episode with Timo, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I know we will receive great feedback on this one! Timo is based in Estonia with his wife and kids, born in the Soviet Union, studied psychology in university, he lived in the US for four years and is now back home living and running his business from north eastern Europe in the wonderful Estonia. He co-founded Pipe Drive 7 years ago with 4 other founders, prior to that was a partner is a sales training business for 10 years, so Timo is a seasoned entrepreneur with 17 years in the game of running his own business. Show notes and links at: https://www.businessgenerals.com/timor Revenue streams Pipe Drive is a SaaS (software as a service) business, that generates a monthly and annual subscription from customers who are from all corners of the world. They have doubles their revenue each year for the last 5-6 years, so Timo describes as a high growth yet high investment SaaS business. They have invested about $30m into the business which includes successful strong capital raisings. Dilution of your ownership v Investors In Timo’s mind their business is run by a team of professionals right across their leadership and executive level, including the investors who he feels are well invested to give the founders every necessary introduction and connection in the market place as well challenge the leadership and ask more of them so as to get the best that the company can deliver. The big idea and the story of how pipe drive started The big idea with Timo’s first co-founder, who also had a sales background like Timo Coming up with the specification document of the product Looking for developers who would build the code Meeting up with 3 other start up founders who had coding back ground The tipping point for Timo He was running his sales business and going well An old friend quizzed Timo about his consultancy role at the time and in Timo’s mind this made his wake up to his dream of being a doer, a builder and this sent him back to his drawing board so he went back to looking at building a business. Building Pipe Drive With the new 3 co-founders the idea was ready to be dusted off and given another chance. Timo and his first co-founder described the whole software idea again to the new team. A brand new specification document was created and it was much better than their original spec, as it was much more visual with screen shots and clear work flows. The original founders had the idea, they knew how to market and scale a business while the 3 new founders brought in the engineering experience and proven experience in coding a product that can be scaled, so together they created a strong foundation on which to build the business from. For a period of 3 months the team would get together on weekend retreats at a local farm house, from Friday nights and code through out the weekend and would only head back to their homes on Sundays. Three of the co-founders had day jobs during the week so this project was only worked on during the weekends at this time. The other two founders plus one other engineer (who would later become a founding employee) worked full time on the project during this 3 month period. Although away from family, this helped the team focus well on the project and also helped them build a strong team dynamic and start to understand each other better. After a few months a beta version was finalised and ready for prime time, Timo was not fully comfortable with doing a beta (test) launch as the product was not fully ready, but his co-founders were quite bullish about wanting to start getting customer feedback so he went along. In hindsight Timo says if they hadn’t done their beta launch when they did it would have been a mistake. The beta launch They targeted about 500 previous contacts that they had worked with previously in sales and sales management. The goal was to get the tool into the hands of these teams, have them test it, break it and give feed back so that the team could fix it and iron out all the bugs – this beta testing took about half a year before the team the first market version was ready to launch Market launch and getting the first few customers It was launched with a 30 day trial followed by a paid plan. Out of the 500 beta users, about 30 had good use of the product during the beta trial stage enough to have 10 of these immediately convert to paid customers when the market version launched. For Timo, he had a back of the napkin calculation that said if they can scale up to 500 customers who had a monthly recurring subscription then the business would be real and sustainable in his own estimations For about 4-5 months from launch the business grew at about 10-15 new customers each month, but it was quite linear and the growth target of 500 customers seemed very far away. Before running out of steam, patience and funding due to the shear pace or lack thereof – the founders started asking how they could accelerate their growth and how they could fund their business  better. Enter…incubators The idea of joining an incubator program became their next logical step on their journey to growth, the US model was most appealing as it had both good programs to help grow the founders, get the start up off the ground as well as strong investor networks and opportunities. They spent 5-6 months applying to different incubator programs in the US while documenting their successes and failures on their company blog which also helped in traffic and conversions. After 6 months an incubator in San Francisco (Angel Pad) accepted them Pipe Drive team into its program. This program brough some initial funding for the business and at this point Timo and his fellow founders were hopeful that this would be a real turning point for the business What can we change this week to help our potential customers find us better? Website optimisation Content creation Considering crazy ideas like doing collaborations with other companies. So they did a deal with App Sumo and heavily discounted their subscription in order to make some noise in the market through App Sumo. This added 220 new customers in bulk, and this was a good jump for the business. With consistent weekly effort, the team finally got to their goal of 500 subscribers which was a great milestone. Pipe Drive’s reach after 7 years in business They serve small businesses with teams of 4-5. Customer reach is over 60,000. With the lowest monthly subscription at $15/month, the maths adds up to over $10 million in annual revenue, a great achievement for an idea that started so simply with limited time and resources. Other topics we discussed during the podcast  Inspirational books as an entrepreneur: Common Denominator of Success – Albert Gray  Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink Crucial Conversations  – Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, by Kerry Patterson Team at pipe drive has over 300 team members which is a great team Best way to connect with Timo – get onto Pipe Drive and use the messenger option and also on LinkedIn Pipe Drive pricing – check out pipedrive.com Legacy “To give people confidence that there is a way to get to great results which are almost guaranteed” – Timo

Bobby Umar has been named by Inc Magazine as a top 100 leadership speaker alongside people like John Maxwell and Richard Branson, he has taken to the famous and prestigious Tedx stage four times and has over half a million followers on social media. Bobby is also an international author and a Huffington post contributor. A father of two and loves improv comedy. Bobby started his business full time in January 2017, he rolled out of his corporate role and went straight into launching his business. His number one revenue stream today is professional speaking – inspirational motivational speaker, travelling mostly around Canada and from time to time internationally. Bobby speaks on leadership as a general theme with specialised expertise in three key areas: Networking – leadership building and connection Personal branding Social media and digital marketing Bobby other revenue streams are coaching (executive coaching, career coaching and business coaching) and events. Why and how speaking During his corporate days Bobby conducted workshops and training and received very strong positive feedback about his speaking and motivational skills. By the time Bobby was ready to leave corporate he leaned on this feedback and took all the positives and embarked on building out his personal brand.  After a deep dive into his personal values, traits, personality assessments and some soul searching – Bobby says he found out that his brand was all about connection, people, persuasion, influence, performing, presenting and diversity, speaking seemed like a logical thing to do. First customer Bobby kept track of all his connections throughout his career even before the advent of LinkedIn, he maintained an excel spreadsheet with 3,000 contacts, so the first thing he did was to send out 500 brochures to people on this list and then also sent an email to all 3,000 contacts sharing that he had launched a business, his services and clearly specifying the opportunities he was looking for. After sending that out a few people wrote back to Bobby (not as many as initially hoped for but it was a start…), some called and with a bit of follow up Bobby landed his first gig. Business growth after the first few paying customers Bobby made it a priority to do an amazing job so that it was easy to get referrals from each engagement He leveraged his network some more, set up calls and met up with his contacts – he estimates having met over 1,000 people for catch up chats, coffees and meals in his first 3-5 years of launching his business. He let them know what he was up to and this fueled more engagements and referral opportunities. Maintained a strong social media presence through Facebook and LinkedIn Saying yes to most gigs that were offered to him, a lot of which Bobby says he wouldn’t do today Paid v Free events Starting out, Bobby was doing a lot of events for free as he built out his brand but was always looking for paid opportunities. His paid opportunities were attracting a $500 fee, and after a while this changed to $1,000 with a lower end engagement being $500, and then $2,500 an engagement and continued to grow that way.  Bobby shares how you have to know when to say NO to certain opportunities if they are not within your core niche as saying NO indirectly helps you say YES to what you are really called to do. Tedx Talk & Social Media While previously unaware of what it was, on 5 October 2011, Bobby did the first of his four Tedx talks and decided to launch his social media strategy as it clear in his mind that social media was here to stay. On this day Bobby launched his social media arsenal on all channels – Twitter, Facebook business page, newsletter and announced his Tedx talk – making sure all his content was all synchronised within the brand he was creating. Within 6 months Bobby landed his first speaking gig directly from Twitter, and that was the start of good innings from social media. Break through moments Bobby says his first break though moment was his first Tedx talk which he simultaneously cross leveraged into his social media strategy launch. He had been in business for 4 years at the time, both these events gave Bobby lots of credibility and visibility as well as a strong edge over many other professional speakers who had not yet embraced social media in the same way. The second moment came in 2015, Bobby had strong recognition as a social media thought leader by this time and this was then named by Inc Magazine as a top 100 leadership speaker (without even pitching for it!) and secondly he scored a speaker agent which meant less prospecting, less logistical admin work and more time to focus on delivery. Other topics we discussed on the podcast Corporate skills that prepared Bobby well for his entrepreneurial journey today Networking, relationship building and connecting with people How to use the different social media platforms to generate leads and connect with prospects and how to incorporate email and phone connection to close out your deals Transitioning social media followers to your in house email list using content Sales funnel tactics for coaching, speaker training and marketing networking courses Best way to connect with Bobby LinkedIn Twitter Intagram Tedx Talk – The 5 Cs of Connection – Bobby Umar Grab a copy of one of the books by Bobby Umar on Amazon Bobby’s website – raeallan.com Legacy “My number 1 legacy is going to be my children, being a dad and raising my kids to be nurtured, happy, fulfilled and global productive citizens is going to be the greatest story and legacy of my life. Secondly, I have always been about connection – I am always there for people, I will support people and I will always help them fly.” Bobby Umar

Dr Daniel Crosby is a Psychologist, he has a PhD in psychology and behavioural finance specialising in helping people and organisations understand the cross over between the mind and the financial markets. He is a co-author of a New York Times best seller “Personal Benchmark” and also authored the “Laws of Wealth“. Daniel is the founder and CEO of Nocturne Capital – an investment management firm whose approach is rooted in the science of behavioral finance. Daniel has a growing family, based in Atlanta Georgia from where he runs his business which he has been running full time for the last 10 years. Check out the full show with detailed show notes and episode links: businessgenerals.com/danielc Lets talk core revenue streams Daniel shares how he started off doing speaking engagement to market his other services in his company but it has since taken off and become a major part of his revenue stream. An early take away from Daniel is not to underestimate the power of speaking as an extra revenue stream in your business! Daniel also manages money on behalf of clients, teaches online courses in behavioural finance and provides consulting services and content development. While speaking is Daniel’s number one income stream it’s not completely scalable due to the time commitment and extensive travel requirements so Daniel has a focus to grow the other income streams. Daniel has been on the speaking circuit for the last 10 years, and cautions that it is taxing for someone with a young family. Childhood inspiration Growing up Daniel was inspired by his dad who is an investment manager, after getting into college Daniel loved the study of psychology, helping and teaching people – but part way through his PhD he felt emotionally burned out as a clinical psychologist. A conversation with his dad about his next options turned him down the road of understanding the intersection between psychology and stock market investing. Why a PhD and not just a Degree Daniel says in his experience a psychology degree in the US, does not get you very far in your career as a psychologist. The PhD paid off for Daniel as clients more readily hired his consulting services as a PhD graduate even though he was only 28. While the PhD opened doors for Daniel he says he doesn’t actually use it in its direct form because he is trained to conduct therapy sessions as a clinical psychologist but he now picks stocks for a living. The skills learned however, of being non defensive, hard work, accepting feedback, critiquing and taking action – are life skills he has taken from his PhD that have helped him in his business. First paying client and a speaking career Daniel managed to secure his first client before he resigned from his job, he recommends that you find a way to get at least one good client account before stepping out on your own. He quickly moved into the world of speaking and in the beginning all his presentations were at no charge, he would look for places to speak at in his city as a way of marketing his consultancy services. After quiet a number of free events Daniel recalls an attendee asking if they could book him for a paid speaking engagement and he began a new journey where he would eventually be charging between $1,000 and $2,000 to speak. A mistake he shares is saying yes to all speaking requests and having to create a special bespoke keynote each time he got an invitation, this would wear Daniel out and he looked for a different solution. Major turning points in speaking and some key lessons After a season of providing bespoke keynotes, Daniel put together half a dozen key notes that covered a few generic topics related to his core message of behavioural finance. This helped his clients focus in on which key note they felt was best for them and this worked well for Daniel as he wasn’t building a new presentation but rather using material that had received positive feedback from previous events and that people benefit the most from. Daniel decided to start saying No to speaking opportunities that were outside of his core focus of behavioural finance and investment management. This was a difficult decision but it paid dividends as he became more specialized and the market rewarded his expertise with increased demand and increased bookings. Another key thing Daniel changed was his pricing. An event attendee really loved Daniel’s keynote but privately told Daniel that his company would love to hire Daniel more but probably won’t because they didn’t think he was any good based how low his prices were! Daniel decided to triple his prices. This created a renewed demand for his speaking services and created great growth in the business. A final piece to Daniel’s successful multiple six figure speaking business came through a bold moment were he decided to jump on a plane to go and have lunch with a prospective client who had been not so responsive to Daniel’s emails. With no guarantee of winning any new business it would have been a costly lunch for Daniel’s growing business, but the move paid off, the prospect became a client and opened the doors to many more such clients who were in the financial management space that Daniel had keenly niched into.  Key lessons in these turning points that I take away are: Don’t be afraid to create systems that allow you to scale and replicate your effort Say no to requests that take you away from your core strength and niche Keep an eye on your pricing model and optimize it – cheap is not always attractive Take some risks with your target prospects and do something your competition will not do Other great topics you will not want to miss as you listen to the show: Why you cannot create wealth from savings alone and why you need to invest The hedonic treadmill principle and how Daniel believes you can turn this negative human bias to your financial advantage Financial accountability, mentorship and why people who use a financial adviser double their retirement wealth over a typical working career How to build towards a million dollar speaking business Recommended entrepreneurial reading Man’s Search for Meaning – Victor Frankl Thinking Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman Daniel’s Curated Inspirational and Business Reading List Reach out and contact Daniel Nocturne Capital Twitter Daniel’s TedTalk Make sure you grab a copy of Daniel’s Bestselling Book Laws of Wealth – Daniel Crosby Legacy: Daniel shares what he feels he would love to leave as a legacy, check it out on the podcast. Quote of the show! “I want to leave my kids enough money so that they feel they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing.” Warren Buffet Look forward to serving you again on our next show. Till then keep your hopes up and remember that you are good enough to chase to dreams! You are a TRUE Business General. Cheers Davis

Rob Jacobs is the guy who gets people up-and-out of their chairs and moving again! A personal fitness expert and the co-founder of UnSit, an innovative company working to get people UP out of their chairs and moving again with the world’s first Treadmill Desk optimized for use in an office environment. His background is firmly in the fitness industry having been in treadmill retail and commercial equipment including a repairs and servicing business model. Being a fitness enthusiast sitting at a chair all day made Rob research into how to help people with desk jobs get fitter by moving more. First business startup – the walking centre. This was a fitness centre targeted at middle aged stay at home mums who would go into the store, rent a movie, and walk on a treadmill while watching their movie! This proved to be a great model for Rob. The results were very good and people started buying these high ticket treadmills in the Beverly Hills area, and opened more stores which also included the sale of commercial fitness equipment. Rob eventually sold out of the retail model after a number of years as the market changed with increased competition and margin pressure. Before selling out of retail Rob had developed a service model that repaired and serviced fitness equipment for health clubs and fitness centres, so with a new business partner Rob developed and grew this business to include retailing of spare parts. Rob has maintained and continued to grow this business over the last 25 years plus and it still continues to be his core revenue generator. The business model is ecommerce based enhanced with telephone technology support, targeted at out of warranty fitness equipment servicing clients in different countries. The problem that turned into a new business idea Rob found himself constantly sitting at a desk, servicing clients and growing his spare parts business, and found himself having less and less exercise, feeling lethargic, lower back problems all from sitting behind a desk far too long. A book by Dr. James Levine, who is credited as the popular inspiration for the treadmill desk, inspired Rob to work on solving his problem. Book reference: Get up – why your chair is killing you, Dr James Levine Rob had seen the idea before but he discredited it on the basis that he didn’t think a treadmill desk provided real exercise or real practicality in an office setting. [During this interview Rob was walking along at 1 mile per hour on his treadmill desk and by about 15 minutes into the interview he had clocked over 2,000 steps! Pretty impressive]. Dissecting the research and looking at the market opportunity Obesity is one third of US population, and this same third is also at the pre-diabetic stage estimated to require medicated treatment in a few years time Sitting disease is a term used in the book by Dr Levine which includes diabetes, heart disease and other chronic illnesses which can be prevented or recovered from through exercise Mental creativity is a softer science but this is the marketing point Rob has picked, exercise leads to a more productive and creative workforce and this can be achieved through the treadmill desk technology Designing the product After reading Dr James Levine’s book Rob decided to work on designing a product that was fit for purpose Most designs at this time simply took a tread mill and stuck it under a desk, but Rob figured there was better way Rob shares that while his academic qualifications are minimal and his learning quite empirical and self taught, this did not disadvantage his entrepreneurial journey Rob took out an old treadmill, a piece of plywood and created a frame around the treadmill, tweaked it and after a couple of months came up with half decent treadmill desk Then after using it a for a little while Rob identified further key refinements like making the desk wider and longer, then also found a way to re-engineer the motor of the product that wasn’t noisy and could power the machine at slow speeds Rob connected with Paul his business partner and they together partnered up with a manufacturer who was given equity in Unsit as a way for all partners to have ‘skin in the game’ The manufacturer with their experience and expertise developed the first 12 beta units which were in line with the initial mock up prototype. Beta testing of the product Found 12 beta locations and got feedback from users of the treadmill desks over a 6 – 12 month period Through networking Rob managed to sell all of these units out to business owners, office managers, professional service firms and other locations They got the model pretty close in the beta round and didn’t need to change it too much This led to the first production unit point with about $100,000 invested into the project at this point which included the prototype, the initial marketing, website and initial beta run First Shipment 104 per container, so they got 2 containers loads in quick succession as the first production batch This was shipped over to some of the dealers the Rob is connected to Rob rented out some space at a We-Work shared office location which has generated sales, doing lunch and learns in different office environments with in person demos and online marketing approaches which are still being built up Small group selling and marketing Due to high ticket item of $2,500 a unit, it only takes a few units sold to make good revenue Anyone who had high value units can follow this model of show casing products to a small targeted group of prospects, Rob shares how each lunch and learn is an opportunity to get content for social media sharing of images from the event, he records the talks and demos and re-purposes them online and on social media To get real scalability Rob is focused on building the online channel Growth and marketing Rob discusses how their current product is more of an executive high end line so working on a lower cost option is a natural evolution in order to access growth Based on research, Rob discovered there are over 1 million stand up desks that have been sold, and so the next pivot was to sell the treadmill separate from the desk, and about 50% of sales is attributed to people who have already acquired a stand up desk and just after a treadmill Having the product in the field, showrooms has generated revenue opportunities Online marketing is also a key driver to growth on unsit.com website People have resonated to the message that they can do more than one thing at once, i.e. work and exercise and the same time Testimonials also play a key role in validating the brand online and there is a dedicated customer testimonial page on the unsit.com. website Coaching tips from Rob Be willing to change when you go into business Get focused on the end goal, if your site is there to sell, then make sure this is the focus Your original vision may not be how the market sees it, your original design may not be the hot you expect, “be willing to change and let go” Revenue since launch Took about 12 months before they started gaining traction A market emanated after they started selling and found out lawyers are their key customers and buying 50% of their units So they have recrafted their message to target lawyers and this has been successful The product is still in early adopter phase, even though there are other similar products the market uptake is still in its early phase Being cash positive is a critical part of the Unsit business, while this means no debt and no outside capital, scaling is slower and revenue growth not as aggresive Developing the Unsit brand Before building the first batch of products the founders focused on getting the branding building blocks all sorted out Had a branding workshop, using professional consultants, spent 10 weeks working on this The logo, colour scheme, the voice of the company in marketing messages – all contained in the brand style guide This sets apart Unsit from its competitors, as the brand ID guides the business along in a strong identifiable way Other topics we discussed with Rob Biggest breakthrough moment – Rob shares a personal story about the California earthquake, his Tony Robbins event and the value of having a group of loyal customers Legacy and what Rob would love to remembered by when all is said and done Best two books on Robs entrepreneurial journey Awaken the giant within – Tony Robins  Get Up – Dr James Levine Best way to connect with Rob Company website: unsit.com LinkedIn: Rob Jacobs Look forward to serving you again here on the blog and over on our podcast! #3 Miles of walking while Rob was on the interview with me, 5,000 steps – well done Rob!! Cheers, Davis

Justin Hales is the CEO and Founder of Camplify, the Airbnb of caravan hire & RV sharing community. Camplify is Australia’s largest caravan hire and RV peer-to-peer sharing community, connecting owners with holidaymakers across the country sharing all types of caravans, campervans, motorhomes and camper trailers to enjoy a getaway in. Camplify gives RV owners the opportunity to earn extra income – anywhere between $280 and $2100 per week – while they aren’t using it themselves. As for their hiring members, they get to experience the joy of camping without having to purchase their own RV. During the interview, Justin shared how in 2 years the Camplify platform has grown from just a small fleet of rentals to over 2,500 placing the company at the top of the fleet market in its niche of renting out caravans and RVs, an amazing effort in such a short space of time. The genesis of the idea Sounds a bit cliche but it all started with a seemingly small conversation with Justin and his wife talking about how cool it would be to go on a caravan holiday. Their conversation was triggered while the couple was walking their dog over and noticed a parked caravan in their neighborhood. Having spent his childhood in caravans this was an exciting prospect and so Justin looked for a place where they could hire a caravan for a holiday but found it quite difficult to find a single provider that he could go to and hire from. As a result Justin found a gap in the market and created a space that was like an Airbnb that got all the hundreds of caravans that sit around in people’s driveways doing nothing most of the year and create a sharing economy market place for owners and holidaymakers to share. Working on the idea Justin found a startup incubator program that was looking for innovators and applied to be considered for the program, which included some basic idea testing, putting up a ‘crudely built’ website and a power-point deck. After a stringent review of 500 applicants, Justin progressed into the final 40 that made it to the “Pitch Day”. Following a successful outing at Pitch Day Justin was offered a spot in the 12 week startup accelerator program. This was an intensive accelerator program on how to set up and scale a startup which became the backbone of launching the Camplify business following that 12 weeks Justin’s key take ways from the 12 Weeks accelerator program Understood the customer more Tested more variables Learned about different marketing strategies Learned how to build good products that had a great market fit, using lean methodology Started building a brand and acquiring customers Leaned on the network in the program to raise capital for Camplify which was well received and helped fund the initial Camplify launch Customer targeting The initial market most people would lean towards in the caravan and RV space was the grey nomad market (grey nomad (plural grey nomads) (Australia) A retired person who travels independently and for an extended period within their own country, particularly in a caravan or motor home – wiktionary But through testing Justin found that while the grey nomads was not going to be their target market to consume their services, they were going to their target partners as RV owners sharing their RVs on the Camplify marketplace From detailed testing and building customer personas, the ideal customer that emerged was families who were not prepared to outlay $60,000 for an RV but still wanted to holiday in one from time to time, and this was found to a buoyant and growing market The No Money Survey – Just Sweets (…Lollies/Candy) 2nd week in the accelerator program Justin and team stood outside a Camping and RV show with no money for a booth and basically offered attendees a lolly pop in exchange for them answering a few survey questions Questions included age, RV ownership, type of RV they own, last question was would you ever hire it out to someone else if you own one Including testing the price point at which they got interested in hiring out their RV Funnily enough Justin shares that they eventually got kicked off the premises as they didn’t have the money to pay and set up a formal booth or table inside the event! Then they looked collating and segmenting the data to identify who the customer is, how do you locate them, how do you market to them as cheaply as possible and convert them into a customer The Most Challenging Aspect of the Launch Building the platform was difficult, took longer than expected and cost more but it wasn’t the biggest challenge Biggest challenge was getting access to those customers and have them trust Camplify as the people that will be able to deliver that long awaited solution for this space and part of it was making sure they had the right team in place. Two team members dropped off and one remained and they built the team from there Getting Over the Customer Access Hurdle First thing was to find an amazing digital marketer who is now their Chief Marketing Officer, who helped Camplify find how to get to their ideal customer Facebook was the best route to their ideal customer, so they invested heavily in Facebook marketing which led to the initial ground swell in lead acquisition and onto the Camplify platform for nurturing and engagement They targeted both suppliers of RVs and holidaymakers, but that hardest of the two markets was getting the RV owners on board and alleviating their concerns that their RVs would be looked after and not trashed Similar issues Airbnb home owners had to grapple with at the begining Finding that First Customer A lot of Facebook marketing and content marketing Justin then exhibited at a Caravan and RV Expo where they met a lot of people who recognised the brand from the Camplify Facebook campaigns They would get a lead and stay in contact with them individually and nurture the lead, assuring them of a perfect customer who would hire their RV, and when this person was found Camplify would get in touch with the owner and help them gain confidence in the brand through a personal relationship Majority of the Facebook work was focused on content marketing around the topics people were searching for on RV hiring and sharing – they looked on old school forums and Facebook groups where people in their niche had questions and discussions that they could target solutions for, which led to building over 2,500 custom audiences on Facebook The Camplify team then created high quality articles and videos around the questions being asked on topics of interest for their business, thereafter monitored the forums and directed people to the Camplify site to consume this content in answer to their related questions Once on the website Camplify would capture their email address through an optin or Facebook pixel them and re-target more marketing to them This led to the first 20 RVs on book and that led to the first few sales which Justin monitored for feedback closely >> Tip: This strategy still works today as long as you provide quality content that is answering people’s questions and not just click baiting them so that you capture their details << Building Case Studies After the first couple of customers, Camplify really focused on building a solid feedback loop both from owners and consumers, to understand the experience and improve the service on both ends of their market place Next step was to build out case studies showcasing owners who had hired out their RVs, detailing their experience and the financial upside of being a partner on the platform These case studies were used to market the business further Capital Investment & Growth Initial investment was $30,000 which helped get the platform started A capital raising of $650,000 soon followed which sustained the next 18 months of the business Justin went full time in the business in 2015 Over $300,000 paid out in Sept’17 in commissions to RV owner partners on the Camplify platform with 20% growth month on month Launched into the UK market in 2017 with only 2 resources required for that initial market entry Other things discussed on the podcast You don’t have to be the only one in your market place or niche in order to succeed and why this is a good thing Dealing with customer insecurity and providing insurance for their RV Story of an initially skeptical owner, who started with 1 RV and now has a full fleet of 14 RVs that he hires out full time, doing $80,000 a month in income during a peak month Financial benefit comparison on investing in an RV to share out on Camplify Vs Uber as an owner The inner workings of the Camplify platform to find and hire out an RV Investing in mentors and finding people who will also invest money into your business as well as working with a peer group Exit options and strategies Best two books The Lean Startup – How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses is a book by Eric Ries describing his proposed lean startup strategy for startup companies Running Lean – Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, book by Ash Maurya Legacy To be remembered for being able to influence other people to find a way to do this kind of thing for themselves, run their own business that helps others and makes a difference in their lives and that of others. Connect with Justin Justin Hales on LinkedIn Camplify.com.au Thanks for listening! We would love to hear from you in the comments section below, and always looking for your support by leaving us a review on iTunes Look forward to serving you again in the next episode. Cheers, Davis

Gil Ado and Carlos Reines are the co-founders of Rubicon MD, an innovative medical eConsult service that connects primary care doctors to same-day insights from top medical specialists. Their mission is to provide better health care through their online platform that enables primary care doctors to easily and quickly access medical specialists and have online consultations (eConsults) and ultimately provide better direct care to patients. With a fragmented US healthcare system, Gil and Carlos identified a need in the market for access to specialist medical care that didnt require patients to physically be in the same room with their specialist doctor. After a lot of networking and hustle, Rubicon MD was officially birthed in 2013. >> Show notes Link: https://www.businessgenerals.com/gilandcarlos >> Today Rubicon is a strong, growing Venture backed Healthcare startup, which has successfully raised over $19M in funding since 2014. The company is scaling at pace throughout the US now with over 5,000 primary care providers using the platform. The two Harvard Business School graduate co-founders partnered up to launch Rubicon on a mission to facilitate the provision of a higher level of care to patients who may not have access to specialist care due to them not having private healthcare or geographical limitations. The platform allows general practitioner doctors to have direct access to expert specialist help on a case by case basis through e-consult process. Doctor to doctor interaction via the e-consult platform is one of their biggest wins – patients that would have previously been referred to the emergency department for specialist consultation now receive access through the eConsult process through their primary doctors, and as Gil says this is real tangible benefit that clinicians and patients are excited about. The business launch and the first paying customer In 2013 the business was launched with the first key goal being to prove that there was value in the platform and that patients would be able to access greater healthcare through the platform They put a basic minimum viable product from a technology platform standpoint, they found a doctor who was willing to trial the platform and it run for a few months with a few hundred eConsults and the feedback was very positive The founders joined an accelerator program focusing on how to build a business around the idea and how to find the people who could potentially buy into your idea Talked and networked to as many people in the healthcare eco system  – learning, doing the research and also selling the idea at the same time Discovered that groups that are at risk, ie taking care of primary health care patients will be most interested in this Pivoted on the fact that there was limited supporting data for the idea so focused on finding the companies that were ready to take some risk in this space as well Their first paying customer contract was from Boston, Gil and Carlos share with excitement how this client has grown and stayed with Rubicon MD for over 4 years, a testament in their minds to the value RubiconMD brings to the clinician. Cash flow during the start up phase Carlos was still completing his Harvard MBA at the beginning but working full time in the business, Gil was also full time in the business but they were scraping by and keeping everything very lean financially It was a difficult beginning for the business, so they had to run their operations in a very lean way but they were determined to see the vision come to life The duo managed to live through the first startup phase through their savings, family support and just sheer tenacity to make it through the early days Access to funding 2013 accessed their first seed money from an angel investor, this was enough to run their pilot After this started accessing funding at this point after they had proved that there was buyer for the product, that patients will be getting real benefit and then ready to access seed money [UPDATE: Following our interview with Carlos and Gil, we have learned that the duo have gone onto raise an additional $13.8M in a highly successful Series B round] Working with mentors Finding someone who helps mentor them through the different phases of the business Someone who understands the space you are playing in He also put in his money as the first seed money This process helped Gil and Carlos stay grounded and stay focused Temptation to give up or quit? Once they saw the impact on primary care doctors and the results patients were getting, they knew they just had to find a way to get the business out there because they had established that the need was there and that their solution was of great value The challenge was how to build a business around having a life, and not having a whole lot of personal wealth to fall back on, and the financial risks that arise can be very challenging Gil’s wife had the stable income so this helped balanced the personal finances for them Sharing Roles in the business as Co-Founders Carlos oversees the operational side of the business, the product, data management, sales, fund raising, delivery of the products implementation for the larger accounts but more focused on the delivery Gil is focused on the growth side, business development and relationship management Business Reach 35 states with USA 5,000 primary care providers on the platform – an excited market and growth Best way to connect with Gil and Carlos To learn more about Carlos and Gil, visit RubiconMD LinkedIn: Gil Ado Carlos Reines Get Your Hopes Up and Maximize Your Dreams!  Cheers, Davis! #TheBusinessGeneralsPodcast

Mike Michalowicz is an American author, entrepreneur, and lecturer. He is a business author including the popular Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. He is a former small business columnist for The Wall Street Journal and the “Business Rescue” segment host for MSNBC’s Your Business. He also hosted the reality television program called Bailout! Mike has founded and sold multi-million dollar businesses and today shares over 25 years of business experience through his books and on stage in front of global audiences . During this episode we discuss some amazing business concepts with Mike including the following: How to Differentiate yourself in Business Mike has an accounting service business called Profit First. While this is an old established service industry, Mike has found a way to differentiate his business. Mike’s team go out to their over 250 clients as Profit Advisor with a special expertise and focus on not just being compliant with taxes and regulatory obligations but making sure the business is profitable and optimised. They focus is pivoted towards interpreting the business numbers and helping business find sustainable profitability This is all part of the Profit First philosophy which is detailed in Mike’s popular book Profit First – A Simple System to Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine  Profit First System It flips the profit formula used in traditional accounting Commonly referred to as the bottom line, the standard profit formula is “Sales minus Expenses = Profit”. But this creates a mindset problem where a business owner does not focus on profit but leaves it at the last thing, a by product of everything else and invariably what gets put on the back burner can get forgotten and not prioritised. Profit First in Mike’s world has this formula: “Sales minus Profit = Expenses”. So every time you make a sale you allocate a predetermined percentage that you have calculated as your optimal operating profit level, and take the rest as the amount available for all your expenses (not the other way round). Acquiring the First Customer in Profit First Professionals The model is based on finding the right accounting professionals who get trained and accredited under the Profit First Methodology and then operate as advisors under the Profit First banner with a profit share arrangement Mike didn’t go out with a know it all attitude but went out to the potential Profit First Professional with the mission first, “we can eradicate entrepreneurial poverty together” They understood that this was something new and it needed to grow so whoever joined would join as the first customers, and it would not be easy but that they will be great upside in the future They also openly reduced the standard membership fee for the founding members and would bring in the first group of founding members onto the advisory board of the business to help provide real time feedback to help build the business Marketing Strategy Mike went to his existing list of customers and followers who were aware of his brand and his message, and publicly announced that he was looking for bookkeepers and accountants who were interested in partnering on this new project, shared the vision and then established a small community that was focused on this new project. Without a personal community, Mike advises that founders should go and look for the community that the target audience is already established (what conferences do they attend, what podcasts are they listening to or what blogs do they follow) and find a way to start contributing and speaking to them there. The One Problem Every Struggling Business had when Mike was on TV Every business that struggled mainly was because they had a spending problem, as revenue went up their expenses went up The overarching solution Mike found was for them to anchor in on the profit first concept, find the profit mark they wanted to work with and allocate that as profit and then fit all the expenses into the remaining available funds Mike biggest lesson now The more I am physically in my business, the more I hurt my business! Reason being, when the business owner is away, the employees have to figure out how do things on their own Sometimes the only way to get out of the weeds is to get out of the weeds! Mentorship Mike is involved in a peer to peer group each month Mike believes in mentors, and his biggest investment in that is time, not just money – and it’s not just mentorship in business but also in life in general Books and how to get the best out of books You have to understand your problem and then work out which book or resource is best for you Organic marketing, recruitment, scaling – find out what you need and then find the resource Great books recommended by Mike The E-myth, why most businesses don’t work and what to do about it; Michael E. Gerber Think and Grow Rich; Napoleon Hill Best way to connect with Sean To learn more about Mike and get access to a treasure trove of entrepreneurial tips, visit www.MikeMichalowicz.com. Books: Grab a copy of Mike’s amazing books Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur: The tell-it-like-it-is guide to cleaning up in business, even if you are at the end of your roll. Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself Podcast: The Profit First Podcast   Get Your Hopes Up and Maximize Your Dreams!  Cheers, Davis! #TheBusinessGeneralsPodcast Link: Mike’s Wikipedia Bio:  

Sean Cooper made news headlines across global news channels when he paid off his mortgage in a record 3 years at the tender age of 30! Sean did all of this while working a normal job in financial services in Canada and freelancing as a personal finance coach and writing as a personal finance blogger. Sean is the author of his very well acclaimed book Burn Your Mortgage. Sean’s story was very polarizing when it came out on Canadian news outlets and actually got him a lot of hate mail and articles online and offline because of how quickly he paid off his mortgage which goes against standard accepted beliefs around home ownership and the 30 year loan repayment time frame that most banks give home owners. The negative feedback centered around Sean being portrayed as a privileged child with wealthy parents or as Sean living in this basement without a life outside of work and stashing away every cent he earns. Born and raised in Toronto Ontario, Canada Sean grew up in a middle class family with parents who instilled in him the importance of home ownership so from age 10 Sean had the vision of owning his own home. He started working various jobs at a young age and started saving for his down payment even before he graduated university. Sean bought his first home when he was 27 and he paid off by age 30, a remarkable achievement – all on his own savings and his own aggressive focus on beating the mortgage debt! Lifestyle choices – no car! Sean made the decision of not owning a car during his period of paying off the mortgage as it amounts to the second largest payment in most people’s budgets and he found a practical way to make sure he lived near public transport and lived a car free life. This was a very bold and mature decision for Sean to make a young age, when I was 20 all I was thinking of was owning my first car, and the first loan I ever took out was to buy my first car, a white Toyota Mark II. It requires discipline and laser focus to follow through with a car free lifestyle. Admittedly it may not be entirely possible for everyone due to your professional work, if you are a trades person you may work from different sites each week and need a personal car, so you may need a find a way to get a reliable cost effective car that doesn’t cost you too much to buy or maintain. There may also be opportunities for you to car pool or ride share with colleagues from work where you reduce your car running expenses with the goal of saving up for your first home. Saving strategy at a young age Sean found a way to work through his university days which paid off tuition and helped him graduate debt free. He also started saving for his down payment during his college days and after graduating continued on this path and saved 80% of his income after graduating which helped in save up a handsome down payment of $170,000 by age 27. Advice for saving up for your down payment Firstly work out whether they want to own a home in the first place. Work out how much you need to save in order to fund your down payment or home loan deposit. Calculate how many years you would like to give yourself before having a fully funded down payment and this will determine how much you need to save each month. Open a stand alone savings account and ‘pay yourself first’ before you do anything else with your salary put aside your nominated savings amount. Automate your savings process so that it automatically comes out of your salary account into the savings account, and make sure you have very limited access to your savings account so that you can ‘save and forget’ without the temptation to spend it other ’emergencies’. Resisting the temptation to spend Sean kept his goal in mind, work hard for next few years, keep saving up and not defer the savings plan. He buckled down and focused on his goal and now he is debt free and able to travel the world and have the lifestyle choices he forego while saving up and paying off his home. Sean’s timeline of building up his savings and paying off his mortgage 3 years in university while working student jobs at the campus and part time work at the supermarkets on weekends, also did freelance writing on personal finance blogs and also worked full time during the summer. 3 years while working full time (and doing freelance writing work), lived at home where he paid $600 in rent and saved up the rest of his salary  to fund the balance of his $170k down payment. 3 years to pay off a $280k mortgage and owned the home debt free at age 30. Sean continues work full time in the pension industry and works on freelance writing and speaking after hours and on weekends. Freelance writing career making $30,000 per year  Started volunteering as a financial journalist back in 2011 with a small online publication, and built up a strong reputation that led to larger writing opportunities for other industry publications including rate supermarket, income tax software blogs – his record month was $12,000 from freelance writing but that was a lot of hours of work which Sean has toned down. Sean currently generates $30,000 in per year as a part time freelance writer. Advice from Sean on how you can become a successful freelance writer in your area of expertise You need to build a library of articles and blog posts in order to create a strong ‘by-line’, basically you must build a reputation that will act as your reference when you go out to pitch your work.  You can do this through having your own blog and post your articles on there, and secondly you can offer to volunteer as a writer for smaller publications online blogs or offline publications – start with smaller ones (check out any available local ones in your city) and then build from there to more lucrative jobs. You can paid from $50 and article to $500 an article once your name is out there and you have a strong brand. To generate a $2,000 month one can expect to write 10 articles based on Sean’s experience in the personal finance writing space. Other areas that we discuss with Sean on the podcast Dealing with negative hate mail and public backlash when his story hit the main news outlets across Canada, Australia, Europe and the US Becoming an author – the process involved for Sean to publish his first book ‘Burn Your Mortgage‘ and how that has helped him further his speaking , writing and money coaching career Mentorship Goal setting and mindset Lifestyle Recommended books by Sean The wealthy barber returns” Be the better broker Oh lala guide to rocking your rsps Best way to connect with Sean Grab a copy of Sean’s amazing book ‘Burn Your Mortgage Blogsite seancooperwriter.com – Personal Finance and Mortgages, visit Sean here and sign up to his newsletter Twitter @SeanCooperWrite LinkedIn Sean Richard Cooper Personal Legacy in Sean’s words “Finance is very personal to me, money was one of the main reasons my parents divorced and it tore the family apart so I don’t want to see that happening to other families. I have been championing the cause of financial literacy because I see it as being very important for families that is why I speak about it and help promote it. Secondly when you read newspapers and watch the news you find that a lot of millennials feel like the home ownership dream is out of reach and not affordable, so I want to show them through my story that it’s still an option and that home ownership is a good long term investment even for millenials, I don’t want to see a generation that gives up on that dream of owning a house, I want to show people that its still possible.” Get Your Hopes Up and Maximize Your Dreams!  Cheers, Davis! #TheBusinessGeneralsPodcast  

Sarah Santacroce is an independent LinkedIn Specialist, Online Presence Mentor and founder of Simplicity Small Biz. She helps people convert their presence online into paying customers. She is the creative brain behind the LinkedIn Challenge, an event that has helped 1700+ people so far to improve their knowledge about using LinkedIn for business. She has helped hundreds of clients from all over the world breathe life into their LinkedIn profiles, put together a strategy for their online presence or generated leads for them by using LinkedIn and social selling strategies.  She also coaches fellow introverted business owners on how to run an online business, and is the founder of the Introvert Business Podcast.  Period in full time business and core revenue streams  She has been in full time business for more than 7 years. In her LinkedIn business, she works with corporations where she does trainings for HR departments, sales departments, and the people in marketing. She also works with entrepreneurs through one-on-one coaching and teaches people in transition how to get recruited on LinkedIn. She has a series of products like video trainings that generate revenue for her without having to trade her one-on-one time.  She also does affiliate marketing and is planning to host her first retreat for introverted online entrepreneurs. The retreat will be an offline event where they will get together and talk about their businesses, and come up with strategies on how to take it to the next level.  The retreat  She says it will be a quiet, reflective, and respectful retreat with lots of fun. The link for the event is www.sarahsantacroce.com/retreat/   Starting out in business  When she moved to California with her husband and their new second-born, she could consequently not go back to her previous job, and decided to take some time off to spend with her kids. After about a year, she decided to come up with her own business plan and choose to focus on helping business owners with their administrative needs, which was what she was good at. That eventually changed, because with the social media boom at that time, she realised how she was able to use social media to create buzz for her own business.  She therefore choose to move away from administrative/virtual assistant work to teaching entrepreneurs/small business owners how to market their businesses through social media. When she moved back to Switzerland with her family in 2010, she decided to start offering the social media training/marketing services.  Focusing on LinkedIn  She decided to specialise on LinkedIn much later after she discovered that things in Switzerland were very traditional and slow. Most people didn’t use social media for business. The one platform that the Switzerland B2B industry was interested in most, that she was well-versed in, was LinkedIn. After a year of offering her general social media services, she decided to zero-in on LinkedIn.  Corporate career Vs. Business  Sarah says she would never go back to formal employment. She calls herself unemployable because she creates success on her own terms now. She defines how success should be in her life, which she could not do in a corporate environment.  Tip 1: I don’t think business is for everybody. I don’t think everybody should leave their corporate job and become an entrepreneur. Getting side hustles is however a great option for anyone in a corporate job  Tip 2: I don’t advice you to just leave your job and focus on your business idea  Replacing full time job income in a business  Tip 1: If you have a business model that can guarantee to replace your full time income then obviously, go for it!  Tip 2: Full time business is not for everybody because some people need the structure of a corporate job and they may need a team. As an entrepreneur, you are making up your own structure and it can sometimes be very lonely as an entrepreneur, so if you are a huge people person then it will take time to meet other entrepreneurs, and share with them while building a strong network  Getting the first customer  She had just moved back to Switzerland and hadn’t even set things up when she got an email from a potential client asking for a meeting. The client ended up being her first client. That lead and many more came from Sarah’s blogging and her presence on LinkedIn and Facebook. The first client found her through a blog post she had written about the great importance of social media.  LinkedIn as a platform  Her main revenue source in as far as her LinkedIn training is concerned, is the corporate trainings but her best work is always with entrepreneurs because she is an entrepreneur, and understands what their needs are. She teaches entrepreneurs the social selling process where they actually don’t sell but serve. That’s the work that Sarah enjoys the most.  When training a new client, she always starts with their LinkedIn profiles by helping them make them into actual sales tools. The second step is always to help them grow their network in order to increase their reach and get their inbound marketing going.  The third step involves helping them start to offer value by sharing content while the fourth step is helping them with their lead generation targeted at their specific audience.  Setting up a LinkedIn profile to be more of a Sales Tool  Tip 1: The first thing is your headline. Here, you should write more about what it is you do, who you help and how you help them.  Tip 2: In the summary, you should talk more about the services you offer, how you help your clients and what kind of results you provide. This should be written more like an About Us page on a website.  Tip 3: Add visuals into your LinkedIn profile and make it into a portfolio that looks like a mini-website  Sharing and Serving  Tip 1: You have to have a decent size network already before you start sharing because otherwise you will be talking to yourself. Increasing your network comes first.  Tip 2: When you have a network that you think is relevant, you can start sharing, commenting and publishing content that adds value to your network  Lead Generation  Tip: This is where you use LinkedIn as a database for your target contacts. The first step is to identify those contacts, find them, reach out to them, connect with them and then engage them through a series of messages where the main focus is to help, serve and provide value. That way, you can slowly move them a step closer towards hiring you for whatever work that you do.  Case study  Sarah is working with a team that is working on a crowdfunding website. She took them through the 4 steps of the social selling process and right now they are working on their LinkedIn profiles. She is also guiding them in their content development by helping them create an editorial calendar through which they will decide what kind of content they will publish themselves, and what of kind of content they will get from other people to share. She is generally helping them come up with a strategy on how to they are going to be more visible.  They tell Sarah that they are already getting a good response from potential investors, which is what they are looking for at this point.  Most effective content on LinkedIn  She says professional content works really well on LinkedIn. She says LinkedIn is service-related, compared to Facebook which is more product related. Therefore, what works well on Facebook is more visual content while on LinkedIn what works well is sharing content that has to do with services, learning, and career development.  Getting LinkedIn connections  Tip: The best way to get connections to come onto your business database is through content like sharing blog posts so that when they click over to your website, the website will be optimized for conversions. That’s how you get them to sign up to your newsletter  Biggest breakthrough moment  “When I made that decision to focus only on LinkedIn. It was one of the toughest decisions I ever made because I had to start saying no to other work related to other social media platforms. It was the best decision ever because am now known specifically for LinkedIn.”  Size and reach of business  She says that she is internationally-recognized thanks to the LinkedIn Challenge, something she started in 2013 and does with other LinkedIn experts worldwide. In November 2016, she was running the 11th Edition of the LinkedIn Challenge. It has enabled her to grow her business globally and also made her a recognized player in the LinkedIn Specialist/Trainer space.  LinkedIn Challenge  This is training for people who want to learn how to use LinkedIn to get clients. Sarah brings on a team of other LinkedIn experts and together they share one LinkedIn tip daily with the participants of the challenge. Every day, the participants get strategy via email, and they also get to attend two live-training calls where they can ask questions.  Book recommendation for entrepreneurs:    Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less – Greg McKeown  Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers – Timothy Ferris   Legacy:  To be remembered as someone who showed people a different way, a more human way, of doing business. – Sarah.    Best way to connect:  https://simplicitysmallbiz.com – Sarah’s Business Website  Sarah Santacroce – On LinkedIn  Get Your Hopes Up and Maximize Your Dreams [Symbol]  Cheers, Davis! #TheBusinessGeneralsPodcast  

Daniel Walter Scott is a certified Adobe instructor (ICE) in Ireland, an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) and he completed the Adobe Certified Associate training (ACA). He has been teaching for more than 14 years and is the founder of Bring Your Own Laptop (BYOL), an Adobe Certified Training Centre in Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and online. He has over 16,000 students on the Udemy platform with over 1,000 reviews and over 16 courses. Period in full-time business He had always been doing little businesses on the side in his evenings and weekends, but he went into it full-time business in 2009. Core revenue streams He has two main streams that are both based on training. One is a sit-down classroom where people book a course, come in and learn from an instructor. He has such training centres in Australia and Ireland. His other stream is online video training on Udemy and other platforms. Starting out in business Daniel used to work for other people but he was always curious about doing it for himself and when he decided to move from the UK to New Zealand, he also decided to start an online business. He started by building a sit-down classroom courses website and promoting it through SEO. He had to borrow some money from his grandmother to cater for his personal expenses so he could focus on building the website and getting customers. Getting the first set of clients He got his first customers through search engine optimization (SEO). He learnt everything he could about SEO because he wasn’t a good salesman so he needed the website to do the selling for him. Through that, his website ranked well and because there were people looking for courses, he was able to get customers. Working with zero budget Daniel says the one crucial thing he did that can work for anyone now, is content marketing. He says content marketing offers the best value for money. He makes his content in form of videos and in the beginning he used to write a lot of blog posts about his work. It was easy and free for him to do it because he wrote them himself. Number of videos At the beginning, he used to write a lot of blog posts and then he did one or two videos a month as a test. When the videos started doing well, he narrowed his content marketing down to videos. He says if he could get a do-over, he would have focused on videos from the very beginning, because progress on getting the website ranked would have taken place ten times faster. He says the content marketing through blog posts was very slow. Growth strategy at the beginning The sit-down classroom courses were more locally targeted so he worked with local businesses like blogs that existed around what he did. He also used to reach out to companies that complimented his work, to see whether he could do free stuff with them. That was the easiest way for him to market the business since it was targeting the local market. Tip: If you have something local, you have to focus your marketing (including SEO) on the local market The fundamentals that worked He says some of the things that really worked for him that can work for a local business include Google local listings (now known as Google Places, Goog Business, or Google Local) which get a business on a map that easily puts a business on top of searches for local products. The other thing, he says, is finding other websites that are linked to the business one is doing (these are mostly professional listings) Other things that may take some time and effort include relationship building with other businesses, going to conferences and meet-ups organized by businesses that are related to what one does. That way, one gets clients through word of mouth and referrals. Adobe certification He says being Adobe certified and having his training centre certified by Adobe, is very helpful. That’s because as part of certification, he gets Adobe.com linked to his website, and it helps a lot, because Google likes to see big companies linking to smaller websites. He deals with corporate clients and they only trust people who have Adobe certification. His training centre is the only one with Adobe certification in New Zealand, and among only 10 in Australia. Tip: Corporate clients always prefer fully certified service providers The transition to online He says the sit-down classes were successful enough to get him out of formal employment, but it was tough. He kept doing them because he didn’t know anything about online business. When it was time to leave New Zealand and get back to Ireland, he decided to start his trainings online. The first videos he put up online as content marketing, had generated a lot of interest in his work, so they formed a good foundation for his start online. To test whether people would pay for his courses, he used a free 30-video YouTube course he had, to direct traffic to his online course. He did that by pulling down half of the videos, and asking people to go to his online course if they needed to get the rest of the course. He has since put the full course back on YouTube for free. He used a subscription model for his first course and it went for $12 a month or $80 a year. He has been testing out different prices so that over time he can determine which will work best. The numbers In terms of the sit-down classrooms, he has great teams running them without his constant input. He earns good income from them every year, ranging between $30,000 and $40,000. He started the online courses in November 2015 and they give him a 6-figure income now, with about $10,000+ a month. In the first 5 months of starting the online course, he was a making $100 per month but after the 6th month, it started picking up. The business has almost zero overheads. The first 6 months He says the online courses started doing better because he improved on his productivity. Initially, he was making courses, editing them, putting them out, distributing them and getting social traffic. When he found things that are working, he hired people to help him fulfil some of the tasks so he can focus more on course production. That has enabled him to move from making a course every 2 months, to making 2 courses a month. He has 16 courses and is currently creating a few more. From his statistics, he has seen most individual customers buying more than one course from him. Tip: The more courses you create, the more audience you have Working with Adobe Adobe found his courses on YouTube and reached out to him so he could help them with a video for a new feature they had created. Since then, he has been making different videos for different Adobe products. Other product managers also work with him when they come across what he’s done for Adobe. Adobe pays him for every video he works on for them. The platforms He offers his courses on Udemy, SkillShare and his website. They generate almost equal income for him. He teaches digital design media (creative IT) which includes digital publishing, web, video and print. He says the most important aspect of the business is distribution (determining the target market and what they want). He is still in the phase of creating different varieties of courses that people want. He has a check list that he uses to keep up with what courses work well. His distribution channels include Udemy, SkillShare and his website. Udemy and SkillShare are very helpful in marketing his courses but with his website, he has to put up videos on YouTube, and do a lot of video SEO. YouTube is the biggest driver of his website traffic. Video SEO on YouTube includes coming up with good titles, creating detailed descriptions, and adding tags. He also adds a call to action in all his videos. Tip: When you upload a video on YouTube, do some research on what to call it and make sure it has usable search terms within the heading. Make sure there is unique content in the description and that it has good tags. Biggest breakthrough moment He says this was when he realised that there is more to putting up videos on YouTube including ranking them well in order to ensure that they get good traffic. Half of the conversions on his website are from YouTube. Another breakthrough was recently discovering that he didn’t need to give away so many of his courses for free because customers were willing to pay for them. Tip: If you are getting into YouTube, you have to put a lot of effort into it ……………. Book recommendation for entrepreneurs:  The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses – Eric Ries The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph – Ryan Holiday >>> Legacy: To be remembered as someone who loved to share what he knew and help others – Daniel. >>> Best way to connect: www.bringyourownlaptop.com – Daniel’s Business website @DanLovesAdobe – Daniel’s Twitter Handle For more info including show notes and resources check out www.businessgenerals.com Remember to click subscribe on your podcast player so you don’t miss an episode. Download your free PDF show highlight reel for all the links and resources mentioned in the episode. Go to www.businessgenerals.com/daniels Thanks for tuning in…see you next time! Cheers, Davis #TheBusinessGeneralsPodcast

Nathanial Bibby is the founder of Bibby Consulting Group, a Melbourne Consulting Group. He is a leading Digital Marketing Strategist, LinkedIn Coach and Social Media Speaker. He is also the founder of Linkedinsider, the world’s leading online LinkedIn training course, and a Founding Trainer at the Australian Digital Marketing Institute (ADMi).  With over 12 years of Digital Marketing experience, Nathanial has been at the forefront of the information age. During his career, he has helped 4,000+ businesses throughout Australia and South East Asia gain a competitive edge through effective business growth strategies.   Core revenue streams  His core revenue stream is LinkedIn Lead Generation which is a very unique service that cannot be found easily advertised in marketing. They usually have to first educate people about it before they introduce it. Once they train people on LinkedIn, they also offer them the lead generation service.     Period in full time business and starting out  He has been in full-time business for about 4 years. He started out the day he quit his job and things had gotten really difficult financially, because he was being evicted, and hadn’t paid his bills, the power in his apartment had even been switched off. He found a way to get power to his apartment and sat down to write his business plan. The next day, he started making phone calls and one of the people he called was a real estate agency that he convinced to let him pitch on how he help their real estate agents to invest in their brand.   The real estate agents gathered in their conference area and Nathanial pitched a real estate personal branding make-up product that included a one page real estate website. Nathanial was charging $2,500 for the product and 8 of them signed up, with 6 of them paying on the spot. That totalled $15,000 and it enabled him to get freelancers to build 6 websites, 6 Facebook pages, and 6 LinkedIn profiles. He paid $300 for each of the 6 which totalled $1,800. The money enabled him to get out of his financial problems.  He still didn’t know what he would specialise in, but he later got an opportunity to sponsor an event for his friend and business coach. At the event, his friend thanked him for being a sponsor and introduced him as a LinkedIn Specialist who could people with their LinkedIn profiles. There were 100 people at the event, and at the end, 30 to 40 people went up to him wanting to have a one-on-one meeting. That was when he decided to specialize in LinkedIn Marketing.  Deciding to become an entrepreneur  He remembers that when he started out, he did it because he had no choice since he could not find assistance from anyone to deal with his financial woes. He was so desperate but got immediately motivated when he decided to start working on his business plan. He knew that he had to go straight to the customers, to the market, without even having any marketing material and systems in place.  Niching  The fact that he specializes in LinkedIn when there are very few people specializing in it, enables him to get clients constantly. Whenever people are organizing conferences on social media and digital marketing, they always want an expert on LinkedIn and when they search on Google, Nathanial’s service always comes up at the top of the search results. He gets called to speak at different events and interviews. His company has become an industry leader on LinkedIn and he also gets invited to speak on social media at different events.  Generating leads on LinkedIn  He says it’s easier to help a B2B (business-to-business) company but when dealing with a B2C (business-to-consumer) company, he has to ask them a few questions about their target marketing and how they get clients. Normally, LinkedIn marketing works better if a B2C business has business partners or distributors. He says smaller businesses that desire to sell directly to customers may have more success on Facebook than on LinkedIn.  Tip 1: If you are looking for a quick way to implement a strategy that works, the first step is to optimize your LinkedIn profile which means optimizing for search results. Don’t upload a version of your CV and don’t write your LinkedIn profile in the 3rd person  Tip 2: Use my 3 step process called Find, Connect and Engage which involves finding the people who are in your target demographic and sending them customized connection requests. When you send about 200 requests out, you will get about a 50% average response rate. After that, you can message them, thank them for connecting with you, and engage them about how they do their marketing by asking for a telephone chat. A telephone chat will enable you to determine which client is suitable to work with  LinkedIn Vs. Facebook  He says LinkedIn is a professional networking site while Facebook is purely a social networking site.   Tip: When choosing which site to use for your lead generation, you have to think about the context in which people’s attention is on each site. LinkedIn will be more effective if you are targeting professionals  Case study  Nathanial refers to one of his goals of signing up one of the big 4 banks in Australia as a client. He started messaging the different banks on LinkedIn and 11 months into the business, Westpac Bank came on board as a client and they asked him to speak at one of their events. He then tstarted working with their licensee department which is BT Financial Group. They also asked him to speak at a digital marketing workshop/masterclass that they do in every city in Australia.   Nathanial started by working with one of the licensees first and running a campaign with them, which led to the licensee telling the other licensees the great results they got. Since the clients were financial advisors, they targeted high profile people like lawyers and medical practitioners. They generated 23 leads within 30 days, which was conservative, but they were very high quality prospects which translated to high sales value. This was a good case study for Nathanial  Biggest breakthrough in business over the last 2 years  “The moment I decided to specialize on LinkedIn was a big one. However, being able to come up with systems and processes so that am able to work on growing the business not in the business was also a big breakthrough”   The numbers  Nathanial says they are able to impact thousands of people now through speaking and training.  Core product  He says that their core product is lead generation through social media and that it’s in form of a monthly subscription.  A Lead  He says according to the service they offer clients, they define a lead as someone who has consented to have a phone conversation and provided their telephone number.  Book recommendation for entrepreneurs:    The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results – Gary W. Keller (what one thing will have the biggest impact for you?)   Ask Gary Vee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness – Gary Vaynerchuk   Legacy:  To contribute as much as he can in and out of business while adding immense value without expecting anything in return, and to pass on that mentality to as many professionals and business people as possible – Nathanial.    Best way to connect:  Bibby Consulting Group – On Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn   Get Your Hopes Up and Maximize Your Dreams For more info including show notes and resources check out www.businessgenerals.com Remember to click subscribe on your podcast player so you don’t miss an episode. To access the show highlight reel for all the links and resources mentioned in the episode. Go to www.businessgenerals.com/nathanialb Thanks for tuning in…see you next time! Cheers, Davis #TheBusinessGeneralsPodcast  

Here are the FIVE things I learnt that may be helpful for you or a friend you know maybe experiencing one of these “out of body” experiences: Being on Social Welfare Is Not Fun I Should Have started Preparing Sooner Have an Open Mind – Find a Coach and Model them Consider Taking a Pay Cut – Get Back in the Game Find a Plan-B Option that Works for YOU  Personal Lesson I remember it like yesterday, started just like any other Friday: drive down the freeway, get to work have my marmalade-on-toast, and work on completing the financial statements for publishing to the market the following week. At 4pm everything changed, I got the call to the CFO’s office, Legal Counsel also present, felt the situation was a little bit unusual, and sure enough I had been made redundant. I can still feel the shock of the reality of the feeling, very humbling, had until 5.30pm to make my way out. I wasn’t bitter or disappointed in the people that had hired me to be their Finance Manager. I knew the company was struggling and that the shareholders were putting pressure on the executive team, but there was so much going on, I didn’t expect it that day. I got back to my office and made the call to my wife telling her I was out of a job. Like a lot of people we didn’t have any Plan-b whatsoever – we were “all or nothing” – single income family with a mortgage, scary. It was a real blessing for us in a sense though, that we had literally just sold our home and so all the gains made on the home became our day to day income, this was only meant to be for a very short while. But soon enough, it became clear that the world was going through the global financial crisis, this was September 2009. Recruiters were not returning phone calls, people were not leaving their jobs. There was zero happening for 6 months straight, not one interview! The FIVE things I learnt Being on Social Welfare Is Not Fun I had no idea where the nearest welfare office was and didn’t even understand how the whole system worked. I quickly found out that it does provide a safety net for families but doesn’t do more than maybe pay the rent. It didn’t cover the car payment so driving our once ‘fancy’ German car that at the time had another party listed on title i.e. bank, was no longer fun. I now had to drive carefully each night and be on the lookout for any suspicious looking cars near our house, make sure it’s not the sheriff! My advice: You don’t want to be on welfare. I Should Have Started Preparing Sooner The social welfare system will not help you professionally get back into a good role – things may have changed now, yes the teams assigned to you will help you write up a resume and prepare you for an interview but in my experience they kind of didn’t even do that – just had to tick the boxes and show up each fortnight. Tip 1: Don’t leave it too late to have a Plan-B action plan. It took me 6 months to just get a contract role. Tip 2: Think about whether your savings can last you long and If not, then start putting a robust savings plan together or better still a Plan-B income source for you and your family. Have an Open Mind: Find a Coach and Model them In November 2008, my wife and I attended a real estate coaching seminar, the concept was residential property sub-leasing – we had never heard of this approach to generating cash flow, it sounded interesting but life got in the way and never did anything with it. Immediately following my redundancy, we decided to hire the sub-leasing coach and invested over $10,000 from the sale of our home to kick this project off and this was our first venture as business owners. We operated this for about two and a half years running about 30 rental rooms in 3 large furnished properties mainly catering for the student population here in Melbourne. I kept an open mind and learnt a lot about running a business. I made some good money but lost good money too a.k.a. “school fees”. Tip: Evaluate all options that come your way and don’t discount them on face value or based on non-expert opinions. Consider Taking a Pay Cut – Get Back in the Game Following two back to back contract roles, I decided to go for a permanent role that was in an industry I had little experience in, so I decided that I was willing to take a pay cut in order to get back in the game, plus I was still running my enterprise, so I didn’t want the long hours of my previous full time roles; and I was also preparing to study for my masters in finance. I got the role and worked through the balancing act of all three things until the work load became too intense. I had to make a few changes to the model and opted to get back to school, leave the real estate space and invest into an online distribution platform. Find a Plan-B Option that Works for YOU An online distribution platform was appealing to us because it has leverage which I struggled with in my previous enterprise, so we evaluated eBay, Etsy and eBooks but didn’t quite get the results we were after. The challenge was the platforms were there but identifying and sourcing great products was tough. What actually worked for us was an online distribution platform through which we market essential utility services licensed with a company that partners up with some of the large Australian providers leveraging the network marketing/direct sales model. It’s done online and part time-services people already use and need every day, we loved it and still do! Tip 1: Do your research and find a Plan-B cash flow model that will work for you and your family (just remember to ignore the skeptics, trust me they won’t help you pay for your mortgage!). Start on that plan now before you need it, NOT after the event like I did! Tip 2: You can’t always avoid being made redundant, but do your best to put a plan together to help you get through it – and just remember, whatever you may be going through, it too shall pass so stay strong!! Get Your Hopes Up and Maximize Your Dreams Cheers, Davis! #BusinessGeneralsPodcast

Tricia Brouk is a performance expert, TEDx organizer, writer, director, choreographer, podcast host, and producer of theatre, TV and film. She hosts The Big Talk, a podcast series on iTunes and currently directs and dramaturges Big Talks and Keynotes. She is the current organizer of TEDxLincolnSquare – Risk Takers and Change Makers.  She has produced, directed or choreographed several award-winning theatre and TV/Film productions. Through her company, The Big Talk, she helps people identify, craft and deliver a life-changing Big Talk or Keynote.  Period in full time business and business background  She has owned a company for over 26 years. She moved to New York City from Missouri to pursue a dance career and had no interest in being a starving artist. She started Brouk Moves, an elite in-home personal training company where she hired people to work for her so that she could still make money even when she was on the road. The company has been going strong, has 15 trainers, 25 clients and recently started a personal chef service. The business has enabled her to pursue a creative life outside of business and also given her the opportunity to create a new business, The Big Talk.  Brouk Moves has been her primary income for the last 26 years and has enabled her to pay all her bills, avoid the life of a starving artist and produce theatre. Her team works on the business full time so she can have time to pursue other things.  Starving artists  She says she sees this a lot in the industry and she has observed that artists feel unworthy of making money, because when they make money they then feel that they are selling out, and that they are not truly artists.  She says artists deserve to be paid for what they are worth, to have money and create art simultaneously.  Tip: You are not giving up your artist soul by taking a big fat pay check  First gig  In her first big European tour, she got a weekly pay check to do what she loves including touring, dancing, and being a full time artist. That was while Brouk Moves was still bringing in money because her team was doing all the work. That when she knew she could make a living as an artist in the long term while also making a living as a business woman.  Tip: Once you pursue and achieve what your goal is, do not let go of that business! Do not think that you have to choose. You can maintain them both equally  Getting into entrepreneurship  She decided early on that she would live the way she wanted without being poor or waiting for gigs to find her. She is proactive, mindful and kind in the way she runs her business. Her trainers take time off whenever they want and the rest sub for them.  Tip 1: Stop waiting for that big artist contract, start creating your art, start creating your business, because if you wait for someone else to do it for you, you will spend your entire life waiting.  Tip 2: Get busy, create art no matter where it is, no matter what it is. Keep your artist muscle flexing and find a way to make money on your own terms  The first months in the fitness business  She started by working very hard and personally training all the clients she had. She used to wake up at 4.30am and would do the client training while also dancing and performing. Once she realised that she could hire a team to take on some of the work, she created a system where she could always be involved but didn’t need to be there. That enabled her to reduce her commutes, and her time was spent doing other things. When she hired other people, she had to trust them, let go, and make sure that she put systems in place to ensure the business would run efficiently.  Tip 1: If you are starting up, you have to dig in, roll up your sleeves and do the work  Tip 2: When starting out, you have to create a solid foundation first, then you can back off and do the other things that you want to do  Choosing personal training  She says personal training was very organically connected to her life as a dancer. It was directly related to what she was doing. She also realised that there was a huge market for it in New York City. It was a niche she could get into and make a lot of money. The business is now very saturated but when Tricia started The Big Talk, she found her second niche because Talk is a massive market. She feels fortunate that she has now created a new business in a new market niche that is not saturated yet.  Niching  Tip 1: If you can find something that you are an expert at, create a niche for people who need what you are offering  Tip 2: You have get very specific in what it is you are offering and find those people who want what it is you are selling  Parallels: Getting clients for the fitness business and for the Big Talk  She has always approached clients with honesty and integrity while sharing that she would be their biggest cheer leader, and get them across the finish line.  Growth strategy for The Big Talk  When she started Brouk Moves, she had never advertised for her fitness service because she got all her clients from word of mouth. That was not an option for The Big Talk, so she hired a marketing strategist and a visibility strategist. As soon as she learnt what she was supposed to do, she did it without worrying about making mistakes because she could fix the mistakes. She wanted to do it as fast as she could because she knew it was an exciting opportunity to work with speakers and help them share their message.   She hired the right people to help her set up a sales funnel, marketing and all her social media. From there, clients started coming. In the last year, it has grown immensely. She has 126 episodes of The Big Talk, she has an online course and became a TEDx organizer.  Transitioning into the speaking space  She believes she is still doing what she set out to do 26 years ago by helping speakers achieve their goals. When she is working with a speaker, she works with them just like she would with an actor or performer. She theatricalises their talk and performance. The transition has been organic for her because it’s the same exact thing for her with a different platform.  How she started The Big Talk  In August 2016, she met with Jamie Broderick, a visibility strategist, who needed her help in developing her TEDx script. Their working together was a huge success and Jamie encouraged Tricia to start helping speakers on a professional level, and that inspired her to start The Big Talk. Tricia actually ended up hiring Jamie to work with her for 3 months, in creating a strategy for The Big Talk, including making sure her website had opt-ins, the SEO was effective, she had a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook page, and a strong social media presence.  Jamie then introduced Tricia to several people who would have been interested in working with a public speaking coach. From there, she introduced Tricia to John Lee Dumas, the host of the EOFIRE podcast, who advised her to do podcasts talking about her process in order to get credibility. She started a podcast and did 20 episodes. She made the podcast part of her brand, then started working with speakers. Her desire to put her speakers on a stage led her to apply for a TEDx license; she got it, and became the TEDx Lincoln Square organizer. That enabled her to give some of her speakers a platform.  She then figured that she needed to grow the business and reach people outside of New York City who couldn’t work with her face to face. So she developed an online course for such people.  Importance of introductions in business  She says they are everything. Whenever she is introduced to someone, she never has expectations that she will land them as a client. She always expects that the right people will cross her path.  Tip: Business is introductions, business is relationships. If you are on LinkedIn and you connect with someone and immediately sell something to them, that’s not a relationship. If you can be open to who you are introduced to without having any expectations, that will lead you somewhere.  The first podcast interviews and their impact  At first she didn’t know what she was doing with the podcast interviews. She doesn’t know how to do many things but she always figures it out, does the research, hires the right people or asks for help.   She figured out how to start and run a podcast with the help of Jamie Broderick and her own research efforts. She wrote 20 podcasts, recorded them all in batch and put them all on Libsyn. She loved it and kept doing them from there. She made a big mistake in the first 20 episodes because she put them on a free platform which made it very difficult for her to move them to another platform.  The podcast taught people what Tricia was doing with The Big Talk, who was she was as an artist and a director of public speaking. She talked about the nuts and bolts of how to write a speech and how to give a speech. The first 20 episodes were 5 to 7 minutes long which Tricia learnt was too short. Since then she realised that her podcasts are really packed with content.  Tip 1: As an artist, you can share your work and sell yourself simultaneously  Tip 2: We all make mistakes when we are learning and its fine. We learn from our mistakes  Tip 3: Just because a platform is free, it doesn’t mean it will serve your business well. Do your research, ask people who have podcasts where they are, where they are hosted and do some background research on what it is you are doing.   Starting before things are perfect  When she realised that social media is everything with relationships and business, she had to let go of being perfect because she would make errors in her posts all the time, but she would always correct them  Tip 1: You should always start before things are perfect because they are never going to be perfect  Tip 2: If you can

As corporate downsizing continues to make news and the internet makes telecommuting ever more productive more and more entrepreneurs are discovering the benefits of running businesses out of their homes. If you are looking to get out of the rat race, to spend more time with family and friends, and to live a more balanced life, a home-based business may be the right decision for you. Home-based businesses are quickly becoming the fastest growing form of business start-ups. Growing your business out of your home allows for flexibility that is difficult when renting or buying office and warehouse space. Although working at home requires self-discipline, the benefits can be substantial-especially in the start-up years. Starting a Home-Based Business Nearly one million Australians are running a business from home according to the Australian government. Forbes reported that home-based businesses were quickly becoming the fastest growing form of business start-ups. With a slowing global economy this statistic can only be expected to grow. Benefits of starting a Home-Based business out of your home There are many benefits and each would appeal to you differently but here are my top five that I find to be key: 1. Ownership – Yours to build and grow 2. Flexibility – No commute and freedom to structure your working hours 3. Taxation – Put simply…the system favours business ownership 4. Low Overheads – Investment can be low, no large office lease expenses 5. Leverage – Ability to leverage your efforts and scale up Personal lesson My late dad was an Accountant – I took after him, he worked long and hard for over 20 years in senior management for a Swedish ball bearing manufacturer. I got back home from boarding school one summer, and dad sat me and my older brother down to let us know that he had been “let go”. Life quickly changed in a space of 6 months – moved out of the company house, no company car, no driver and no more executive perks. It became clear that though dad had a great job employment by nature generally does not provide any “business equity” – he got paid his redundancy package (maybe a year’s salary) and that was it, back to the drawing board…which was starting a home based consultancy business in accounting. This was my first encounter with the difference between business ownership and employment. You get to make your own conclusions here as to how you would respond to such a situation…I have shared in Episode 077: Five Things Redundancy Social Welfare Taught Me, how social welfare became an unwanted reality for me and my wife a few years ago when we went through the same scenario The 5 key benefits of starting a home-based business 1. Ownership – Yours to build and grow Building a business means that you will be building equity for you and your family, if you work it right; and even if it takes you say 20 years to really get it established, that is just under half of your working life, you can build a substantial enterprise that is willable, saleable and transferable. The best time to start is while you are at the peak of your career which for most people is right now, start from your home and grow it from there – don’t just focus on building equity in your home, build some business equity as well. 2. Flexibility – No commute and structure your working hours. A colleague said to me she spent about 2 hours last week getting home because there were two accidents on the major roads during peak hour…that’s happened to me several times before! The ABC reported that Australians on average spend close to an hour each day on the daily commute to and from work. A Gallup survey reported the same for the average American commute. You can save a lot of time and turn that into productive hours, you can work around your family and your own personal routine with your business hours structured around that. As your business grows you can structure and systemize it so that you free up more of your time. This will demand discipline but the flexibility is a real tangible benefit. 3. Taxation – the system favours business ownership Any good tax accountant will tell you that the tax system favours businesses, there are a whole lot deductions that a business can qualify for that enables a better after tax take home pay. If your situation qualifies you can benefit from many deductions including a qualifying portion (directly relating to your business) of your mortgage, property taxes, insurance, utilities, home office consumables, training expenses and even client related travel expenses. Tip: A tax good accountant will help you optimize your taxes further through advanced tax structuring that you can’t benefit from unless you are running an enterprise. 4. Low Overheads – Investment/ operating costs can be low A home based business can generally be started with low capital investment and low operating costs. Working from the home, leveraging online connectedness reduces your risk exposure and explains why more and more people feel empowered to start a home based business be it full time or part time. Office lease rentals and its associated sprinklings can be a debilitating cost for start-ups. A low cost base helps you factor those savings into having competitive pricing which is critical as you build market share. 5. Leverage – Ability to leverage your efforts and scale up In a job situation you generally only get paid for the hours you personally work, a home based business allows you to leverage your efforts. As an opportunity arises you can begin to grow in systematic and staged approach. You could even outsource some of the components of your business to free up more productive time, or even start to hire a team of people as you grow. That’s the power of leverage – it can compound in your favour over time and help you impact more lives and champion more causes that you may be passionate about not just with your money but with your time and expertise. Final comment If you structure and systemise your business right, and pace your growth well, after a season of planting (maybe 5 to 7 plus years), you will be able to start freeing up some of your time while your business continues to grow without you. This is only made possible in a business, and in my mind it’s a worthwhile pursuit – if you have that “inner itch” for it, start now, start part time – start from home! Get Your Hopes Up and Maximize Your Dreams Cheers, Davis! #TheBusinessGeneralsPodcast  

Anthony Iannarino is an international speaker, bestselling author, sales leader, and entrepreneur. He specializes in the complex business-to-business (B2B) sale. He is also a founder and managing partner of two closely-held, family-owned businesses in the staffing industry, leading both entities in strategic planning while growing sales. Anthony is best known for his work at The Sales Blog, which has helped him gain recognition as a top thought leader in sales strategy. He is the designer of Level 4 Value Creation and Building Consensus methodologies that help sales organizations achieve transformational, breakthrough results. Period in full time business He has been in full time for 10 years now. Core revenue streams Anthony has very diverse revenue streams. He still has a role in their family’s staffing business and he is a partner in another one of the family businesses. He just started an accounting and finance group (specialised in staffing) where he is a partner. He is also a speaker, coach, consultant and an author. He says he believes that we are in the age of constant accelerating disruptive change which keeps coming faster and is more disruptive especially for business people. The speaking, coaching and consulting revenue stream makes up about 75% of his overall income. Tip 1: You shouldn’t give up any revenue streams, you should have multiple revenues streams going at one time Tip 2: You should really think deeply about how you can create additional revenue streams Starting out in business Anthony used to run their small family business of about $3 Million a year, and with about 6 sales people, he built it up to $50 Million a year. That got the attention of many people who wanted to know how he achieved so much with such a small team. That business was a competitive displacement business which took big companies away from big competitors. People wanted him to help them in that same way but Anthony wasn’t interested until at some point when he felt that he could something to help people succeed in building and growing their businesses. So he started waking up an hour earlier than he used to every day, to write down everything he knew, and publishing it on his new blog. His goal at that point was to become a keynote speaker within a year. He worked very hard on building awareness on what he did and within 10 months, he got his first speaking gig. In those 10 months, he used to get a lot of inspiration from Seth Godin, and he applied what he learnt from him in his own work. Overtime, he got introduced to a group of people who had a sales content sharing group. That sharing ended up amplifying all of their messages. Tip 1: Because of the internet, as an entrepreneur, you have audiences worldwide and they are looking for you. Google will help them find you provided that you publish your best ideas, and people can tell how you create value and what you are all about Tip 2: One of the things that entrepreneurs struggle with when it comes to sales and marketing is the consistency of doing the work every single day Motivation during the first 10 months of the blog Anthony knew that the idea for the blog would work because the statistics were good and kept growing. He had confidence, faith and was willing to play the long game with the blog while building a body of work. He started by getting 7 people reading his blog posts up to the current 2,500 readers that visit the blog per day. On Mondays, the number goes up to 4,000. Tip 1: Stay with what you are doing for a long enough time that it actually sticks and you will get some traction. A lot of people give up right before that point where they get the traction because they start to worry it’s not going to work Tip 2: You just have to continually do the work and it will pay off, but it does take longer than you think Getting the first set of clients Anthony says his first clients found him through a Twitter link that directed them to his blog. Pricing the first paying gig He had picked a number that he thought was outrageously high and even shared it with professional speakers. He learnt that it was about 10 to 20 times what anyone thinks they get on their first speech. When he got the first call from potential paying clients, he knew that talking to 1,000 people and being able to help them grasp a concept and execute it, was worth far more than he was going to charge. Tip 1: Your price is a reflection of the value you create Tip 2: When you can create a tremendous amount of value for other people then you are allowed to capture a tremendous amount of value Growth and marketing strategy after getting the first clients He has somebody who helps him with prospecting. When people come into his newsletter and download resources, Anthony still reaches out to them. He also blogs every day. In 2016, he did 200 YouTube videos and tries to do them daily but he hasn’t figured out how to do them when he is on the road. His company also uses Facebook and Google Ads especially for things like book launches where they need to get attention and are willing to pay for it. Lessons learnt so far Tip 1: The right way to think is that you have to serve the business and also serve the clients, and you have to do what is right for both of those entities at the same time. Tip 2: Even if you have more work than you need, even if you think that you can’t take on any more clients, you still have to get up and do the sales and marketing work because the laws of the universe say that you plant seeds in the spring time and harvest in the fall. With business, it’s always spring time because when a client goes away, you cannot be left with nothing in your pipeline. When entrepreneurs don’t do enough sales and marketing, that’s how they end up going back to the corporate world. Tip 3: The way that you keep a business running is client acquisition. Sales and marketing is an important part of the business that you can’t ignore Advice to those starting up Anthony advices those who are starting up a business while also working in their full time jobs, to do a lot of marketing including blogging if it’s applicable, actual cold calling and prospecting. He also says that from a marketing perspective, social media channels work great. Tip 1: You have to do both cold calling, client calls and prospecting every day. You need to do what is enough to get you the clients that you need Tip 2: The ability to go out and get attention has never been easier and cheaper Tip 3: If you’re serving business people, spend time on LinkedIn; and if you’re serving consumers, spend time building your audience on Facebook. Tip 4: The most important thing is to find a way to get people back to your site with content that is relevant to them and answer all their questions there. Then capture their email addresses because that’s how you’re going to start getting in touch with people, and that’s how people are going to start reaching out to you His funnel He says his funnel is very busy. Their marketing and sales consistency over a long period of time brings about a lot of funnel activity. He just had a book launch and it has kept them very busy. They have been sending people copies of the book and the book has been a great lead generation tool. Becoming a writer and its impact He always wanted to be an author and when he started writing his blog, people would ask him to write a book. He couldn’t find a suitable publisher so he decided to publish the first book himself. He hired a great editor and spent 6 months editing the book. Through Twitter, he linked up with someone who ended up helping him get a 2-Book publishing deal accompanied with a very nice advance payment. From there, it became a long-term relationship where he will probably do up to 7 books. He is currently working on the third book. When he was writing the first book, he was taking ideas from his blog posts and fresh-writing them. The book was about how one can be someone worth doing business with and the skills one needs to actually sell. The book has helped Anthony tremendously in developing his profile and outreach. It has also grown him as a speaker and created a lot of awareness about what he does. Tip: Who you are matters more than what you do. First, you have to be somebody worth doing business with before you can sell Their staffing business He says that it’s a retail staffing firm that serves the light industrial, clerical, accounting, scientific, and other general staffing needs of diverse clients. What he did to grow the business faster and scale it up, was to recognize that they spent a lot of time selling to small accounts which took as much time to win as large accounts. They also took just as much time to serve as large accounts. It didn’t make sense to Anthony to dedicate the small number of resources he had to small accounts that would not generate enough revenue for the company. So he focused on large anchor accounts, because the company could manage to run profitably with just 2 or 3 such accounts. He systematized the process of targeting and acquiring those accounts, and was very persistent to date, which ensures that he acquires the target clients. Tip: You can have what you want, but you have to be willing to hang in there Breakthrough moment He says he is still waiting for his biggest breakthrough moment because the more he achieves, the more he sees further into how much more he can achieve A typical day during a book launch He says there are two painful things for him when writing books; he loves the writing process but hates the editing process; and loves the book launch process but hates what happens after that which includes hundreds of emails and interview requests which become very frustrating because he tries to put people into his already packed calendar. In his day to day work, he wakes up at 4.30am and works up to about 8.30pm then goes to bed at 9.30pm. He also works through the weekends and that is when he prefers to do interviews. Book reception and feedback The book he just launched, The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the Ten Commitments That Drive Sales, has been very unique compared to other closing books because most of the other books have all had a long list of different types of closes, but this one is about 10 commitments that one has to gain. The reception of the book has been very good. It has had forty one 5-star reviews with comments on how the book has changed people’s thinking about what they are doing and producing better results. It’s helping people rethink their sales process and the conversations that they’re having. It is also helping them recognize the reason they lose is because they are not collaborating and giving clients something that they can easily say no to instead of customizing it for them in such a way that they would have to say yes. The best place to find Anthony’s books is www.amazon.com The most important commitment He says the first commitment (The commitment for Time) is the toughest one for people to get and it’s the one he would advise anyone to master first. Tip: We have so much time but we don’t get anymore, you have to protect that. Legacy: To have created good adults out of his children so they can go out and contribute while making a difference. To be remembered for having helped other people transform and produce better results in their lives than they would have otherwise – Anthony. Best way to connect: www.thesalesblog.com – Anthony’s Business website Get Your Hopes Up and Maximize Your Dreams Cheers, Davis #BusinessGeneralsPodcast

Nicky Billou is the No. 1 International Best-Selling Author of the book Finish Line Thinking: How To Think & Win Like A Champion. He is also the co-host of the No. 1 Podcast in the world for thought leaders called The Business Of Thought Leadership. His guests on the podcast have been the likes of Seth Godin, Barbara Corcoran, George Ross, Jen Widerstrom, Tony Hawk, Larry Winget, and Marie Forleo.   As an Accountability Coach at Finish Line Thinking, He energizes people to be their best selves. He works with entrepreneurs and professional sales people (top real estate agents, insurance brokers, financial advisors and sales people for top organizations) who want to be held accountable for producing top results. He offers a unique system that teaches people how to Think & Win Like a Champion when it comes to achieving goals.  Starting out  He worked for different technology and telecommunications companies, but the corporate world was not for him, because he felt that something was missing and every day he felt he wasn’t living according to his purpose. He eventually decided to start his own business, and because he did it alone, his success plateaued at some point. Luckily, he found the right mentor who taught him what he needed to succeed in the long term.  Leaving corporate  Nicky left his last job when the last company he used to work for went under. While other people were finding it hard to get a job, he got into consulting, but he went through a lot of years being stuck in the journey of being a business owner. It wasn’t until he started to see what his expertise was, that he was able to turn that into success.  He says the stages of the thought leader’s business journey are:  Stage 1: Being a new comer – this is for people thinking about getting into business or just getting started in business. They have no real experience owning their own business. They are not skilled at marketing and selling what they are offering, and they have no business systems. At this stage one is lucky to make any money at all. It’s a dangerous stage because if one doesn’t get passed it, they may need to get back to their corporate job. People in this stage make between $5,000 and $10,000 a year.  Stage 2: An unconscious expert – This is someone who has expertise but they are not clear what their expertise is. They have some systems in place but they are stuck in an obsolete time for money business model. Their sales are inconsistent because their marketing works sometimes, not all the time. They have lumpy billings and make between $30,000 and $50,000 a year.  Stage 3: Conscious Expert – Those in this stage have their message nailed which results in consistent marketing and more predicable sales. The challenge with this stage, is that one has to work lots of hours under a time for money business model which is not sustainable. They make between $150,000 and $300,000 a year.  Stage 4: Thought Leader – At this stage, one has arrived and they are making between $500,000 and $3 Million a year. It’s not about time for money, it’s about getting paid based on one’s expertise. One works between 50 and 150 days a year doing what they love, with the best clients of their choice. Very few get to this stage.  Nicky says there is a final stage called the Celebrity Thought Leader Stage, which is the stage for people like Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Robin Sharma who are global iconic figures. They make between $5 Million and $100+ Million a year. They work whenever they want and they can work a little or a lot. They are sort after by the top business/industry leaders in the world and celebrities. They get to charge whatever they want and their impact is global. The challenge is, very few people get to be in this stage.  Tip: It’s possible to achieve the Thought Leader stage, it doesn’t have to take you 10 years to get to Conscious Expert or an extra 10 years to get to Thought Leader stage. I can show you what mistakes to avoid to help you achieve all that in 1 to 3 years.  Fastest way to achieve 6 figures  Nicky says Matt Church’s program has 150 members and 75 of them are thought leaders (50%) who make between $500,000 and $2 Million a year. Of the remaining 75 members, 40 are conscious experts who make $250,000 to $500,000 a year (conscious experts on the way to being thought leaders).  Nicky says the program is brilliant because it shows people how to get clear on their expertise, take their expertise and utilize it in a fashion that positions them as the authority in their market place while selling it in a way that it appears to be a service to people.  Nicky offers people in North America the ability to hack that.  Tip: Go do Matt Church’s program, go do the thought leaders business school and that will enable you to get to 6 or 7 figures fast.  His book and its impact on his business  He wrote his book Finish Line Thinking: How To Think & Win Like A Champion, several years into his entrepreneurial journey. He says it helped position him as an expert when it came to mindset. He has only sold around $5,000 worth of the book, but it has made him over $1 Million because it has been a brochure and business card for him, since people have read it and decided to do business with him.  Tip: If you are in Australia, go to Matt Church’s program and if you are in North America, go to the eCircle Academy so you can figure out what your expertise is  Case Study: North America  Nicky refers to a fellow of eCircle Academy named Dan. Dan had been making less than $2,000 a month as a personal trainer. He used to travel around by bus and would train anyone he could find.  The academy helped Dan get clear on his ideal target market and eventually he landed on people with missing limbs and now he is the go-to guy for health and fitness for people with missing limbs. Focusing on that market enabled him to move from 7 clients to 400 clients. He also went from doing one-on-one trainings to doing group/online programs, VIP programs, and inner-circle masterminds. This year, he has made up to $610,000 in sales which makes him a thought leader and works less than he used to.  One of the ways through which Dan made it are; he got clear on his message and market.  Tip: Clarity rocks, make sure you identify your message and market  Biggest breakthrough in the business  He says this was when he got connected to Matt Church and the time he started to bring in Matt’s thought leadership program into his business to North America, which has been helping a lot of people.  Tip 1: Anyone in Australia, you need to know who Matt Church is, you must go to the Thought Leaders Business School website, go to one of Matt Church’s events, and sign up for the Thought Leaders Business School.  Tip 2: If you are in the United States, find out about the eCircle Academy, listen to our podcast, and if you want to understand how it can help you, call us by going to ecircleacademy.com/appointment   Core revenue streams  He says the eCircle Academy is one of them and he also does one-on-one mentoring/coaching for people. He does some speaking and will be focusing on doing more of it in 2018. He is also passionate about serving men because he went through a devastating divorce and would like to help men who are going through it. He actually has programs that can help such men.  Action to take before signing up for Thought Leaders Business School or eCircle Academy  He says:  Step 1: Reach out to Nicky Billou (eCircle Academy) or buy Matt Church’s book, The Thought Leader Practice. If you are in North America, you can get Matt Church’s book for free from eCircle Academy if you say that you are a listener of the Business Generals Podcast. If you are in Australia, connect with Matt Church or buy the book from Amazon.  Step 2: Jump on a call with Nicky or reach out to Matt Church  Growth strategy now  Nicky says their podcast and going to other podcasts helps a lot. They also do a lot of cold calling and marketing. They run a program on their Facebook page where they give away Matt Church’s book and they use that to get people on the phone.   Book recommendation for entrepreneurs:  The Thought Leader Practice – Matt Church Cathy Capitalist & Johnny Jobmaker: Teaching Your Kids About Free Enterprise, Dreaming Big, and Going For It! – Nicky Billou >>> Legacy: To raise his sons to be great men, to be men who follow their purpose, who are gentlemen, who are respectful to all people, who will end up being great husbands to their wives, and great fathers to their kids. To be remembered as a great friend and family member who cared about the people in his life and helped them make their own journeys easy. To have helped people achieve their dreams to the greatest extent possible – Nicky. >>> Best way to connect: nicky@ecircle.ca – Nicky’s Business Email www.ecircleacademy.com/appointment – Nicky’s Business Calendar For more info including show notes and resources check out www.businessgenerals.com Remember to click subscribe on your podcast player so you don’t miss an episode. Download your free PDF show highlight reel for all the links and resources mentioned in the episode. Go to www.businessgenerals.com/goals Thanks for tuning in…see you next time! Cheers, Davis #TheBusinessGeneralsPodcast

Nelson Dellis is memory athlete, mnemonist (able to remember and recall unusually long lists of data such as unfamiliar names, list of numbers, and others), public speaker, and consultant. He is a four-time USA Memory Champion and the co-founder of Memory League, a new type of competitive memory platform that allows memory enthusiasts to challenge each other online. He is also the founder of Climb for Memory through which he preaches a lifestyle that combines both mental and physical fitness with proper diet and social involvement. HELP OUT in the endeavour to find a cure for Alzheimer’s by taking The Extreme Memory Challenge, a short, easy memory test online. It’s poised to be one of the largest long-term memory studies ever conducted. Just go to www.extremememorychallenge.com Becoming a memory enthusiast His grandmother died of Alzheimer’s in 2009 and that made Nelson develop an interest in memory. He saw how her mind slipped away and didn’t want the same thing to happen to him. From his research on memory, he discovered the US Memory Championship which to his surprise included average people who had just learnt some memory techniques and practised. That’s when he realised that memory was a skill like any other and from there he started off on his journey towards becoming a memory champion. Climb for Memory: Research on Alzheimer’s He says the current research is not clear on whether or not keeping the brain active deters Alzheimer’s. Some researchers say it doesn’t while others say it does. Nelson is a believer that keeping the brain active makes a big difference, judging from his own experience with his memory transformation. Core revenue streams He says it’s hard to define his business because his revenue sources have not always been clear. He is not much of a business guy. He started doing memory as a business when he found that he had won a few memory championships, had gotten a lot of media attention and was receiving a lot of requests for speaking engagements and different appearances. He used to work in coding and physics as a career but he decided to leave it behind. The majority of his revenues come from speaking engagements, doing different memory-related events, spokesperson deals, and other memory-related projects. Leaving the normal job He loved his formal job in the corporate world but when he started doing the memory-related projects, he had a hard time managing both. When he got an offer to do a memory event sponsored by a certain company, the head of marketing of that company approached him after the event, and asked him to work with them on a long-term basis. For Nelson to take their offer and focus entirely on memory-related work under their endorsement, they agreed to pay him the same amount he was getting as a salary at his job. Getting to the point of winning competitions He had to put in a lot of hard work to become a memory champion and it was easy because he was very passionate about it. He loved the whole process of memorization. He wanted to be the best, so he spent as much time as possible training his memory. He started getting serious about it in the summer of 2009 when his grandmother passed away. He entered into the first competition in March 2010 and came in 3rd place which was commendable considering it was his first time. That inspired him to train more seriously, and in 2011, he won the competition. He used to train every day after work for at least 2 hours. He says he also used to memorize numbers and cards while at work. Two ways to catapult memory retention skills He says one way is to pay attention which includes focusing on one thing at time and not multitasking. Since the brain is not good at memorizing abstract things like numbers, names or directions, the second way is to turn those things by association into pictures (visual imagery in the mind). Tip 1: Paying attention will help a lot with your memory Tip 2: Always try to think in pictures Growth strategy at the beginning A friend of his linked him to someone who became his agent. The agent got him one endorsement deal and promised him that more were to come but later on, Nelson had to part ways with him because he never delivered on his promises. He was able to work under the endorsement deal, but he knew it was not going to last long, so he used to think about how he would go back to a corporate coding job. The more he got farther from a formal job, he realised that he didn’t want to get formally employed again plus working on memory-related work could not be added to his resume so he just decided to find more endorsement deals and come up with innovative ways to make money from memory-related work. He started targeting companies that were in the memory space and he eventually found one called Brain Health, a supplement company. Nelson knew about Brain Health because they had sponsored several memory championships that Nelson had attended. He managed to close an endorsement deal with them and they have worked together to date. Nelson also got speaking engagements through the TV interviews he did and media coverage he got when he attended championships. His interest in speaking engagements grew over time because he loved teaching and inspiring people so he eventually choose to focus on speaking engagements instead of endorsement deals. He also identified speaking as the best way for him to grow and scale his work. The TED talk He did a TEDX Talk in 2012 and he says it was a game changer for him because it was the biggest speaking engagement he had ever done. He took a while to prepare for the talk and he used software called Prezi to build his presentation. The presentation enabled him to successfully make his talk. He doesn’t use the software now but he has a fixed deck that he customizes to fit different speaking engagements. Speaking gigs Nelson gets about two or so speaking engagements per month and he also teaches at a university. After doing them for several years, he is currently trying to move away from them because they take up a lot of time and can be very exhausting. Now, he wants to have more of a passive income by doing the same thing he does but in different ways that don’t require so much of his constant involvement. Comparison of coding work to the current business He says he is better off now than he was at his formal coding job, but he says that if he had stuck to that job, he would always have a steadier, more predictable salary. Now, with the memory-related work, he doesn’t always know where he‘s going to fall though things are always fine. Tip: The beauty about being an entrepreneur and having that freedom is that when you are in a tough spot, there is always something you can do; you can work harder, you can work something out, and so much more. App development He has wanted to have an app for a while but he didn’t really pursue it until he decided to move away from speaking engagements. His ultimate goal has always been to spread what he has learned to as many people as possible and with his desire to do it in a passive way, developing an app, writing a book or creating an online course was the best way to achieve that. The decision to develop the app was influenced by different things and people. An Australian memory enthusiast who was better at coding than Nelson helped him in developing the app’s back end while Nelson worked on the idea. They called it the Extreme Memory Tournament and they run 3 years of a competition using it as digital software that worked as memory training software that showed on-screen what was happening when two memory competitors were going head-to-head memorizing things. Before that, memory competitions were very boring to watch because they were analogue. They later joined forces with the Art of Memory, an online forum where people could post questions about memory and learn memory techniques. They have been working together and so far they have done a successful Kickstarter campaign which has enabled them to start delivering the beta products of that. The Kickstarter campaign They had requested for $20,000 in the Kickstarter campaign and they got slightly more, which was enough to get the beta version of their software products out. The beta products are geared towards teaching the art of memory and they include tutorials for beginners, training software for practicing, online games to measure memory success against others, and many more memory-related training tools. Their app is subscription based and the funds they have been using have come from the competition software which many memory enthusiasts have used to practice and play. Wikipedia page Nelson says he never wanted a Wikipedia page but a mentor of his encouraged him to get one made. The mentor knew a company that could develop his Wikipedia page and she got them to do it. He says it’s been great because it comes up when people search his name. Tip: Once you have a lot of information about you in form of sources and articles, anyone can write a Wikipedia page for you Craziest thing he has ever memorized Nelson says during World Alzheimer’s Day in 2016, he decided to memorize Pi (π in mathematics) which included memorizing 10,000 digits of pie with the world record being over 100,000 digits. The record Nelson was trying to break was someone quizzing him on 5 digit chunks somewhere within that 10,000, and he was to be asked 50 of them, and all he would have to do was say the next 5 digits and the previous 5 digits before each chunk. He was to do it 50 times with no mistakes and in a certain amount of time. He took a long time to study it but he didn’t make it to the end of the 10,000. Biggest breakthrough in the business “It’s been not being afraid to delegate some of my workflow to people who are good at the things that I need done. I used to think that I had to do everything myself so a lot of the times nothing would get done because it was something that

Mike Wheeler is the founder of Mike Wheeler Media which provides Salesforce training, consulting and development services worldwide. Mike creates the course curriculum and provides training for users and those seeking to become certified on the Salesforce platform. He is also a world-class online trainer and instructor with over 27,000 students, over 9 courses and over 7,600 reviews on the Udemy online training platform. Period in full-time business He has been doing his own business since 2001 before which he used to do technical writing, training and curriculum development. He also supplements what he does with the business with some consulting work. Core revenue streams One of his primary revenue streams are his online courses on the Udemy platform. He says he has had sales on the platform every single day since he started offering his courses there. He also makes money from Salesforce consulting and development engagements. Starting out in the business Mike had a long career in the corporate world doing technical writing for different software companies. That work led him more towards contract work, but he says he had a few stints as an employee. He would always go in at the end of a project to write manuals. That was back when the internet was still new. The contracts would typically be 6 to 9 month engagements with different companies. He would basically go where the work was. Getting into Salesforce Mike encountered Salesforce in 2008 when he was doing technical writing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to better rank his technical writing services on Google. He then started getting into WordPress for websites and building his own websites. While building a website for a client, he was asked for a web delete form on Salesforce and he did it but as he was offering the website development services, he realised that Salesforce was becoming more and more popular in the market, so he decided to train more on it. One day, in 2011, while in a Barnes and Nobles book store, he came across a book on Salesforce development, read it and felt like he had what it took to go into the Salesforce platform professionally. Salesforce Mike says it’s a web-based or cloud-based platform that one can use and customize to fit any business or process. It can be used for marketing, sales and customer service. It can be used by any business, in any industry, and is customized through clicks instead of code, though a person can also use code if they want to. Salesforce is best known for the fact that it can be customized to meet the marketing, sales and service needs of any business. For example, a business owner can use Salesforce to replace Legacy systems, spreadsheets and many other processes/systems. Mike says Salesforce was one of the pioneers of cloud computing and SaaS business. Knowing the Salesforce business would work After learning Salesforce, he needed to use it in practice, so while still working as a technical writer he got more involved with Salesforce related work which enabled him to build on his expertise. Going into Salesforce training services As he was learning Saleforce, getting certified and seeking his first job as a Salesforce developer, he started to develop an interest in sharing the value of Salesforce with anyone who was seeking it as an attainable path to a cloud-based career. For several years, he thought he would blog about Salesforce or develop his own online help system, but he realised that it would be a big time commitment and hard to monetize. He ended up developing Salesforce-based online courses and teaching on Udemy. He came across Udemy when a friend referred him to a sale Udemy was holding for their courses. Mike really liked the Udemy business model which enables people to buy a course and keep it for life. He ended up buying more than 20 courses for everything he would be interested in learning. Naturally, he got interested in knowing whether there were any Salesforce-related courses on Udemy and discovered that there were none that were offering quality and value in terms of Salesforce Administrator Certification. With the help of his son, who is a talented videographer and film editor, he was able to put his courses together. Doubling income Mike worked for years as a technical writer and had hit the limit of what he could do there. He was going from contract to contract making $40 to $50 an hour, but that work started to go down, and he started learning Salesforce. He then got the relevant certification. The Salesforce development work he had been doing at his day job enabled him to get Saleforce-oriented work earning $80 an hour. Salesforce certification Mike spent 3 months getting his first Salesforce certification which included a study time of about 100 to 150 hours through consuming different learning content from Salesforce, reading books that he bought, and hands-on experience through his day job. He failed the first test and had to improve on his knowledge which enables him to pass the second time. Training others on Salesforce Mike says choosing to teach Salesforce to different professionals has been very effective because the type of students he deals with are motivated learners, and he gets great satisfaction from helping them achieve their career goals and earn higher income. Starting out on Udemy He began with recording his Sales Administrator Certification Course and it ended up being an 11 hour course taking him 3 months to create. He spent more time creating the course than it took him getting his certification. Due to his eagerness to release something, he decided to release the first section of the course as a free preview and just called it “Introduction to Salesforce Certifications and Careers”. That enabled him to get a first-hand preview of the kind of demand he would get for his course. By linking the free course to his website, interested students signed up to get updates on the full course. 6 weeks after that, Mike completed the course and had about 100 interested people signed up. Building an email list from Udemy Mike says it’s difficult to build an email list on Udemy because one has to direct students to their website since Udemy puts a lot of restrictions on instructors’ dealings with students outside the platform. Instructors cannot directly ask students for their email addresses. Getting the first buying customers The night he got an email that his course was live, the first thing he did was send emails to the email list he had built on Udemy and from his Salesforce work. There was a restriction on Udemy against sending mass emails so he ended up sending them from his gmail account. When he woke up the next morning, he had 8 sales, and by the end of the first 24 hours, he had 28 enrolments. Most of them were from his email list, and about one or two from organic sales. That got Udemy’s attention because Mike had gotten a genuine buying audience very fast, and they were very interested in knowing more about Mike and his plans on Udemy so they could support him in growing on the platform. Since then, he has had sales everyday since he launched on 30th March 2016. The numbers Mike offered his first course for $15 because Udemy was in the process of changing their pricing structure at that time and the prices on most courses were ranging between $10 and $15. Within 24 hours, he had made about $300 with his cut per sale being about $10. Mike calls it passive income because he has to do student support while updating the courses and creating new ones. His son, who is a developer, helps him answer student questions. Udemy provides ways of having teacher assistance that helps answer student questions. He says it’s because of his great responsiveness and engagement with students that he was able to get off the ground early. The questions he gets from students also enable him to improve and update his courses. Current state of the business He has had students buying more than 1 course and has about 1,000 new students every 10 days. There was a time he was averaging 10 sales a day and now he has about 100 a day. Repeat customers Mike has had several repeat customers especially when he releases new courses, but he does not have exact numbers because Udemy doesn’t have the necessary analytics built into their platform. A large percentage of his students come from prior courses that he has done and they always guide him on what they want to learn next which helps him create new courses. Do-Over He says if he could start out afresh, he would spend less time fighting the Udemy system and embrace it for what it is because right now it is his largest revenue stream. Despite trying out other platforms and building his own, Udemy still forms about 80% of his online teaching revenue. If he got a do-over, he would not complicate things and just focus on what he does best for his audience. He would let Udemy play its role of marketing its platform and focus on creating his great quality courses. In terms of marketing, his students do a lot of word of mouth by sharing links to his courses with many people. Course quality Over time, Mike has changed the quality of his courses by better structuring them to include sections like quizzes and talking head videos. He previously used to record his videos during early mornings or late nights which brought him out as tired on the videos. 6% to 7% of his students asked him to have more energy on the video lectures so Mike started to exude more energy on his videos and also shortened the length of his lectures. His son has also helped him improve his production quality by getting better gear. Biggest breakthrough moment He has had several, which include the day he went live and got 28 sales. He also says trying new courses that he thought would be big but which ended up not matching up some of his certification courses was a learning curve for him. That taught him to stick to motivated learners. The other breakthrough moment was when Udemy informed him that they were launching a new product for practice test courses and wanted him to create a practice test course. He had never done one before and felt very intimidated, but when he did it, it became very successful, and it is now his second best-selling course behind the full administrator certification course. Since then he has done a practice test course for another certification course that he has. Now, whenever he is developing a certification course, he also writes sample test questions to test students’ knowledge on the course concepts. A day in life when launching on Udemy Vs. a day in life now The first thing he does each day, is look into how many sales he has, to check if things are on track. He then looks at the reviews, to make sure that there are no half star reviews. He used to say thank you to every review he got, but he now doesn’t, because he has over 7,500 reviews, which demonstrate that he has a strong engagement with his audience. After that, he answers any questions from his students and answers messages from different people. He is usually either restructuring a course or recording a course. Tech Gear He uses a Mac laptop, Camtasia for his screen recordings and a wide screen Dell monitor to capture his screen demos in high pixel so people can see it well. His son uses Adobe Premiere Pro, has a Mac computer and laptop, and a host of great cameras. They have all sorts of microphones and lights with a dedicated office space. The worthwhileness of the business He says the business has been very worthwhile because it has been much easier and profitable than the technical work he did before. Up and until his first course sale, he used to have doubts on whether the business would succeed because everything was speculative. Now, he is always enthusiastic about the future growth prospects of the business. Tool and Resources Camtasia – video editing software for creating tutorials and presentations directly via screencast, or via a direct recording plug-in to Microsoft PowerPoint. Book recommendation for entrepreneurs: 1. Development with the Force.com platform: Building Business Applications in the Cloud – Jason Ouellette 2. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers – Geoffrey A. Moore Legacy: To positively impact a lot of lives and also leave behind a platform for his kids to stand tall, rise up and accomplish great things – Mike. Best way to connect: www.mikewheelermedia.com – Mike’s Business website Get Your Hopes Up and Maximize Your Dreams Cheers, Davis!

I am excited to have you join me in this solo episode which is actually a workshop I hosted for a over 50 entrepreneurs. It’s a relaxed yet entertaining training environment where I walk you through a couple of key concepts that have helped shape my mindset towards business over the last 20 years. Listen in and find out: What your 2 missions in life should be? The keys steps to move you from Idea Stage to Significance Case studies on ideas and giftings that have been executed into global brands today Plus much more Listen in to get all the juicy details in this episode on converting your ideas and gifts into wealth and your wealth into significance!. Remember to click subscribe on your podcast player so you don’t miss an episode. Access all the links and resources mentioned in the episode at https://www.businessgenerals.com/goals2 Thanks for tuning in…see you next time! Cheers, Davis #TheBusinessGeneralsPodcast