The Business Generals Podcast | Helping You Maximize Your Entrepreneurial Dreams - Every Single Week

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 w...

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,

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,

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.

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

I am excited to have you join me in this solo episode which is actually a workshop I hosted for 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 key 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. Significance and legacy Find a reason why you want to achieve what you want to achieve. That way, you will always stay motivated even in the midst of challenges 1.0 NUMBER ONE MISSION IN LIFE Find out what you are passionate about and what excites you because it causes you to keep going when things get tough. If you find yourself working in a job that you not excited about, it's going to be a bit of a drag. Write down what you are passionate about and then write down the answers 1.1 Areas of influence: Seven Mountains of Influence These are the areas where your passion will most likely fall under, and they are: Business: We all go looking for a job from business people. Therefore, they influence our lives. Government and politics: Government makes the policies that influence our lives. For example, when they say, "Drive on the left," we drive on the left. If one doesn't drive on the left, they're in trouble. Arts and entertainment: This is where we find music, movies and other forms of entertainment where there are celebrities, for example, Hollywood. They influence the hairstyles we wear, the clothes we wear and much more. Religion: All of us have grown up in church or some form of variation of that and that influences us immensely Education: This where we learn most of what we know Media: This includes popular media outlets like CNN, BBC and different TV channels. They influence how we understand what is happening in the world. What they show on TV is what we believe is happening. For example, if they show us that there's an earthquake somewhere, we understand there's an earthquake somewhere and if they show us ISIS is taking over the Middle East, we understand that that's what is happening. We don't actually go to the Middle East to work it out for ourselves. If they present Africa the way it has been presented, that is how the world understands Africa as being. Unless we have somebody in the media sphere from Africa who begins to change the perspective that people have, that doesn't change. Family: This constitutes how we are raised, how we grow up, the community that we live in. Tip: Once you understand where your passion sits, then you can begin to take the next step. 1.2 Building a career or business Once you have identified under which category your passion sits, make sure it always excites you in your day to day life and then look into your actual skills, strengths, and gifts to determine whether they match what you are passionate about. Your skills, strengths and gifts have to work hand in hand with your passion, to help you fulfil that passion. For example, someone who is passionate about singing has to have a good voice and strong singing skills, or at least be in a position to learn good singing skills. You may also find another angle in the music industry that you can do other than singing, for example, producing music, and much more. 1.3 Ideas As yourself what ideas you have and what ideas keep resurfacing in your mind. Don't keep sharing your ideas every time you get them,

Setting goals enables us to move forward in life and business. Goals are like the oxygen to our biggest dreams. They are the crucial first steps in every journey we choose to take. Setting goals will enable you to: * Focus * Measure progress * Stay locked-in and undetered * Have accountability in finishing every task * Motivated at all times In this episode, i'll personally help you learn and implement goal setting into your personal and business life so you can build on your self-confidence and increase your productivity. Listen in to get all the juicy details in this episode on goal setting that works!. 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

Brady Shearer is the founder of Pro Church Tools and the host of a popular podcast on iTunes called Pro Church Tools. Pro Church Tools is an organization Brady founded to help small, medium and big churches go professional with their media, communications, and videos. The organization was built on his passion for church media and announcements, and has grown exponentially over time to become sizeable.  Listen in to get all the juicy details from Brady Shearer in this episode.  Remember to click subscribe on your podcast player so you don’t miss an episode. Access this show highlight reel for all the links and resources mentioned in the episode at www.businessgenerals.com/bradys  Type of business  His business is entirely online, they don’t do anything in-person. When he started the business it was entirely laptop-based (laptop lifestyle) for a long time. The business now has 8 full-time employees plus Brady, and has room for about 3 or 4 more people. It has at least 6 to 12 freelancers, contractors and remote employees.  Period in full-time business and core revenue streams  Brady says he has been 3 or 4 years in full-time business and their main product since the beginning is producing video announcements (Pro Video Announcements) for churches. They currently work with about 150 churches each week producing their video announcements. He says what drives the entire business is their brand “Pro Church Tools”.   Since the very beginning he has been releasing videos, articles and podcasts every week to teach people everything he knows. That has enabled them to build an audience called the “Pro Church Nation” which has in turn allowed them to experiment with new products including Nucleus (A boutique church website builder) and Story Tape (An unlimited stock footage site). They are a fully bootstrapped business. Pro Video Announcements has been funding everything.  Starting out in business  Brady started out as the media director in his church while also attending bible college. He didn’t have any video, social, web or design skills at the time but he had a knack for going into something he had never done before, and learning it very quickly. He did that with recording software and learnt everything he could. The more he learnt, the more he did for his church and his work was eventually noticed by other churches, that kept asking him to do freelance work for them.  The more he did the work, the more he started to focus mainly on doing church specific stuff and that’s when he decided to launch Pro Church Tools. The business brought together his interest in online business and the audience he was passionate about serving including churches, ministries, pastors and church leaders. He started www.prochurchtools.com and just began teaching everything that he had learnt about producing church-specific video announcements.  Knowing he could succeed with it  He was full-time in school and also worked 20 hours a week at his church so he didn’t really have time to work on the business. To make time, he started waking up very early every day to work on the business. From 5am to 8am, he would work on the business before going to school. To date, he does his best work in the early mornings.  He didn’t know the business would work but he had money saved up from his freelance work to put into starting Pro Church Tools. He then gave himself 4 months to work on the business but nothing happened in the first 3 months. He was starting to lose hope when in the following next 2 weeks he had 6 churches sign up. It turned out that churches go into hibernation especially with big purchase decisions throughout the summer and that’s why he was not getting any sign ups in the first 3 months. With the first clients,

Yaro Starak is the founder of Entrepreneurs Journey. He is a globally recognized internet marketer and online business mentor and coach who started his online journey before being online was a thing.  In this episode, Yaro shares how he launched his blog for fellow entrepreneurs, especially for people who are interested in following the online business model that he has leveraged to make over a million dollars.  Yaro has developed a simple business model made up of the following three components:   Start a Blog  Grow An Email Newsletter  Sell Your Own Digital Products  Listen in to get all the juicy details from Yaro Starak in this episode.  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 at www.businessgenerals.com/yaros   Starting out in business  When Yaro joined the University of Queensland to study business management, he got his first access to the internet and he was fascinated by the ease of access to information. He started playing a card game called “Magic: The Gathering” and became a great fan of it so much so that he built his first website dedicated to the game.   The website was built using GeoCities (a free website building tool) and he built a strong following through articles written by himself and other card players. That turned into a real business because he created a card game store which did very well. He also put up banner ads on the site and used to make $500 to $1,000 during the best times. The business gave him great experience in basic internet marketing.  Later on, while still in university, he started an essay editing business mainly targeted towards international students with English as a second language. His family would help as editors on the site and later on he hired other editors as contractors.   It was Yaro's first real “laptop lifestyle business” because it enabled him to travel while doing it. It was hands-off for him because he had contract essay editors and all he would need to do is the website marketing through SEO and putting up posters at university campuses. His job was sending emails between customers and the editors, then he would take a 50% profit margin for every job. Eventually when he got enough volume, he hired an administrative assistant to look after the email job. It was a great full-time business and he made enough money, so he didn’t need to get a job after graduating.  After graduating he focused on business and travelling to different global destinations. Eventually he sold the essay editing and card game business because he was no longer passionate about them.   Blogging  In 2004, Yaro learnt about blogging, so he started a blog and writing about business. Consequently, in January 2005, he registered www.entrepreneurs-journey.com purely as a hobby where he wrote 2 to 3 articles a week talking about running his card game and essay editing businesses. In the end, he sold off the card game and essay editing businesses to become a full-time blogger and information marketer.  Period in full time business  Yaro first made a full-time income in 2003 from his online essay editing business and has never looked back since.  Utilizing his business degree  Yaro says that he didn’t use it a lot since he never got formally employed but he says going to study business enabled him to access the internet which developed his interest in online based business.  Core revenue streams 

Phil Ebinar is a video creator, educator and online business creator. He is a best-selling instructor on the online learning platform called Udemy with over 300,000 students in 211 countries. He has over 27,000 reviews and 76+ online courses. His passion is always to inspire and educate others through documentary and educational media. He teaches all kinds of things from video production and photography to design and online marketing. He owns the Video School Online brand through which he teaches people the skills that he has. He also started the Online Course Masters podcast to train people how to teach their own online courses. Phil graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Film and Television Production from Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. Over the past 5 years, he has shot and edited thousands of videos that have played everywhere from the movie screen and television to film festivals and YouTube. ............ Business podcast recommendation for entrepreneurs:  * Listen Money Matters: An uncensored personal finance podcast * The Mad Fientist: Financial independence podcast >>> Legacy: To touch the lives of millions of people all over world by teaching them skills that will be a benefit to them - Phil. >>> Best way to connect: www.philebiner.com - Phil's Business website www.videoschoolonline.com - Phil's Mentorship Program www.onlinecoursemasters.com - Phil’s Podcast For more info including show notes and resources check out www.businessgenerals.com/phile Thanks for tuning in!! -Davis #TheBusinessGeneralsPodcast www.businessgenerals.com   

Levi Newman is a freelance international copywriter on fiverr.com focused on crafting engaging marketing and advertising content. His work has been featured by numerous media outlets including Huffington Post Live, U.S. News and World Report and Social Media Today.   He is passionate about copywriting, online marketing, and client-based relationships. Over the last 10 years, he has constructed an improved relationship between brands, achieved success through strategic and focused consulting, and has been an innovator when it comes to engaging people on multiple social media platforms.  He has helped to develop and execute successful, large-scale social media programs that helped curate a following of more than four million people. He has been responsible for brand building and brand awareness by means of cultivating relationships through marketing, public relations, website/blog content and advertising, and he has done so by creating marketing materials in a variety of mediums (print, web and video)  Switching from Army/Police to becoming a writer  Levi enjoyed writing since he was in high school. He joined the army so he could be able to go to college, left the army at age 28 then attended the University of Missouri where he graduated from at age 32.  Crazy army missions  Levi was among the first soldiers in Afghanistan after 9/11 and the first to take detainees to Guantanamo bay. Being the first soldiers in Afghanistan was very challenging for him and his fellow soldiers.  After the army  Immediately after leaving the army, Levi went straight to university. In his junior year, he got an internship at Veterans United, a fortune 500 real estate company. He used to manage their social media and was very successful at it, he took it from 30,000 likes to 1.4 million likes within a 3 year period. After 6 months working there, one of the writers quit and Levi was offered the job.  Later on he became a director and senior marketing writer for about 3 years during which he won industry awards for his great performance. Eventually he decided to leave the company and apply for a senior marketing/writing position at an international crafts company. He got the job and worked there for about one year before leaving to become a freelancer on Fiverr.  Joining Fiverr  Levi had just returned to Missouri from Utah, where he worked at the crafts company. He decided to do freelancing and looked into a few freelancing platforms including Fiverr. He had tried Upwork but didn’t like the bidding system and on Christmas day that year, he chose to start working on Fiverr.   Initially he didn’t take it very seriously but he got a few orders within 2 days. In the following 3 months, he was doing very well and had made good money. He figured if he could make $100 a day ($3,000) a month, it would be enough to sustain his family and lifestyle. He therefore started aggressively selling his services and after 6 months he decided to raise his prices to earn more as he got more and more work. Levi got so busy on Fiverr that he didn’t need to go into formal employment so he decided to go full-time into it  First gig  Levi’s first gig was offering a service writing 250 words about a person’s business. One of his first big orders was fixing a client’s 25 page business plan for $600. After that big order he decided to niche down and streamline his gigs so he could deliver the best service to his buyers.  Income growth on Fiverr  Levi says there is a big misconception that a person cannot make good money on Fiverr or that they will always be limited to $5 jobs. Some people limit themselves by downplaying their worth through providing their services for very low prices, which Levi says it's a self worth mindset problem.

Michael Jackness is the co-founder of colorit.com, creators of top-quality coloring books for adults. He is also the CEO of terrain.com which focuses on domain investing, ecommerce, SEO, PPC, and affiliate marketing. He is also the co-host of a popular podcast called Ecomcrew Podcast.   Michael has been involved in the online marketing world for over 10 years. Since running one of the largest poker affiliate networks in the world with over 60 employees, he now runs a network of ecommerce websites generating over $7 Million in revenue annually.  Period in full-time business  He started in business for himself when he was 18. He was graduating high school and he didn’t have much to look forward to because he wasn’t going to go to college due to his poor grades and lack of attention in school. So he got a box of business cards and a pager then started computer consulting because he was very good with computers. He would go into people’s homes and help them with their computer needs for $20 an hour. That was back in 1998  Core revenue streams  He says that over the last 4 years, they have been immensely focused on e-commerce. In 2017, their projected revenue is $7 Million and in 2018 he projects $15 Million in revenue. They have been growing at 200% to 300% per year and the only thing that slows their growth is lack of enough cash.  They currently have 4 brands. The first one was www.treadmill.com. He has been investing in domains for a long time and says they are like real estate. He ended up starting an e-commerce business with www.treadmill.com and then sold it at the beginning of 2015 after which he purchased another site called www.icewraps.com which offers hot/cold packs for different parts of the body.   From there, he developed www.colorit.com which offers a brand of colouring books geared towards adults. They also have www.tactical.com which offers information on gear, camping, hiking, hunting, DIY, food, and more. They have a new brand called “Wild Baby” which they recently launched exclusively on Amazon and are currently developing its website.   They also have the Ecom Crew which consists of a blog and podcast about e-commerce. His background before e-commerce was affiliate marketing and from his e-commerce experience he learnt that he would need to talk about e-commerce through developing different valuable content. They have been looking into monetizing the blog and podcast.  Tip: There are a lot of ups and downs in business, everything you start isn’t going to be successful but it’s all about identifying those that can become successful  Domain investing  Michael does speaking engagements on e-commerce and business in general. He says that domain investing comes down to being at the right place, at the right time, and knowing that domain names are illiquid assets and that they cannot be sold on a moment’s notice. He never really chooses to pick a particular domain name because he mostly gets opportunities to buy them from different people. He may sometimes resell the domain names or choose to develop them like he did with www.treadmill.com and www.tactical.com.  Tip: You have to be prepared for the fact there is only a couple of people in the world that can purchase these mid-6-figure or high-5-figure domain names  Affiliate marketing  He got into online poker affiliate marketing in 2004 and that’s where he made a lot of his money.

Kyle Racki is the founder and CEO of Proposify, a software-as-a-service company currently doing seven figures in annual recurring revenue. Proposify allows companies to make better proposals faster to win more business. When Kyle launched Proposify in 2013, he and his co-founders almost gave up in their first year but despite enormous challenges, they now have 2,500 paying customers. He dedicates most of his time to product design, management and customer support, and doing his best to make Proposify all that it can be. He has been an entrepreneur for over 10 years and has lived with hustle, tenacity and resilience. He shares what he has learnt and what he continues to learn every day because he wants to help other entrepreneurs succeed. He does that through his blogs, videos, speaking and his upcoming book on building a SaaS business. Period in full-time business At age 24, he became a freelancer and a while later started a small web design agency with a guy he had met in the agency world. They ran the business for 5 years before starting Proposify which has been in operations for the last 3 years. They sold the agency in 2014 and also raised a seed round of funding for Proposify. The Journey He never thought he would be an entrepreneur and was in fact terrified of it. Core revenue streams Proposify is a software-as-a-service business. People sign up for a free trial of their proposal software and later they can opt for different pricing plans based on how many proposals one writes. Each pricing plan also has a range of features. So far they have 5,000 paid accounts and retention is very good. Starting out in business Kyle says everything he has done so far in business was not planned. He was freelancing in 2008, doing web design and development, but he got lonely and decided to get a business partner. Together they started their agency. Getting the first set of clients for the agency His business partner already had a few clients but they struggled a lot in trying to get clients. They did well in the first year, maintained low overheads and they got several good projects. They also struggled with their growth after the first year because they couldn’t effectively manage the volatility of the business. Core agency products Kyle says that social media and digital marketing were there but very new. They used to do a lot of web design, UX work and online marketing. One of the problems they noted with the agency is that they didn’t have a speciality. They never focused on a niche so they were stuck competing with local companies for smaller contracts. Tip: When starting a service business especially a creative one, you need to specialise in one thing. Starting Proposify When he was employed and freelancing, he used to write proposals and as he was freelancing he came up with the idea for a SaaS product for proposal management. He didn’t have any coding skills but created its wireframe and shelved it for several years. In the process of running their agency, they started getting tired of chasing clients for payments among other issues. They really desired to transition into a SaaS business and tried out different SaaS products which didn’t work. That’s when they started discussing the proposal SaaS idea and they decided to go into it. Developing a SaaS product Kyle was not skilled in building a SaaS product but he knew how to create the interface. As they were developing different SaaS products, they built a team of developers internally. They got a grant to hire a developer who worked on the Proposify idea for one year. The developer is now the CTO. They got the grant from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) after they p...

Adii Pienaar is a serial entrepreneur best known for founding the successful and multi-million dollar company WooThemes in 2008 which he also built from his home country South Africa. Since WooThemes, Adii has started a few new businesses, most recently Conversio (previously Receiptful), a SaaS business for all-in-one ecommerce marketing including features like email receipts, cart abandonment, follow ups, recommendations, product reviews, search, and feedback. Starting out  When Adii started out in business, he just wanted to be an entrepreneur and work for himself. He got into Wordpress out of necessity because he needed money for school. So he started doing some consulting for clients and he got to a point where he was building free Wordpress themes as a way to gain traction and find customers. That’s how he started WooThemes.  That was before the ecosystem around Wordpress products even existed and there were only 2 to 3 other entrepreneurs who were selling premium Wordpress themes. Back then, one could only offer free opensource stuff or consulting services. Today, there is a vibrant community of different kinds of products, services and business models around Wordpress. Adii never thought Wordpress would become so big and that WooThemes would grow sustainably as far as it has.  On 2nd November 2007, he launched the first theme, The Original Premium News Theme, that eventually became WooThemes. The theme sold widely. He had started working on themes a year before that and he used to sell them through his blog.  Themes  Adii says that Wordpress has become a tougher place to build and sustain a business.   Tip: If there is a way to productize and some way extend some kind of service that you are doing, especially cost efficiently, then you will always have a market  Core revenue streams  He says with Conversio, they apply a Saas (Software as a Service) business model. That’s unlike what he did with Woo Commerce/Woo Themes which only offered one-off downloadable content.  Conversio  In 2013, he was hoping to try his hand at building a new business. So, he stepped out of the Woo Themes operations and took a non-executive position. He then started working on a new product, Public Data, which was an online developments and learning community for entrepreneurs. While working on that, he was also negotiating his exit from WooThemes which concluded at the end of 2013.  He eventually shut down Public Data as a product. In early 2014, he came across a blog post about Email Receipts and when he read it, he became very interested in the idea. The first version of the idea before it became Conversio was called Receiptful, and it allowed people to include some form of marketing in their email receipts, this became very successful. From there, they slowly evolved into building complimentary tools including email marketing tools (now includes email newsletters and widgets).  Adii believes that anyone who read the blog post that inspired him could have just as easily started the same business he did. He says that what helped him was the fact that he had more understanding and experience in terms of building solutions specifically for people who were building ecommerce stores.  Building up on the idea  The first thing he did was Google to find out who else was doing something similar. His idea was slightly different from the existing ones. Addi identified Stripe (a payment platform) which was going through a massive growth phase as a potential business partner. People could build apps on top of the Stripe gateway exclusively and get a lot of success.   Adii outsourced the development of Receiptful’s first version which was an app that would work with Stripe.

Michelle Dale is the founder of Virtual Miss Friday, an online business consultancy and academy with built-in virtual assistant services. She is also the creator of Insourcing, a service that helps 6 to 7 figure entrepreneurs to organize, monetize and cultivate their online businesses. Through the academy, she offers a range of training programmes and courses for virtual assistants and digital nomads.   Michelle built her business while travelling through 6 countries and has expanded Virtual Miss Friday into multi-6 figure, multi-VA team supporting a global client base.  Travelling the world  Michelle has been on the road travelling globally since 2005. In 2005, Facebook and social media were not invented and there were very few people offering services online. She left the UK to travel the world and she thought to herself that there must be something she could do online to earn a living in such a way that she could keep travelling. Eventually, she discovered that she could provide VA services online which is what she did.  Current base  She is currently based in Greece, on the island of Crete, where she spends most of her time during the summer months after which she travels in the winter. She goes back to England on Christmas and then takes her kids off so they can travel for a few months after which they return during the summer.  Corporate role  She was in banking for a long time. She left school at 16, so she did any work she could do to make ends meet. At age 17, she landed a job in a bank and by the time she was leaving the UK at age 23, she was working as a para-planner and office manager in a mortgage and financial administration firm.  Core revenue streams  She makes money from services she provides to clients including consulting services, VA services, and online-oriented training courses. She also sells products, training programs and does a lot of coaching. She is currently trying to focus more on her programs and courses. She has a membership site as well, which generates income for her through membership fees. This is her primary income source.  Starting out in business  When she started out, her house in the UK was broken into and the thieves took everything except her passport. Michelle took that as a sign and so she decided to start travelling. She immediately quit her job, sold her house, booked a one way ticket and left.  She then did some research online, came across virtual systems and started the business. She also contacted her friends to get people and resources that would enable her to test the services before she started getting paying clients.  She then started taking paying clients for services like customer support, administrative support, and personal assistance. From there, she later branched out into website design, and when social media was created, she started offering social media marketing. Michelle didn’t have any skills in website design but she self-taught herself  HTML code and Dreamweaver so she could build her own site and it worked out so well that people started asking her to do websites for them.  Identifying what to do  She had a criterion of things that she absolutely had to have fit into her business and one was that it had to be a business she could do on the internet so she could work while travelling. She also wanted a business that wouldn’t require her to commit to specific times. The criteria included many other things which she wanted in a business. She then researched online about working online and she came across many different online businesses including ecommerce. She had tried selling things on eBay but she wanted to use her skills in what she was doing, and enjoy it. That’s how she settled on administrative and customer support,