Laying of Plans

Note: this is a free bonus chapter from my previous best-selling book, “Buy Your Own Island: The Ultimate Guide to Breaking Free and Making Your Dreams Reality” about some simple “rules” to create a business that liberates you, and how to avoid creating a business that ensnares you. After reading this chapter you’ll have an idea about how to go about creating the type of business you’ll want to have in the first place!

Browse the business section of any book store. There is an over-abundance of books out there on business, marketing, leadership, and startups. It’s easy to get lost in them.

When I started my first business I taught myself to speed read, and became a tenacious demon, devouring tomes on business, startups, marketing, sales, and so on. For three years while starting out my first company, a digital advertising firm, I was reading on average 2-3 books a week. I would listen to marketing podcasts while working out.

In addition, I’ve shelled out multiple thousands on online programs and courses to learn business and marketing strategies for the internet age (I don’t care to tell the actual number of dollars I’ve spent). Everything from how to set up an internet business, to e-commerce, to marketing through e-mail and search engine optimization. And everything in between. Of all business activities, about 80% of my time in the early days was spent on learning.

What I found was that a lot of the advice out there - while great - often wasn’t applicable to my situation. For example, Jim Collins has written highly-lauded books such as “Good to Great” which explains how good corporations become great ones. Some concepts, like the “mirror and the window” ethic of great CEOs are nice to know, but very little in the book could be directly applied to my business. I’m just one guy working from home in shorts and vibrams with no employees.

My dad gave me the book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” when I was 18. It was a great read, but at that point in my life, it was just a read. It fired me up, but I wasn’t ready to implement anything from it at that point in my life. Even the example muse businesses provided by the “4 Hour WorkWeek” - such as the French T-Shirt company, provided very little information that I could apply to my own specific muse business.

Why This Book is Different

This section of the book is highly relevant to those who wish to construct a mobile location-independent business or a virtual company that supports their ideal lifestyle. One that provides them both substantial income and freedom. I’ve experimented with a hundred different ways to perform every aspect of business: from sales, to marketing, to managing contractors and clients. When I find something good I implement it, and if it works very well, it’s kept. Anything that doesn’t is discarded. I’m not going to bog you down with a whole bunch of business theories; only things you can take and apply immediately in your own business.

I made the journey from a confused, lost and lonely 23 year-old college graduate to location independent and financially independent boss. My business has given me complete freedom of time and location. I’ve had substantial passive income deposited automatically into my bank account to fund adventures all around the world; where I was or what I was doing was irrelevant. This didn’t happen by accident. It was the location-independent business model I developed that made all of my dreams reality. And I’ve helped several friends start their own successful online and freelance businesses.

Now I want to take you behind the scenes and share with you the blueprint that makes it all possible.

The methods shared here are the product of dozens of interviews I’ve conducted with successful location-independent entrepreneurs. I’ve picked their brains to discover commonalities for success and the best business secrets. I’ve talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs and freelancers to understand what they feel the biggest challenges and opportunities are.

These represent a culmination of the best methods, processes, and strategies for building a economically viable business in today’s digital market that will realistically sustain your ideal lifestyle. Some of these ideas and techniques are actually counterintuitive. You wouldn’t think that they work, but they do. My only criteria is that something is effective. If it works and its useful to help us reach our business and personal goals, then it’s kept. Within all of the haystacks of business advice that one could sort through, I’ve discovered and cherry-picked the best methods.

I know I have to prove myself to you, too.

I’m not the greatest entrepreneur in the world nor am I an academic expert delving deep into the topic of entrepreneurship. I’m not on any Forbes’ list of Most Promising CEOS. I’m living an extraordinary lifestyle, but I’m just an ordinary guy - and that’s the point. These are simple strategies and techniques that work for the average person; all you have to do is apply them. So if you want to learn how to build your dream business and lifestyle, then read on. I’m not going to bog you down with abstract and impractical concepts. In these pages you’ll find nothing but practical and applicable strategies to build a business that allows you live on your own terms.

Choose Your Own Adventure

It is impossible for me to know where you are now, where you want to go, or what your goals are. If you’re reading this, I can assume that you are interested in starting your own business. Perhaps you’re unhappy with your current job and lifestyle and are looking to leave your job and make money doing what you love.

Where do you start?

Your path will be unique to you. My path is just one path, as are those of all the individuals I’ve featured in this book. It’s pointless to compare yourself to others, because everyone takes different paths to success. But you can and should learn from them so as to become the best version of yourself.

Here are several options available to you, each based on paths my friends have taken:

1. Develop a solution to a problem that you yourself experience. My friend Andrew struggled with girls in college. He was fed up with losing girls that he liked and set out to find a solution, taking notes on what worked and what didn’t.

In time, he began to see results. His friends were struggling also and started approaching him for advice. It turns out others who were having similar problems were willing to pay for a solution. He had all the makings of his first e-book, which he dubbed “Men’s Book of Knowledge.” Two years later his podcast “Knowledge for Men” nabbed the #1 spot for New and Noteworthy, receiving 70,000 downloads in its first five weeks.

2. Identify a mission or purpose that you feel strongly about and develop the business around it.

My friend Ryan arrived in NYC with $700 and a plastic bag full of clothes. He took on stunts as a stock broker, then a realtor, but felt his “dharma” was out of alignment. He realized what he really wanted to do was to help make his friends’ dreams come true.

Ryan created “PureHouse” to bring creative individuals together with the vision of using creativity and innovation in the interest of promoting common good. Through housing initiatives, he created his own collaborative incubator. Many people are now using Airbnb to rent out space, but Ryan has differentiated his activities and appeals to a unique niche. He takes his overall mission and purpose and uses it to differentiate his business in a crowded market (housing). As the saying goes: if you stand for something, you’ll never stand alone.

3. Pick a small niche that you can dominate and move product through outbound advertising.

Outbound advertising is “interruption marketing” - commercials, pay-per-click ads, etc. This was the strategy of the french sailor shirt example used by Sherwood in the “4 Hour Workweek.”

My friend Jeff wanted to create a product but didn’t know what. He didn’t want to enter a large niche where the competition could blow him out, but also didn’t want to choose a niche that was so small that he would struggle to scrape by. The answer? Boutique garden gnomes. Silly? Sure. But through the sales of his gnomes he’s built a very comfortable lifestyle for himself, with enough money and time freedom to travel where he likes and do whatever he wants.

4. Pick a large niche, stay lean, build a superior product, and build brand loyalty through inbound marketing. Features of inbound marketing include social media, blogging, and emphasize relationship building, creating engaging content, and building a brand. When the market is huge, and you sell a recurring product, brand loyalty is key.

My friend Lars entered the enormous supplement market and created a superior quality testosterone boosting product. The biggest factor in his product’s success came through free marketing tactics on Facebook. Targeting leaders within the large fitness and nutrition niche, he built personal relationships with other fan page owners, and assembled a huge following of customers in a large niche through social media.

5. Freelance.

Freelancing is not for everyone. You will often not know where the next paycheck is coming from. You’ll wonder how to price your services. You may take on clients and jobs that you don’t like. But freelancing is also one of the best ways to generate “active income” and earn a profit from day one.

You must be a master of building business relationships, and carefully cultivate a personal brand. If you don’t absolutely love to deal with people, then this approach is not for you. But if you’ve got the charisma and the energy to survive as a freelancer then you could do very well.

My friend Tim is the consummate freelance professional. He’s the best I’ve seen at what he does. He’s built a highly lucrative freelance career in a very short time, and lives a lifestyle that turns the rest of us green with envy. He’s also a master at marketing and the art of self-promotion, so I asked him to share his strategies and techniques for this book.

6. Take the “No-Half Measures” approach. For those with a flair for audacity, perhaps spiked with a twinge of insanity. I named this one for my friend Johnny. Coming from a poor single-parent family in Ireland, Johnny wanted to build a better life by any means necessary. After getting a degree in finance, he decided he wanted to take a year off to travel. Raising $3,000 by participating in medical experiments, Johnny bought a one-way ticket to Thailand and decided he wanted to travel forever. He was willing to do whatever it would take to reconcile his twin desires of travel and making money.

It took years, and there were many detours and much trial and error. But his blog changed his life, and Johnny made his dream a reality. He has traveled to over 100 countries by the age of 30 and is earning more money than he knows what to do with. Thanks to his travel blog, he receives free stays in five-star resorts around the world, from the Maldives to Malta. He’s also purchasing his own properties throughout Asia and Europe.

No half-measures. Commit to moving heaven and earth to make it happen, and eventually the world says “Alright, we’ll let you have your way.”

7. Go niche and create high-price information products. The marriage of information products (ebooks, membership training websites, podcasts, etc) and niche targeting is a match made in heaven. At a time when many digital books are selling for 99 cents on Amazon (or given away for free), my friend Steve is selling e-books to a specific niche for $300 per unit. Information products targeted to large corporations with a ticket price of $25,000 are not all that uncommon either. People within specific, well-defined niches are willing to pay high prices for products that will do the best at delivering the result they want.

At the same time, production costs are virtually zero - digitally delivered information products cost nothing to reproduce. There is one caveat - from online keyword research to driving traffic to your website to conversion optimization - your degree of success via this route is directly tied to your marketing savvy.

8. Become a small business consultant. My friend Kevin has taught over 10,000 students how to succeed as a consultant offering marketing services to local businesses. The beauty of his model is that it requires very little capital or know-how to get started. By simply doing a little networking, you can pick up your first clients, collect a paycheck, and outsource most of the work.

I owe Kevin a personal “thanks” for something he taught me three years ago: you only need a handful of clients to earn a full-time income. When I heard this, I stopped wasting time with low value clients and leads, and focused on providing more value to the three or four most profitable ones. I built up these relationships, dramatically cut down my work hours by ending the pursuit of new leads, and booked a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires.

All of these entrepreneurs - and the specific strategies and techniques they use - are covered in greater detail in Part 4 of this book.

These are just a few examples of paths you can take. Most of these entrepreneurs are making revenues of multiple five figures a month, some are making four. All that matters is that each earns enough to enable their ideal lifestyle. They’re all fully-fledged lifestyle designers with the freedom and options to live life on their own terms.

Each of these businesses were bootstrapped (started with the entrepreneur’s own money); some for less than $50. I’m not against borrowing money to fund creation of a product - but strongly feel that first-time entrepreneurs should not borrow, at least until they have some experience with both winning and losing under their belt.

For a “lifestyle business,” it’s important that you don’t borrow money from professional investors dependent on you to turn their investment into 20 times what they gave you. A scenario where you have to take $10,000 that you borrowed and turn it into $200,000 will cripple your efforts at freedom before they begin, and the only potential exit is to sell the company in the distant future.

That’s not the type of business that we’re trying to create. If you need to borrow capital to fund a physical product, or an app, turn first to friends and family. Consider “crowd funding” with a website such as Kickstarter (kickstarter.com), or taking on a well-heeled partner with industry experience who can fund you. You could also license the idea to a large company while you collect paychecks, as outlined in Stephen Key’s book “One Simple Idea.”