TheMikeODonnell

I couldn’t believe how long my post was in December. I’ve never had that much to write about in just a 30 day time span. We’re now in the beginning of February and things are moving so fast that I feel like if I don’t write them down I either forget them or they become irrelevant.

In December I mentioned the beginning of my partnership with Ricky and how we were planning on developing our own course teaching the concepts of how to manufacture and private label brands. I didn’t really know much about Ricky at that time because I had only met him in Lithuania. I could sit here and write all about Ricky and how he owns two Million Plus per year businesses and how we were planning on working together.

I could write about how he completely opened up to me and shared tons of resources. How much confirmation I felt when I looked at his hiring processes and the management systems of his business and I realized I was already building the same systems into my business. When you’re on your own, sometimes you feel like you have these great ideas and you’re doing everything right, but never really get confirmation that what you are doing is the right thing. To look into a young multimillionaire’s business and see the exact same systems and processes is amazing and lets me know how close I really am to blowing my business up beyond my wildest dreams.

But all of that stuff I could have written about is irrelevant now. I’m on my final day of a 7 day Vegas trip that has completely changed my life. Unfortunately tomorrow I have to tell Ricky we aren’t going to be able to move forward working together anymore.

The course we were building would be in direct competition with Amazing Selling Machine. Granted, the ASM guys are so much more advanced and we wouldn’t even make a dent in their business if we did 6 figures with our launch. But the point is, no matter how much money I could make working with Ricky, I don’t want to do anything to get on the bad side of ASM.

Next month, I’m going to Aruba with Matt and Jason (creators of ASM) and about 30 other 7 and 8 figure business owners for an exclusive mastermind. They are literally going to break down my business with me and help me scale it up rapidly. I’ll get to the details of that whole mastermind later in this post, but the point is that I’m leveling up so fast I can’t believe it. It’s hard for me to decompress sometimes because so much is going on in my life. A couple weeks ago, the idea of working with Ricky was the most fantastic opportunity ever and now it feels like a footnote that I can’t even write about because it’s in my past.

Jason Katzenback and Matt Clark

When I came back from Lithuania, I approached my life and my business from a whole different perspective. That whole experience expanded my mind and helped me think bigger. Before this week in Vegas, I had this goal that I was going to do a million dollars in top line revenue in 2015. It felt like a lofty goal, but the more I thought about it and talked to myself in my head, I knew it was possible. Even if I fell short, I knew I was going to get damn close to that million. Now I just feel like I’m going to completely blow through it and do over a million.

After my Christmas stock out, my sales have been shit. I haven’t even checked Amazon in about 2 weeks, but I think I’m doing about 5 thousand a month on Amazon. But I’ve been spending my time working on my systems and building the infrastructure and advertising funnels that are going to take me well over 100 thousand dollars per month consistently as soon as I flip the switch.

All I need right now is access to capital. I have the confirmation and I have the confidence and I have the support structure around me to grow fast without the wheels falling off. I just have a couple more small pieces to fit into puzzle and I’m golden. Most importantly, I know exactly what to do to fit those pieces in.

So that’s the big picture.

Now I’ll try my best to provide a linear recap of this week and how I’ve arrived at that big picture. I’m sitting in an open tent in sunny 70 degree weather in Vegas right now smoking a cigar and writing. Hopefully I get into a flow because I feel like I can just sit and write for 10 hours straight right now.

Decompressing From The Week

I don’t come to conferences for the content anymore. I’ve heard it all before and I have more than enough skills and business acumen to succeed. I come to conferences for the networking and to develop relationships that help me level up.

Because of my network and my relationships, I was able to get into a small mastermind led by Ezra Firestone the day before the ASM event started. Ezra is one of the top ecommerce strategists in the US and probably the world if you get down to it. He owns multiple brands and has consulted for some monster fortune 100 companies on their ecommerce strategies. Facebook actually called him up a few months ago because they were making so much money using Facebook advertising. Facebook literally wanted to know what the hell they were doing to make so much money on their ad platform so they could incorporate his feedback and build a relationship with him and his team.

So the day before the event, I spent 8 hours in a small room with Ezra and about 20 other very high net worth people learning from him. Learning everything he’s doing and how he is designing his funnels. How he scales business process and the services he uses to coordinate everything into a money making machine. I got to ask him questions and get on a first name basis with Ezra and all of these other amazing people that are doing amazing things in life and business. Again, the content was just content. It was good, but what I really got out of it was confirmation again that I AM a fucking rock star and that I am doing everything right. I can’t stress enough how important that is to me.

Ezra Firestone Mastermind

I sat next to Ken (bald guy behind my hat)  for the entire time at the mastermind. Ken owns multiple real estate businesses and is developing some condominiums right now. He also owns a couple supplement brands that he’s in the process of scaling up. Next to Ken was Freddie. Freddie is an older guy that’s been around the Internet Marketing space pretty much since inception. Freddie is partners with Jerry West, who is arguably one of the best SEO guys in the world and the only person I will listen to for SEO advice. I was actually going through one of Jerry’s courses on the plane ride to Vegas.

I also got to meet Alan (far left of picture). Alan is a Scottish guy with a ridiculous accent that I can barely understand half the time. He lives in Panama, has real estate businesses and a brand in the home and garden niche. He’s in the process to scaling up over a million this year as well. He also knows and is involved with Simon Black’s sovereign man confidential. Think I had an in with Alan when I told him I was one of the 50 entrepreneurs from around the world that Simon selected to come out to Lithuania for a week last summer? Alan also knows the owners of Red Frog beach in Panama, which coincidentally is exactly where Justin has his condo in Panama. I’m going to introduce the two of them this week.

I also met Iyathos (half head next to Ken) from Colorado. He’s doing about 250 thousand dollars per month with his physical product brand. Another guy I met in the mastermind was this Indian dude Mikial (next to Alan). He has a speech impediment and as bad as it is to say, I let that influence my perception of him and I didn’t really go out of my way to meet him at first. When I did meet him, I found out that he used to be a trader and was a multi multi millionaire and had Maseratis and houses all over the world. Then he lost it all in 2008. Now hes building up his empire again. Cool and Funny ass dude. We had some really fun times drinking together.

So I met all these people and hung out with them all day. Most of them are doing more than I am right now in business, but guess what. I was able to hang with all of these guys intellectually for the whole weekend and I actually taught them a lot of stuff. They were coming to me with questions and I had all the answers and strategies that they wanted to learn.

Now that I knew all of these guys, I had my own crew to hang out with through the entire event. Remember a few months ago when I promoted the ASM course and did over 130 thousand dollars in sales for ASM? Well, that got me a VIP pass to the live event. VIP means that my badge had a little ribbon on it that signified status. That little white ribbon made everybody treat me differently this whole week. I don’t get caught up in that status bullshit normally, but it is amazing how that changes perceptions.

When you have a conference of about 4,000 people and you are one of the few VIPs, you are a big deal. The only other way to get a VIP pass to the event was to pay an extra $10,000 just so you could hang out with and network with the other VIPs. Just to get good seats, people were showing up and waiting in line at the Venetian at 6:30 in the morning and the doors didn’t open until 8:45. I hung out later at night drinking and partying with all the other VIPs and then would roll out of bed at 8am and walk over to the conference center. 4,000 people had been waiting in line all morning and I just walked right by everyone and took the elevator up to our private VIP room. Sat down, had a banana and a coffee and shot the shit with all of the speakers and other VIPs. Then we’d walk in to the conference and take a seat in the second row from the stage. That’s what I mean when I talk about status and networking and the ability to get on a first name basis with all of these high net worth people. (No, I’m not on a first name basis with Kiyosaki or Branson. Just pictures)

Robert Kiyosaki Sir Richard Branson VIP Badge

One morning I was sitting there having a casual conversation with Robert Kyosaki’s wife. Then I’m sitting there talking with Jason and Matt about the future of their business and getting inside info on what’s going on. I don’t know the exact numbers for their business, but I think they are around the 100 Million dollar mark now after launching ASM 1 about 2 years ago. They just rebranded and purchased the domain amazing.com for $780,000 and their goal is to become the number 1 place where aspiring entrepreneurs go to learn how to build and scale businesses.

Matt’s only 28 years old by the way. When he was 25 (my age) he had built 2 million dollar ecommerce businesses already, but he was in about 180 thousand dollars of debt and had no way of paying it back because his businesses weren’t profitable. Now look at him and what he has helped create in just the last 2 years. Matt is definitely a robot though when it comes to interpersonal communication. I think when you are so business oriented and you have to think and make decisions at such a high level every day, you can become devoid or detached from emotion. I find myself getting that way sometimes when I get super consumed with my business.

Last night was great though because we were all out at the bar and Matt had a few drinks into him. He loosened up and Matt, Alan, and I talked for probably about an hour and a half. It was funny because for the previous couple days Alan kept telling me he heard Matt was part of the brotherhood. By brotherhood, I mean the skull and bones Ivy League school type of thing. The secret society that the movers and shakers of the world are all a part of. Movies and the media have kind of sensationalized the whole skull and bones secret society thing, but it’s real and we talked about it over some beers.

Alan literally just called him out straight up on it. In the middle of our conversation Alan was like, I see you are here with so and so, what’s it like to be a part of the brotherhood? This is top secret kind of stuff and I have no clue how Alan was able to track some of the members down and know who they were. For a second Matt just looked at us with a bit of shock and then just started talking about what it was like to be a member. What he said made a lot of sense.

If you’re a local business owner, there’s a network group for you. Once you get into 6 figures, there’s another networking group you get into to associate with those like minded people at the same level as you. Same thing when you start doing a million a year. As you keep going up though it gets harder and harder to find and associate with the people that are on your same level.  That’s pretty much what it is. It is the premier society of the people that make the world move.

After talking to Matt, Jason comes over with Shane and says hey what’s up Mike how’s it going? I’m literally on a first name basis with these guys. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it on my blog before, but Shane is actually Jason’s brother. I was in a mastermind with Shane for the past year and we did calls every Friday afternoon to share strategies with each other. We also partnered up on the ASM launch so I’m very close with Shane and now I’m connected with Jason. Shane is in a similar level up position right now because Jason brought him into his business and is funding Shane on a bunch of projects. A couple months ago, Shane was doing about 100K per month. Now his goal for this year is to do 1 Million per month by the end of the year. All of the sudden, Shane now has 8 brands in different niches and he’s taking his business international. He just started selling in Europe and he’s working on tapping into India and South America as well. Unfortunately we are not masterminding together anymore because he is in the next level of people now, but I consider him a true friend and he’s someone I can call whenever I want.

At the bar, Mikial also introduced me to the guys from VOX. In the US there are pretty much 5 companies that manufacture every type of supplement and consumable. All of the major brands all come from the same places and they keep all of the formulas secret for everyone. VOX is a very big deal. To put their business into context, earlier last year a ton of people rode the Garcinia Cambogia wave. Overnight, tons of people were doing in some cases 300 grand per day selling just Garcinia. VOX was the first of the supplement manufacturers to develop Garcinia 80% which at the time was the highest level out there of the active ingredient. So when you look at their business, they were selling to all the people that were doing 300K per day. I can’t even imagine how ridiculously wealthy they got feeding the wave.

After hanging with those guys for a little bit, I’m sitting at the bar talking to this guy Gabe who partnered with Anik Singal on the ASM Launch and they took 2^nd place. I don’t know his specific cut of the money, but in total they did about 2 million bucks I think on the launch so he made a nice chunk. We’re sitting there talking and right behind him is Yanik Silver. In terms of movers and shakers in the world, Yanik is on the same level as Matt and Jason, Ryan Deiss, Perry Belcher, and Simon Black. Check out Yanik’s bio, it’s pretty ridiculous http://yaniksilver.com/who-is-this-yanik-silver-guy/

So I go to Gabe, watch this, and I make a joke and made fun of Yanik. I’ve never met him before, but it was a funny ass joke and he came over and we started talking with him. We all did our introductions and when he got to me he mentioned he thought we had already met before. Want to know why he thinks he already met me before?

Yanik runs a group called the Mavericks http://maverick1000.com/#!/ . They only accept a certain number of people in the group and you have to be a millionaire to get in. They coordinate exotic adventures all over the world and all the millionaires just go and do shit like climbing mountains or sky diving and then hang out and network together. It’s a couple grand per month to be a Maverick and it’s simply for the opportunity to do cool shit with other super successful people. Shane is joining the Mavericks now by the way.

Yanik also runs a similar camp to Simon Blacks for young entrepreneurs. I think he calls it MaverickX. I knew this going into our conversation and I also know my friend Jock Purtle that I met in Lithuania also went to the Maverick X camp last year. So I mentioned to Yanik and I asked him if he knew Jock. Of course he did, and then I dropped that yea I know Jock from Lithuania because I went to Simon’s camp.

Yanik and Simon as far as I know are the only 2 people around that do these young super successful entrepreneur camps so I knew they were friends. I’m also pretty sure Simon is a Maverick as well. So anyways, we talked about that stuff for a while and now I’m on Yanik’s radar. The reason I think he thought we already met is because Simon just released his video for this year’s camp in Lithuania. Guess who has a 20 second speaking role on that Video? Yours truly! Yanik had to of watched Simon’s launch video and already saw me before we met at the bar. All of my networks are starting to intersect and IT’S FUCKLING AWESOME!

Side note: How cool is it that I have known Shane and Jarod for the past year strictly through the internet and skype. Never met either of them in person until this week, yet we did the 130K plus launch together and have helped each other grow our businesses exponentially over the past year. I feel like most people couldn’t comprehend having internet relationships like that, but that’s what’s so cool about the technology we have available today. I did the same thing with Justin. Never met him in person until we knew each other and worked together for over a year.

Me – Shane – Jarod

As for Aruba, it cost me 15 grand to go with those guys and mastermind for the 3 days. Before Lithuania if I was faced with that decision I would have said I couldn’t afford it. Guess what? I still can’t afford it, but I did it. I did it because I know the relationships from that trip will sky rocket my business even further than where I am now. I need to come up with another 10 grand by the end of this month so my credit card doesn’t get declined. It’s a scary position to be in and it’s risky, but Fuck It. I’ll come up with the money and I’m willing to go into some debt to get it. If I didn’t have all of the confirmation about what I’m doing in my business, then I would have had to miss out on the opportunity. But I do have that confirmation and I know I’m going to ramp up very very quickly as soon as I flip the switch when I get back.

I’ve built my business to be a multimillion dollar business even though our revenue isn’t there yet. So the way I look at it is that if I truly believe I’m going to do a million this year, then I’ll profit somewhere in the 300K range. That 15K is a drop in the bucket. Again, it’s not about the content, it’s about the relationships. I was very nervous when I committed to Aruba because I could easily put that 15K into inventory and advertising to grow my business. But that would be a short term view on things and that would be chasing money. Instead, I’m investing in my long term because I know it will work out for me.

Over the weekend I did a core values exercise with an executive coach. One of the things I learned about myself when I did my introspection was really my view points on money and risk. I’m where I am at today because I’m not attached to money and I’m willing to take significant calculated risks in order to get high pay offs in the long term. From working with Justin unpaid for a year to learn about entrepreneurship, to walking away from Ben’s equity offer in Canada, I’ve been making decisions not based on money, but based on gaining experience and working on myself and my skill sets.

I haven’t discussed it yet, but I’m going to be doing a TV infomercial for Cave Tools. That’s going to cost me 7 grand minimum and there is a high chance it could flop. If it doesn’t do well in the test market, then I essential paid 7 grand for a sales video. If it does well in the test market, then I crush my million dollar goal because I have the funnels already built to capitalize on the halo affect of that campaign. I’ll say it again, I don’t have the money in pocket right now for this stuff. But I’m thinking bigger and I’m putting myself in situations where I can make it work. I’ll get the money for it and I’ll turn it into a profit.

If the infomercial is a flop, then I got experience in that market and dealing with tv producers, etc. That’s worth it to me. To go to my original point, I’m not afraid to lose money and I’m willing to put myself out there and I think that’s really one of my core values that I want to stay true to.

With Shane out of the picture, Jarod and I have decided to continue moving forward with ASM Elite. ASM 5 is launching in April, so we are planning on doing another very large launch and this time splitting it 2 ways instead of 3.

I’m just thinking of it now, but we definitely need to have the conversation regarding ownership and funding of software tool development. That whole thing fell through with the 3 of us, but I think Jarod and I might pick that back up where we left off.

The first night of the event we hosted a dinner party for our members in ASM Elite. We went to a really nice Italian restaurant called Buddy Vs. Shane was there the night before and spent $900 just on himself between drinks and food. We weren’t planning on picking up the tab, but everyone kind of expected it so we decided to just split it 3 ways for a party of about 20 of us. The damage wasn’t as bad as I expected, but we figured if we could get at least 1 new signup in April out of it then it pays for itself.

Dinner was great because we got to meet all of the people under us. We are all pretty much their mentors now and they come to Jarod and myself with business questions all of the time. Some of these people are way more wealthy and experienced than I am in business, but I’m in the position of mentor because I know ecommerce inside and out now.

We actually have about 10 people from this weekend that bought the ASM course for $3,500 but didn’t come in under a group like ours. Just to have the ability to get mentored by Jarod and I, they are willing to pay us $1,500 a pop to join our group and have access to us. All of our members also have friends and family that they want to be able to join and get in when ASM 5 launches in April.

For each new signup, Jarod and I get to split a $1,500 commission. As soon as we get back, we are having our developer build in a sub affiliate link software to our membership site. So now we can make all 40 of our current members sub affiliates for us. That means when they promote our group to their friends and family, they will get a couple hundred dollar kick back.

It sounds like an MLM type of thing, which I would never ever do, but the reason it works is because we are actually and truly making our members rich as hell. These guys are going from regular jobs to making 10-20k per month in a few months based on the education provided in ASM and the mentorship we provide. They want to tell everyone they know about the course because it truly is life changing for them and we are in the perfect position to capitalize on the opportunity and make everyone else rich in the process. It’s awesome.

A couple of our members actually approached us this weekend and said they feel bad because they are taking up our time with questions and they want to pay us for our time. So now Jarod and I are going to roll out a monthly consulting retainer to our group so they can get a certain amount of access to us per month. It will probably be about $50 a month or something depending on how we structure it, but when you get 40+ people paying you that kind of money it becomes some serious passive income. Income we can use to develop more software and to build our own businesses.

We all met in a bad ass suite in the Venetian last night for beers and we were very open with them about it. It didn’t feel like we were selling to them at all because it’s what they want. We’re going to release a survey to the whole group so they can be brutally honest about what we’ve done right and what we’ve done wrong so far. That way we can continue to develop our membership and release information and software that they need to succeed.

We’re also looking forward because ASM 5 is the last time they will release the course in the US. After that they are going to be releasing a course on how to break into Europe. Jarod and I need to now set up business entities and get our businesses up and running internationally so when the time comes for the next launch we are still ahead of the game and can provide the value they need. I can barely keep up on inventory now in the US, but that just means I need to get more capital and use it to fund inventory for an international subsidiary.

Cave Tools in my opinion doesn’t even lend itself to a European market because bbq is such an American dominated lifestyle. In Europe they live in cities or in rural areas. They drink beer in the pubs versus Americans that have yards and like to drink beers outside and grill. If I’m going to do this successfully, I’m probably going to have to start a new brand all together and start researching and getting into the minds of my European customers.

All of this sounds great on paper, but the problem outside of capital is really bandwidth. I don’t have the time to do all of this stuff. That was one of the big questions I spoke to Ezra a lot about. All he does in his business is create ideas and then he has smart team members that do all of the work. I need to become that visionary in my company instead of the operations guy.

One of his biggest pieces of advice was about hiring smart help before you have the work for them because it forces you to utilize their help to the maximum so you get your money worth. I’m going through this with Dorothy now. She’s may be working 30 ish hours per week right now, and that is forcing me to delegate more and more work to her so I can get the value from her time.

Filipinos are great, but at the end of the day they are task based. I need a “Mind” to work with me on my team. Someone I can say hey we’re doing this project, now get it done. I know I’m not going to get the value out of this person and I may go red for the first couple months, but that is going to force me to delegate more and after the first couple months the business will be doing way better because I’m not stuck in the weeds anymore.

I was thinking about all of this before I came to Vegas and I’ve already got my first real hire figured out. Remember my unpaid internships at Penn State? The type of person that is willing to do an unpaid internship is exactly who I need. I don’t need a technical person, I need someone who is hungry like I was when I worked for Justin. Somebody that understands the tradeoff of building experience and deferring money in the beginning so you can focus on building your skills and experience. That person is Ryan and I’ve already talked to him regarding a possible job. I was on the fence about it before this week, but now I know I need to hire him no matter what.

The good thing about Ryan too is that he’s just coming out of college in May. I can hire him for cheap, somewhere in the 25-30K range per year and I will completely change his path in life. By living at home and working for me for a year, he will learn more about business than he ever imagined. The best part is that he knows it and he shares those values.

Can I afford him right now? No. But I can’t let that influence my decision. I need to think like a multi million dollar company and I need to act like one because it’s coming. If I can plug him in as a manager so Dorothy and Caecilia can report to him then I am golden because that frees me up to work on business growth for the majority of my time. If I can train him to make operating procedures on his own and teach him how to work with VAs then my business grows exponentially. I don’t give a shit about hard skills. I care about mindset and he has it and that’s why he’s going to succeed in my company.

This is going to be the most wild ride of my life. I have the entire map and the entire vision and the skills to make all of this work.

It’s getting late and I’ve been at this for quite a few hours writing. The last little story I’ll include on this post is pretty interesting.

Matt and Jason ran an Aruba mastermind back in October. I went out to the bar with a bunch of the people that went to it so I could pick their brains. I had talked to most of them with the exception of this one guy John. He had been kind of eyeing me up and giving me looks all night. He finally comes over and starts asking me about my business and we’re talking for a while. It’s mostly me sharing about myself so when I turn the conversation around to start to get to know him a little better, I ask his name.

He tells me his name is John and I introduce myself as Mike and he says yea I know. I actually know everything about you and your business already. I’m the owner of Grill Beast and we are direct competitors.

Now I’m like shit, I just told this guy so much stuff. But it turned out to be awesome. He had been trying to figure out how to approach me the whole time because in this situation most people would probably be very stand off ish because of the competition. But we were both cool with it and he told me how much he loved my brand and that they spoke about my company a lot in Aruba and he was kind of using me as a model. This guy came out of nowhere and started crushing me on my thermometer listing. I told him how I saw him fly up and it forced me to raise my game to compete with him.

We started then talking about our suppliers and cost of goods sold and all sorts of stuff. At the end of the day I don’t care if he knows about me and he doesn’t care if I know about him because processes are what drive business. We’re both not trying to dick each other over and the healthy competition forces us to raise our game.

It was really cool to actually get insight into his business. Especially after he literally knew everything about me and had been trying to reverse engineer all my shit for the past couple months haha

Over the past 3 years, I’ve gone to quite a few seminars and marketing conferences. I always learn a lot of new techniques, pick up 1 or 2 new key relationships, and come home energized and ready to grow my business. However, this increased drive and energy typically fades after a couple weeks and I return to my “normal” working habits. Granted, my new normal is at a higher level than it was before, but the energy boost and increased drive is what fades away.

This time around was different. I didn’t come away from the Blacksmith camp with a checklist of marketing techniques I wanted to implement. Instead, I came away with some major mindset changes that have allowed me to get out of my own way and really take my business and life to the next level.  I also came away with about 40 new key relationships and a firm support group of other entrepreneurs my age all striving to better their lives on a daily basis. I can’t hold myself accountable to my friends at home. They are in a totally different place in life and have completely different goals than I do.

With the Blacksmith Alumni facebook group, I now have a group of people that I can hold myself accountable to that will help me raise the bar for success and keep my focus on the things that are important in my life. I really want to go back to Lithuania next year. For that to happen, I need to take action and prove to you that I’m worth your investment. I’ve been incredibly busy since returning home and wanted to take this opportunity to share with you everything I have been working on.

Lifestyle Changes and Liberty

One of the first lifestyle changes I made was to commit to reading a minimum of 10 pages per day before I sit down at my computer and start working. I downloaded an app called Habits and placed it on the home screen of my phone so I can see and track my commitments every day. Some of my other habits include working out every morning, getting out of bed by 6am at the latest, and doing daily meditation. The app is great because I see a big red circle on my phone every time I don’t complete a habit I committed to. As J Massey would say, If I want to be a person of integrity, then that starts with living up to my own expectations. If I say I’m going to do something, then I’m going to do it.

When I compared myself to the other Blacksmith members, I would say I was above average in entrepreneurial education, but I had a lot to learn on the liberty side of things. Before the camp, I really didn’t know much about Simon or have a firm understanding of the current international economic situation in the world. When I returned home, I immediately became a member of sovereign man confidential and I started reading The Creature from Jekyll island.

I literally read through all 600+ pages of Jekyll Island in under 2 weeks. I couldn’t put the book down. It completely opened my eyes to everything going on in the United States and the federal reserve and changed my outlook on the world. Between reading Jekyll Island and SMC, I’m continuing to read and expand my knowledge about what’s going on in the world.

Out of all of the mentors, I connected the most with J Massey and became very interested in Real Estate. I read Cash Flow Diaries and subscribed to his podcasts so I could learn more about real estate and make use of my time while driving in the car. I also took a real estate investor I know out to lunch to pick his brain about getting into wholesaling. Then I joined a bunch of local Cashflow 101 meetups and started attending local real estate events so I could build my network and learn from more people.

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs About Money

For me, playing Cashflow with J helped me overcome some self limiting beliefs I held about money. Before the camp, I had been growing my physical products business solely on profits. Whenever anyone asked, I was proud that I never took any investment to grow my business. After hanging out with J, I learned that that was the complete wrong way to look at things and that if I had my systems in place that I should be accepting to money so I could accelerate my growth.

I started sitting down for meetings with my local banks to see what type of financing they could provide for me. I also sat down with my friend Alan who is a mortgage broker. He has connections to tons of investors, so we started working on deals to see how much money I could raise. Just sitting down to have these conversations with everyone was incredibly enlightening for me and I learned a ton.

I found out that the banks wouldn’t give me a business line of credit until I could show a tax return with a minimum of 150K in revenue. My business was on pace to do over 150K in revenue this year already, but last year I only did around 60K so I would have to wait until my tax returns in January if I wanted to go that route.

The investors that Alan introduced me to all wanted equity in my company. For the amount of money I needed, I wasn’t comfortable giving away equity and the interest rates they wanted to charge on short term loans were through the roof. I considered all of my options and ended up taking a loan for $15,000 from my dad. I already owed him about $5,000 so I figured I would put the money into inventory and hopefully be able to pay him back after the holiday season. Once January came along, I could get up to a 150K line of credit from my bank and use it to pay off my debt to my dad. That way I would be solely responsible for all of the money owed.

I used the money from my dad to fund inventory purchases for my current products and also planned to launch a new product before Christmas. With my levels of sales, I should have had enough money set aside for inventory, but I mismanaged my cash on hand. I was tracking everything up to this point on excel spreadsheets and never had a true financial picture of where my company was at any given point.

Mismanaging my cash flow was a big mistake that I couldn’t let happen again. So I met with my accountant and over the next couple weeks I went through the painful process of importing 1,000s of transactions into quickbooks online. Now I have a clear financial picture of what’s going on in my business and can run financial statements and appropriately reserve money for future expenses.

After funding inventory, I wanted to use my excess cash to develop new products that I could launch before the holidays. Timing was tight because it typically takes about 70 days from the start of manufacturing for me to get my products in the warehouses and ready for sale. I ran into a bunch of snags with manufacturers and ended up abandoning the idea of having new products by the holiday season. Having new products would have generated more money, but I didn’t want to rush things and launch a product that didn’t meet my quality standards. Instead, I devoted my efforts towards something I hoped would make me even more money in the short term.

Amazing Selling Machine Launch

In October, the Amazing Selling Machine course reopened for sale to the public. This was the course I went through that helped me learn how to source and manufacture products. I partnered up with Shane and Jarod from my Amazon mastermind group to sell the course as affiliates. I’ve been around the internet marketing industry for years, but affiliate marketing was new to me so I was excited to see what we could do.

The course cost about $3,500 so with each sale we would get a $1,750 commission and split it 3 ways after expenses. None of us had an email list to market to, so we decided that we needed to create an awesome bonus package if we were going to get people to sign up under our group. We started out by researching the bonus packages of all of the top affiliates from last year’s launch and we did our best to match or provide a better bonus where we could.

We tried everything when it came to driving traffic for people to buy the course through our link. We each placed about $1,000 into an account and then used it to pay for facebook ads, twitter ads, craigslist postings throughout the country, a news paper classified ad, and even some plenty of fish (dating website) ads targeted at entrepreneurial type of people. Nothing was working and we were spending a lot of money and time to make this work. By the 2^nd video of the launch, it looked like we were only going to make a few sales and barely make our money back. Let alone still having to provide all of the bonuses we offered.

Then, one night as I was working it came to me. Why were we spending so much money trying to drive cold traffic when the other bigger affiliates were just going to poach our sales anyways? What if we flipped everything upside down and only focused our advertising on people that we knew were already interested in the course. Under each sales video in the launch there was a facebook comments feed. Each video literally had 1,000s of comments from people who had watch the videos and engaged with them.

I called a meeting with Shane and Jarod and told them we needed to stop all of our advertising immediately and only focus on the people who engaged via the fb comments. I did a little bit of research and about 5 hours of work later I built a scraper that dropped the profile urls of every commenter into a spreadsheet. We now had a list of about 2,000 unique people we could market to.

If you send a private message to someone on facebook you aren’t friends with, it goes to their “other inbox” and they never see it. However, if you pay about $1, facebook will drop the message in their regular inbox and they are pretty much guaranteed to see it. We now had a $1 cost per acquisition for targeted traffic.

Jarod had a background in creating bots with a software program called uBot. The next day, he created a program that automated the entire process of private messaging everyone on our list and accepting the $1 charge. We split the list into 3 and we each ran the program on the background of our computers and messaged every single person. This automation program saved us probably about 20+ hours of work!

Instead of telling them to go to our website and “check out our bonuses” we decided to send them a message telling them we created a skype channel where they could ask us questions about the course that weren’t answered in the videos. Everyone had questions and our message wasn’t trying to sell them, so we had excellent response rates. Now once we had them on skype we would friend request them and engage in conversations. On the final days before the cart closed, we were able to follow up with phone calls to every non buyer and convert them over to our group.

We went from a potential total failure to ranking #14 on the top affiliates board and selling over $125,000 worth of the course in 7 days! After expenses, we all cleared about $20,000 in profit and will be paid after the 30 day refund period expires at the end of November.

For me, this is a completely life changing amount of money. I’m 25 and still living at home, so all I wanted to do with the money was just pay myself and finally move out again. But that would literally be the worst way to spend the money. Not only would the government take a huge portion in taxes, but I would be ruining my opportunity to put that money towards other cash producing assets such as new inventory and new products.

New Business Opportunities

I’ve discussed it with my dad and when I get paid, I am going to pay myself about $3,000 to keep myself going and make a payment of approx $5,000 towards my loan from him. The rest of the money will be spent towards new products (possibly launching a new brand) and towards a new business I am forming with Shane and Jarod.

There are approximately 5,000 students who are in or have gone through the Amazing Selling Machine course. All of these people and other Amazon sellers need marketing tools to help them promote their products. Our goal is to reverse engineer all of the software out there and start making our own versions and selling monthly memberships to people. We each left money in the shared account and already have a full time programmer working on our new software suite.

Once it is finished we will be giving all of our members who joined under our affiliate group lifetime access. We will then use their word of mouth and also tap into the ASM facebook group and other Amazon groups to get an initial base of users. We will not only be making money off of our new software suite, but we will also build a giant list that we can market to for the next ASM launch!

Becoming an Amazon Coach

Right around the time we were wrapping up the affiliate launch, my mentor Justin Lee gave me a call. I worked for Justin as an unpaid intern for a full year while in college so I could get firsthand experience from an entrepreneur. Justin has played a major role in my success and helping me become the entrepreneur that I am today. After spending some time catching up, Justin told me that he ran into an old real estate buddy who started an Amazon wholesaling business about 5 years ago. They were growing faster than they could keep up with and were looking for some coaches to help them out with their growing student base and he wanted to know if I was interested.

I spoke with his friend Chris Bowser and he ended up flying me up to Boston last week to meet his team. Chris essentially owns 3 businesses in one. They run facebook and radio advertisements in cities throughout North America and drive people to free events where they learn about wholesaling on Amazon. From the events, they sell people on a coaching program and 3 day boot camp to get them up and running. Once the people are trained, they can purchase products directly from Chris’s wholesaling business which uses bulk buying to pass deals on to their students. It’s a very cool business model and I’m excited to learn the wholesaling side after being on the private label side of selling for the past year and a half.

Starting this week, I’m taking on 5 new coaching students and I’m expected to increase that number over the next couple months. They are also going to be flying me out to some of their events. With everything I have going on right now, it’s probably not worth my time to be doing the coaching for the amount of money they are paying me, but I’m very interested to learn this new business model and I think the relationships I build with Chris and his team will be very beneficial for me in the future.

Marketing and Outsourcing

At the same time as all of this is going on, I still have my Marketing agency providing SEO, PPC, and reputation management services. I decided that I would just keep my current clients and stopping trying to get new ones because I would rather focus my time on all of these other amazing opportunities. However, I keep getting phone calls and new referrals coming in from all over the place. This past week I on-boarded 2 new clients and have 1 more on the way. It’s funny how you can go through droughts in business and then all of the sudden everything tends to hit all at once.

Right now I’m working 7 days a week just trying to stay on top of everything, but I’m absolutely loving it. I’m learning a ton and I’m challenging myself every day to work smarter and more efficiently. I’m also building a bigger and better team around myself to handle all of this new business.

Starting Monday morning, my first full time outsourcer will be coming on board. In the past I’ve always done hourly or fixed projects with my outsourcers. Now I’m at the point though where I have the cash flow and work to support someone full time. I’ve created a full online training resource center for Karen with written and video instructions for everything she is going to be doing. In the beginning, I will have her doing blogging, video marketing, press releases, and social media management for Cave Tools. Once she gets comfortable with that, I will start training her on how to take over some client work for my marketing company.

Last Thursday I held my first training webinar for the Blacksmith alumni and went into detail about my entire outsourcing system and management practices. It felt awesome to be able to give back to the group and share my knowledge with them.

Fool me once…shame on you. Fool me twice…shame on me.

A couple weeks ago I got a call from Wayne. With the exception of a few random conversations, we really hadn’t spoken a ton since we stopped working together.

The fact that he made me chase him around for over a month and kept dodging/avoiding paying me were definitely contributing factors. It’s not like he was paying me a salary or anything either, these were expenses I paid for on my credit card that he said he would reimburse me for. I knew at the time he was in a tough position from a cashflow standpoint, so I figured his actions were a product of circumstance, not personality.

We talked for about 15-20 minutes just catching up on the phone and he seemed like he was back on his feet again. His education company had picked up and he had just returned from Seattle locking down a new school contract. The reason he was calling me was because he was working on putting together a parenting workbook for inner city families in L.A.

Apparently, schools in Los Angelos are required by law to spend 5% of their discretionary budget on parents every year. They normally spend this money on parent teacher nights and food, but 5% usually comes out to about $50,000 per year! Through his conversations with various principles from those schools, they told him that they literally struggle to spend that money every year. If he could come up with a decent parenting workbook, they would give him the contract.

So Wayne went around and pitched a bunch of principles on his parenting workbook idea and in his words, sold the thing before he even made it. He lead his pitch with his absolute best activity for parents and children, tied it in to a personal story, and sold them on the entire workbook based on what would become just 1 page of the entire thing. He’s a hell of a salesman, I’ll give him that.

His pitch/story had to do with a quick activity that helped parents learn a ton about their child. First, you ask the kid to write their name in the middle of a piece of paper. Then, they need to place the names of their friends around their name. The closer the friends name is to their name, the better friends they are. Farther away means they aren’t as close friends. They also have to group friends in clusters based on who they hang out with.

Right away, the parent can get an idea of who the major influencers are on their child and who hangs out with whom. After this is complete, the child has to write 2 things next to each persons name about why they like that person and 1 thing about what they don’t necessarily like about the person. Now, the parent gets to see what their kids are attracted to and what turns them off. This is very powerful information that most parents never know and it only takes about 5-10 minutes to complete.

So Wayne has all these contracts waiting on him now to produce a workbook with about 60 pages worth of these types of activities. The reason he was contacting me was “Because he needed someone he could trust to do a full day of white boarding with him.”  In reality he only had about 10 of these activities pre thought out and he needed me to help him build the rest and take notes as we brainstormed. He offered to pay me $25 bucks an hour if I would help him out.

I had a ton of stuff on my plate with Cave Tools and Hyacinth Marketing and also had 3 interns coming on board within the week that I needed to prepare for. I figured that this would be a good way to rekindle a relationship with an old business partner and also get my creative juices flowing. He seemed to be back on his feet, so I ignored the thought of him screwing around with me like last time.

I assumed that helping him out as a friend meant that this was a personal job, not a business job. Like when you help a friend move out of their apartment and they hand you 40 bucks at the end as a thank you. In retrospect, I definitely should have discussed payment terms with Wayne first, especially knowing the type of person he was.

Wayne’s neighbor had free office space for us to use in New Hope, so we took over for the full day (9 hours). I have to say, outlining and creating a book was a pretty cool experience. We discussed layout, organization, illustrations, and reverse engineered a bunch of competitor books.

We decided to break the book up into the cover, credits and copyright page, introduction page, parent child contract, and then 4 activities per section (Self Awareness, Family, Friends, Education, Health, Money). The back had a corresponding student section for activities that both the parent and child would do and then compare answers.

All of the competitor books pretty much covered these areas, but they just had words on paper. There was very little interaction and the messages were very direct. The goal for this book would be to have less words and more activities. As the parents and children completed the activities, the answers/message would come through indirectly and would be learned because they actually engaged with the book instead of skimmed through it.

It was a good concept, but to be honest I would never do any of the things we put into the book. I mean these were some pretty basic parenting skills that I guess as a white boy from the suburbs I just take for granted that everyone already knows and understands. However, our target audience comes from a completely different background and household. We approached the book with the mindset that if someone did the entire book, as long as they came out with just one good insight, it would be a success. With that perspective in mind, the creative flow of ideas came much easier.

We worked on the book all day with a short lunch break in between. Over lunch, Wayne started talking as usual. Telling me about how he got a 10K commission for introducing his friend to the owner of the restaurant across the street because his friend bought it. Then he starts going on about how his wife has a new job and that he’s also been selling coffee on the side to distributors for extra cash. Now that he was a big coffee connoisseur he had all of these grand plans for launching his own private label coffee brand. He was going to sponsor farmers in South America and had a brilliant plan to use kids to sell the coffee in train stations. Typical Wayne…talk all day about the grand vision and then never take a single ounce of action.

In the afternoon we go back to work and the productivity seriously drops. Wayne is on the phone with his wife texting and he didn’t prepare with ideas for some of the later activities in the book. We were coming up with activities on the fly and wasting tons of time thinking of unique questions to ask. We ended up powering through and finishing up as much as we could before he needed to leave to go coach his daughters softball team at 6:30.

As we’re packing up to leave, he hands me one of the workbooks and tells me to take it home with me to keep working. Of course, I hadn’t agreed to continue working from home. I had a very busy schedule and told him that I could only fit in the 9 hours we did today because I had other responsibilities.

We walk out the door and Wayne starts to get in his car to leave without paying me. I make a comment asking to get paid and he tells me he’ll send me a check in the mail in a few weeks. I’ve already been through this once before with him so I tell him I was expecting to get paid today. His response is that he doesn’t have enough money to pay me. At this point, I’m fuming. He runs his mouth all day about all this money he’s making with schools and coffee and now he can’t afford $225. Bull shit! At this point, I say no I want to be paid in cash. I’m not dealing with him giving me a check and then the check bouncing and me having to chase after him again. I also said I was expecting to get paid personally, not as a business consulting fee. For $25 bucks an hour, there was no way I was paying taxes on top of that. All of our work together is on my computer, so I have all of the leverage.

He’s in a hurry on his way to his daughter’s practice, so he tells me he’ll think of something. He realizes that I have the leverage, so he gives me a call later that night telling me he’ll meet me tomorrow and give me a check. About a half hour before our meeting, he calls me saying he needs me to bring an invoice and a printed copy of the work with me. Now that he’s broken the trust, there’s no way I’m handing over my leverage until I get paid and the check clears.

When we meet, he’s really pissed off that I don’t have the hard copies with me. We get into a small argument and I flat out tell him that I can’t trust him and that I don’t like the way he does business. If you truly can’t afford to pay someone, then you don’t leave that information until the end after they put an entire days worth of work aside for you. He assures me that the check won’t bounce and then I leave to go to another meeting. I then get a whole bunch of texts about how if I have a problem cashing the check to give him a call. This of course further reaffirms that I thought he was going to try and screw me again.

I deposited the check in my citizens bank account instead of finding a bank of America to cash it on the spot. In hindsight, that would have been the smart thing to do, but the thought didn’t even cross my mind. Wayne of course was pissed that I was now making him wait a full day until the check cleared and he went into a total breakdown.

I received about 15 texts from him that night freaking out. He was calling me a liar and doing all sorts of character assassinations. He was even completely making things up as if he was trying to rewrite history through text messages in case this came into a court battle or something. At one point he even threatened to show up at my house because I was depriving him of supporting his family. I only responded a few times to these outrageous allegations, but basically I said I will send it to you once I get paid. The number of texts and phone calls I got form him were absolutely ridiculous.

I sent him everything that Saturday when the check cleared and I haven’t heard from him since. Looking back on this experience, I definitely should have been very clear about how I expected to be paid before we started working together. This way he couldn’t have tried to pull his shit at the last second. I also should have just used my brain and really considered if it was worth it to work with him again. I knew the type of person he was and should have expected something like this to happen. He definitely hasn’t changed. Ironic that the only 2 people to ever fuck me over in business are Wayne and Matt Zinman. Very similar personalities and I met Matt through Wayne. To this day, Matt still hasn’t paid me the $1,500 he owes me and I’ve found out that he has scammed a bunch of other people as well. That’s another story for another day though.

Looking at the bright side, I’m happy that I did work with Wayne because it was a creative new experience and I did learn a lot throughout the day. We got a lot of really good work done together. I’m also happy that I understood the situation enough to not give up my leverage until everything was square between us.

Back in October, someone posted this article on Facebook http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626104579121813075903866 and a bunch of us got into a very deep discussion about it. The article was written by the creator of the cartoon Dilbert and discusses how the Secret of Success is Failure.

The controversial part of the article and the reason it generated so much buzz is because Scott Adams says that goals are for losers! If you read the article it will make much more sense, but the point he is getting at is that there is always a feeling of emptiness when you achieve your goals. You have that slight high and then you are faced with the question “Now What?” I achieved my goal, I should be happy because this is everything I have been working for for so long. Often times people get depressed or lose their focus because they don’t have a proper road map for after that goal. Scott says you should be focusing on systems instead of goals. When you have a system in place, failure is just an obstacle on your way to success. Achieving goals are just milestones on your journey. I completely agree with everything he says in the article. In my opinion, the set “Short, Medium, and Long Term” goals mantra that you always here is bull shit. It doesn’t work and it sets you up for failure.

Today, I watched a 1 hour presentation by Todd Herman (Google him, he’s a fucking beast) in which he explained a framework for managing your goals. This framework was like the Scott Adams article on steroids and has inspired me so much that I stopped everything I was doing to do my own self evaluation based on his framework.

If anybody is reading this blog post, I recommend you open this diagram in another window so you can follow along as I build my goal setting framework. I have no doubt that once you understand this framework that you too will want to reflect on your own life as I am doing now.

The top of the pyramid is “The Outcome” or what I ultimately want to do with my life. Ever since I read The 4 Hour Work Week, my outcome was to live that cush lifestyle and become a tycoon of business without having to work long hard hours.

As a full time entrepreneur for over 2 years now, I have gone through more bumps in the road than I care to recall. I’ve done the standard goal setting approach and have subsequently gone into mini depressions. I’ve lost my course more than a few times and at this point last year I was even calling it quits and looking for a “job” on career builder like a little bitch.

In Todd’s presentation, he talks about how “You set goals to feel alive. You’re searching for meaningful experiences of connecting a feeling to yourself deeply. “ But to bring things full circle you need to go Through your outcome.

The brain interprets things very literally. If your goal was to make it to the NBA, but you got a career ending injury 2 weeks after signing to a team, what kind of fulfillment is that? Yea you achieved your goal, but now what?

When Todd works with professional athletes, he gets them to tell him their outcome and then he repetitively drills them with the question Why? Why is that your outcome? It normally takes about 17-23 times of answering the Why to get a substantial answer from the person and to get them to see Through their goals.

If you asked me a few years ago what my outcome was, I would have said to live the 4 hour work week lifestyle. Some of my other answers would have been to make money, to have freedom, to achieve lifestyle design, to be able to move out and support myself on my own as a business owner.

The final “outcome” I just listed has been my biggest goal over the past year. I’m living at home right now and it sucks. I’m missing out on lots of things that I will never get back in my early 20s. Yea, I go out all of the time and do fun stuff with my friends, but I don’t have the autonomy I had when I lived on my own in Montreal. I can’t just bring a random girl home from the bar. It’s difficult to get into a relationship with a girl when everyone I meet lives 45 minutes away and I would basically just have to crash at their apt every weekend like a leech. These may seem like superficial kinds of desires, but they’re true and they are a major part of your early 20s. So that has been my outcome since I moved home from Montreal. Living on my own and supporting myself with my business has been the epitome of my “Success.” If I could just achieve that outcome.

The truth of the matter is that everything I just listed above is just a goal that if I achieved, I would feel empty inside and maybe go through a little depression because of the “Now What?”

Todd says that to get Through your goals, you need to add the words “so that.” The So That helps you build “Your Story” around your outcome goals. I want to move out of the house so that I can regain my autonomy. But there is so much more to that once you start asking Why?

I want to achieve these things so I can give back what? So I can do what? Why am I breaking my ass trying to build 2 companies at the same time and taking on ridiculous amounts of work? Is it to make a million dollars so I can be a young playboy and bang super models? Yea, that would be great for a while, but are money and lifestyle my true end goal or outcome? Or is there a different outcome that I want to achieve. Something that will give me a fulfilled life and make me feel happy.

Taking on my first intern has been an amazing experience for me. I have the opportunity to mold a young budding entrepreneur and pass on all of the skills and knowledge I’ve acquired over the years. Teaching my intern gives me an amazing sense of fulfillment and when I listen to myself giving him advice it puts everything into perspective on how far I have really come. Being a mentor and the person he looks up to for guidance and advice makes me feel truly happy. It’s like I’m experiencing what it’s like to be a father for the first time. Teaching your children the right mindset and giving them advice so you can watch them grow up and succeed in life in whatever they do because you helped them build a solid foundation.

Public speaking has also been a passion of mine for about 2 years now. I love the rush I get when speaking from stage and have often envisioned myself giving seminars to 1000s of people from stage and teaching them. That’s always been a goal of mine. The underlying motivation here really comes back to teaching and giving back.

I’ve always had a very capitalistic mindset. The idea of volunteering and giving back has never been something I could truly relate to. One day when I have tons of money I’ll give back, but until then I just need to focus on making tons of money. I remember when I was working with Wayne and he asked me why I was trying to launch the National Alliance for Student Debt Awareness with him? My response was that I wanted to make money and that I wanted to expose myself to him so I could learn from somebody that had much more experience than I did. I never really gave a shit about “The Cause” like Wayne did. My motivations were selfish (in a good way) and I was very clear about that.

Now that I’m reflecting and going through this exercise of using the goal setting framework, I see that I CAN give back and I CAN make lots of money and achieve all of those other goals at the same time.

So what is my Through Outcome that I’m busting my ass to achieve?

I want to build Hyacinth Marketing and Cave Tools into power brands and I want to build them in a highly scalable way that allows me to achieve lifestyle design. There’s no doubt about that. But I want to do these things SO THAT I can pass my knowledge on to my interns, students, family, and friends. So that I can speak from stage and help change people’s lives. So that I can do my Couch Surfing Across America trip. So that I can travel the world and have incredible life experiences. So that I can meet new people and share stories with them. So that I can be the exception and show other young people that if they really want something that they can achieve it. So that I can choose something new to learn each year such as learning a new language or becoming a true competition BBQ Pitmaster AND have the time to devote to these things. So that I can acquire all of the knowledge and skills and experiences that many people could only dream of.

That is my true Through Outcome when I look at my life as a full circle. Not just some empty goals that I want to achieve. I set out to start my own marketing agency, now what? I set out to build a physical products business, now what? Just like the NBA player I achieved those goals, but there has to be more. This is my more and this is my destiny in life.

The mid level of the pyramid is your performance goals. These are the goals you need to achieve to reach your desired outcome. Typically, for 1 outcome goal you will have multiple performance goals that you need to achieve to get there.

Here are some of my current performance goals:

1. I will develop the processes for a call center so I can expand the website development portion of Hyacinth Marketing by 1 week from today.
2. I will implement my project management software marketing strategy to build copious amounts of back links and increase my exposure and referrals for Hyacinth Marketing by 1 week from today
3. I will start developing my 4^th Cave Tools product line and launch by the end of May
4. I will start to penetrate the Competition BBQ community and leverage my exposure to grow Cave Tools by 1 month from today

Before moving on to the final stage in the pyramid, we need to discuss the difference between Ow! Brainers and WOW! Brainers. Performance goals are great, but the difference between achieving your through outcome and failing lies in the way you have trained your brain.

Both Ow! Brainers and Wow! Brainers follow the same path in life. You have your starting point, your goals, and your Ideal Outcome.

People that are Ow! Brainers are stuck because they are constantly trying to go from Goal to Outcome. Wow! Brainers on the other hand, focus on getting from their starting point to their goals.

Ow! Brainers are fantastic at saying I started here and I’ve done all of this work and I still haven’t achieved my desired outcome. They quickly come up with all sorts of excuses as to why “This isn’t for me” or why it will never work out. They jump around from opportunity to opportunity and they eventually quit because they never get to achieve the desired outcome. They look at the top of the pyramid and say holy shit that’s a far ways away. They build their internal story around this mindset and then they quit. I’ve been on the Ow! Brainer side of things plenty of times so far in my life and I can completely relate to this mindset. I’ve accomplished a shit ton of things in my short career, but I still haven’t reached the financial success I have always been striving for.

Wow! Brainers are different. They go from the starting point to their goals and then they look back and say holy shit, look at everything I have just accomplished. If I keep making progress every day and knocking off my performance goals, I’ll eventually achieve my desired outcome.

Yea, I’ve achieved a shit ton of things in my short career and the monetary gain hasn’t been there yet. But the Wow! Brainer side of me says look at all of the knowledge and skills and experiences I have acquired. If I keep at it, I will achieve my Through Outcome because I’m building a foundation that can never be taken away from me.

This brings us to the bottom level of the pyramid which is your Process. Your Processes answer the questions of What, How, and When. The beauty of this stage is that YOU are 100% in complete control over your processes and how you spend your time. Performance goals are only about 90% in your control and there are other factors that affect whether you hit your performance goals or not. Processes are 100% on you. You need to take Personal Responsibility if you want to start hitting your performance goals.

A Process Goal for me would be that every day I am going to spend 10 minutes researching online and reaching out to BBQ teams and Pitmasters to give them free products or ask to be a sponsor. The great thing about the Process stage is the old 1% theory. If you work to get better at something by just 1% every day, then it will take only 70 days until you have doubled your effectiveness in that area. If you follow the 1% rule for multiple areas of your life every day, it will have a geometric compounding effect.

The Process stage sums up the entire framework with the word “INEVITABLE” By building and following your Processes, you make it INEVITABLE that you will knock off your Performance goals and reach your desired outcome.

It doesn’t matter that I haven’t been a huge financial success yet because I have a framework or system in place that I follow every day. It may take me a few more months or a few more years before I will be able to start living my Through Outcome the way I envision it. The point is that it truly is INEVITABLE that I will make it there.

As long as I am making progress each day, I will hit the bend in the exponential curve and everything will fall into place.

IT IS INEVITABLE

To put this post into perspective, last night I went out into Philly for a $28 open bar from 9-12pm. I got 3 times my money’s worth of the open bar and I loaded up with 4 more mixed drinks before 12 to keep me going the rest of the night. We didn’t get back to my friends place until around 2:30AM.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am busy as all hell with different projects that I am working on and at times I have been feeling completely overwhelmed. Luckily for me, I built an in house project management system last week and have been offloading everything in my mind into it because I literally haven’t been able to sleep for weeks because my mind is racing. I’ll make another post soon on the Project management system because I have a ridiculous marketing strategy behind it that will help grow Hyacinth Marketing exponentially over the next 6 months.

With that said, I am no stranger to work hard play hard. I got my ass up and made my way to Starbucks by 11:30 this morning and have been working ever since. Normally I just go right into things and get lost in my work until around 7pm at night (sometimes forgetting to eat because I am so immersed). At that point I go back over to a friend’s apartment and get blasted and go out.

Today is different. I closed all of my email down and decided I was not going to work at all today. I was going to spend my entire day working on myself and knocking off self education goals that I have been sidelining.

I just finished watching a presentation that has been on my list for about 2 months that I’ve been putting off. This presentation moved me so much and really struck home, so I decided to place all of my notes and pictures below.

In another post, I will be working through my own thought processes and building out my own framework. I’m also planning to reenact this exact presentation on video myself because for me it was that incredibly powerful and the notes don’t do it justice.

Your Potential – Todd Herman:

Frameworks for unleashing your potential:

For athletes that have been very successful, they hate when people say they have a lot of talent. The reason is because talent refers to genetics and basically says you did nothing to get where you are, you were born with it. Code is your genetics, the stuff you were born with

Competence is the collection of skills you have built over time and knowledge you have acquired. Everyone has the capacity to get more of competency.

The Catalyst is the motivating force or the drive that you have within you.

Kids are a great model to look at. They have what’s called intrinsic motivation. They have a desire to learn to grow and to explore the world around them.

When Competence and Catalyst match up you get motivation.

When Competence and Code match up, you get “A Calling” something you were drawn to do.

When Code and Catalyst come together you get Confidence.

This model is called the performance protocol. When all 3 are working together, your performance matches your potential. At that point, Code pretty much gets taken out of the equation

Goal Setting Framework:

Heider Simmel Study: We as human beings despite whatever information is in front of us, we attach a story to everything.

Most people goal set to a destination. Once you get there you feel kind of empty. That’s because you went to it, but you didn’t think through the goal. You need to go through that goal and tell the story of that goal.

You set goals to feel alive. You’re searching for meaningful experiences of connecting a feeling to yourself deeply.

Most athletes and type A individuals are really really good at the “Outcome”. What is it you’re shooting for. If you are not getting the satisfaction when you achieve your goals then you are focusing on the Outcome too much. You need to go Through your outcome.

Examples of outcome goals: Winning the race, getting a medal/trophy, making X amount of money per year.

How to goal set through the outcome. If your outcome goal is to retire, you goal set through that by saying so you can travel, so you can be your own boss, it’s the why behind it. Think about what you are giving or what it will do for me to achieve that outcome goal.

When you keep repetitively asking someone why they want to do this? The surface answer is rarely something that really evokes a lot of emotion and motivation. Keep asking someone Why and then typically by answer 17 or 23 you will uncover the real Through Goal.

Outcome goals are great, but you need to develop that story around it. The middle level is performance. Performance goals sound like this:

I will improve the number of vendors I reach out to in China from X to X+5 by Date

I will improve the number of sales I get from 10 per day to 20 per day by 1 month from now.

This model works for anything you are trying to achieve. The key words are “So That” I will shoot for this outcome goal so that I can give this back or so that I will be able to do these other things.

I will improve my pushups from 10 per day to 100 per day within 1 month from now so I can get ripped and live a healthy life style so that I can play with my kids and not get tired out from being a fat ass.

How is not important in this stage. If you have 1 outcome goal, you will typically have 3,5,10 + performance goals so you can hit that mark!

Performance goals are very important because there are 2 types of people. Ow brainers and Wow brainers. The word success is a crap word. Value is a better word.

Einstein had a great quote: He said don’t become a seeker of success, become a person of value. None fears value. People have a fear of success but nobody fears value.

You have your starting out point and then you have the where do you want to get to. What’s the ideal. Both Ow! Brainers and WOW! Brainers have the same path.

Now you establish your goal in the middle. If you are caught in the OW brain side you are stuck trying to go from goal to outcome. Versus people on the WOW side who focus on getting from the Start Point to the Goal. You need to work your way out of the OW brain side. Most people are not wired to be on the WOW side.

Ow brainers are fantastic at saying I started here and I’ve moved forward and done all of this work…but I’m still not at my ideal. This isn’t for me, I’m not going to do this.

Wow brainers are not the same as everyone else. You start at your start point and now you’re here (wherever that is) and here is what you do differently if you’re a Wow brainer. You say look at everything I’ve just accomplished.

Ow Brainers look at the top and they say wow that’s a bitch to get to the top, it’s never going to happen. You start telling yourself some bullshit story about how you’re never going to get there and why it will never work. How you’ve quit a million times before

Wow brainers are looking up from the bottom at the next stage and saying look at all I have accomplished. Let’s keep going because I’m making progress towards the top and I’ll eventually reach my outcome goal.

If you implement this model in your life it gives you a framework to run your days and achievements through and catch yourself. If you’re stuck on the Ow side and you just do this over time, you rewire your brain. You’re not stuck where you are, you can change yourself.

If you’re an OW brainer don’t write down what you want to do today, write down what you don’t want to do each day and start tracking that shit.

Everybody always keeps some type of log book about everything they are planning to accomplish each day. At the bottom of each day, put a little number from 1-10. Over time you will start to see patterns on what your “8” days look like versus what your “2” days look like.

Your next questions are What, How, When? At the bottom of the triangle is your Process that you will do to achieve your performance goals.

Every day I will wake up and do 4 sets of pushups until failure. Today I might only be able to do 40 pushups. Tomorrow I can do 42. A week from now I can do 60, and so on.

You have control over Process Goals 100%. You are responsible. Performance goals, you have control maybe 90%, Process is all you 100%.

If you are an athlete you are constantly bombarded with did you win the game? If you are a parent and you weren’t at the game, the worst thing you can do is ask them did they win the game? Children internalize that as if I win because mom and dad get excited about it, that means that they love me. Sports are about developing, learning, growing, gaining skills. Not about winning. You’re not toughening up your kids, you’re teaching them what not to be.

Process goals are all about the What the How the When and how to schedule that into your calendar. Follow this framework and you build a real support system to achieve your performance goals.

The word that sums this entire framework up is “Inevitable” How can I make it inevitable that I can retire by the age of X so that I can give the lessons that I’ve learned to my family or friends, help them to achieve some of the things that they want to go after, and do more of the things that I really want to do such as travel, experience new things, meet new people, tell people about my journey.

You make it INEVITABLE by doing the PROCESS goals and reaching PERFORMANCE goals. The lessons that you learn along the way are the things that are so incredibly valuable to you and everyone else around you.

The great thing about the PROCESS area is the 1% factor. If you improve yourself by just 1% each day, how many days does it take for you to double your effectiveness in that area? Just 70 days…

If you do this in multiple areas of your life, the improvement is geometric and has a compounding effect. Instead of asking yourself how can I be incredibly successful? Ask yourself how can I be Average today? Take the pressure off of yourself. Schedule in 2 days of the week where you are just going to be Average. It’s amazing when you release a whole bunch of that pressure and those average days becoming amazing and great days.

3 Things to take action on right now.

1.)    Know your outcome and wrap your story around it. How can you go through that outcome?

2.)    Measure your performance. Simple numbers, I will improve X to X+ by deadline.

3.)    Build the process. Give it some legs underneath it and energize it with action stuff.

The brain has an amazing way of seeing to the horizon line 3 months out. 1 year goals are hard for the brain because it is a little bit too foggy to see that far out. Do 3 month focused sprints.

Is my 3 month goal going to be mastering the mechanics of getting stuff into Amazon? Build the process and performance metrics around it. Give yourself the deadline a sprint to it. Chase it!

I have been horrible at writing lately, so I figured I would at least give a status update on what has been going on in my business life. I would love to write about each of these things in more detail, but I just don’t have the time. Or maybe I am just not prioritizing this blog enough, but it is what it is right now.

What’s Going On:

• I have my first SEO intern working for me doing about 10-15 hours of work per week. I built a 12 week course on my own platform which will allow me to scale with multiple interns. Course is set up as Major project week 1, redo project week 2 with some tweaks. After every 2 weeks the intern must write reflection post on our interns blog to help solidify their learning. Week 3 starts a new major project and everything builds on itself as they go through the 12 week course. Students get College credit for completing the internship
• About a month ago, I built my own software (I coded it myself:) which allows me to scrape the business owner name and contact information for companies in pretty much any area that don’t have a website yet. Today I am hiring a data entry person for dirt cheap to run the software all day and upload leads into a CRM system. I also started the process for hiring my first cold caller/ telemarketing employees. They will call all day to sell websites using my script. Anybody that bites will be set up with a phone meeting with me where I will close them. My website developer will take on all new projects and follow my detailed instructions for exactly how we are building every website. Basically I’m productising small business websites and scaling. Once the process is smooth we should be able to increase lead generation at the top of the funnel and increase throughput
• I have a phone meeting later today with a Famous TV personality in the weight loss niche. She is a B-list celebrity, which for my purposes is perfect. We’ll be discussing building an apparel ecommerce website for her. She has already mentioned promoting Hyacinth Marketing and Cave Tools to her following. I plan to close the deal and over deliver the shit out of her. Then I’ll open the conversation for not just promoting Cave Tools, but becoming the face and celebrity endorsement for the company
• My 3rd product line, digital cooking thermometers are finishing being manufactured this week and will be thrown on a boat so we can get them live selling. I also have samples on their way for a 4th product line which also sells more year round. Really working hard on leveling out the business to avoid the seasonality trap I got stuck in this winter
• This week I will be receiving my sample for our first full size Cave Tools grill. It is a combination charcoal grill and vertical rotisserie. Absolutely bad ass and super high quality craftsmenship. Still working on finalizing the details of our agreement, but it will be a private label dropship deal with a welding company in NY to create the grills. The design itself is an award winning design, but they are welders not marketers. Best part is I never have to stock inventory or risk capital to get going. Once orders come in I parse them through and the grill is manufactured for the customer and sent directly to them. I’ll finally have some high ticket items to legitimatize the brand.

• I’m sending sample products out today to Restaurant Depot, which is like the Sams Club for all restaurant owners. Also working on getting samples out to MrBarBQ as they are very similar to Restaurant Depot, but primarily focus on BBQ niche
• I did a 1 yr national advertising deal with the National Barbecue Association back in November. I spoke to my rep this past week and they said I am outperforming the industry average by over 200% and I’m getting tons of brand engagement and follow up searches. They were trying to sell me on an even larger advertising package, which sounded pretty fantastic from a value standpoint. However, I declined because I need to expand our product lines more first so once we do kick the advertising into high gear I can have better conversions through cross sales, upsells, etc.
• I got invited to a major auction in Las Vegas in May that draws over 20,000 retailers and distributors. I’m not personally attending, but I will have trained sales reps selling my products to the attendees. They take a 20% commission, so I don’t intend to make money here. I intend to break even and get as much brand exposure and engagement as possible. I also get a full data list on everyone that showed interest in our products so I can remarket to them afterwards. The list itself is priceless
• I took a different angle with FB. Instead of working on the Cave Tools brand page, I set up a general interest group called I Love Barbecue. The reason being that people are less likely to like a brand page because they feel the company is making money on them. With a general interest group it is very open and people easily like the page. I am currently getting likes for less than $.05 a piece. We are well over 1,000 likes and the page is getting all sorts of engagement from Barbecue Associations and Enthusiasts posting pictures. When the Thermometers are ready, I will have a huge and captive audience to run a deep discount deal to. The deal will be giving away 50 free products, but it will be viral in the sense that in order to qualify they need to share the deal on facebook to their friends. The additional exposure will be huge. I  know other people who have done this with amazing results.
• Today I built out a full advertising campaign for a real estate investor. I am getting much much better at media buying and conversions. This REI is part of a group of close to 100 other REIs and he has been talking about me a lot. Best part is that his original campaign was worse than horrible so without even trying I will look like a genius. I also built this guys website and he has already passed on a solid lead for another person that wants something similar.
• We’re almost finished the completion of the Penn State specific classified ads website. This is a cool project that is basically creating a CraigsList clone but only making it university specific by email address for posters. Once they build a following at PSU they will approach other universities and I’ll be the web dev for each new site.
• Just finished a website for an author and will be helping him with his book launch when they are done being printed. Interesting book that targets Atheists market and was rejected by over 100 traditional publishers because it was too controversial.
• Planning a full rebuild of Hyacinth Marketing website to showcase client success stories and focus on Web Dev, Media Buying, High Level Consulting, and SEO only.
• Planning to migrate Cave Tools over to a more robust ecommerce platform so we can really build out the sales funnel and increase conversions on the site. I’ll write a recap post of the website as it is now before I get rid of it. I learned so much through the development of the current website that I never knew before and I have tons of cool shit going on on the website!

There is probably more stuff going on right now I can’t think about. My mind has been racing lately and it’s very difficult to keep on top of everything. I’m really working on getting out of the employee mindset and focusing more on C-level and scaling processes. Lots of stuff coming together and I can’t wait for the summer when Cave Tools picks up again and I start having more cash flow to play with.

Cheers,

Michael “Medium Rare” O’Donnell

This is one of those reflection posts that is long overdue. The fact that I haven’t done a complete reflection yet makes me sense that this will be a painful read when I’m finished because the answers to many months of struggling will be so clear. This post will recap the Unlimit3d project from the beginning to where we are today…still in Milestone 1.

I first started devoting time towards the unlimit3d project back in April 2013. I was coming off an intellectually stimulating, yet financially fruitless partnership with Wayne Marquez and was in the beginning planning stages for Cave Tools. The Unlimit3d website represented a significant revenue opportunity and a chance to bring large scale recognition to Hyacinth Marketing.

I remember spending many nights on Google hangouts with the Unlimit3d team helping them build out the scope of work for the website and outline all of their ideas on paper. Throughout these meetings I would offer consulting advice for their business model and share insights about how I have built and scaled my business.  Through these meetings with the Unlimit3d team it became very apparent that Mark was the type of person that focuses on minute details and has a hard time seeing the big picture. After what I went through with Wayne, I knew this was the worst type of person to work with as they crush momentum at every stage of the game. However, I decided I could put up with it because of the potential income opportunity. All of these meetings were done free of charge so I could position myself to win the bid for the website. This essentially amounted to about 3 months worth of free consulting before we finally signed the contract and began work on July 15. Furthermore, I allowed the possibility of them going with another company to make me under price the website to ensure I won it.

What I would do differently now: I allowed the dollar value of the website to cloud my judgement. I knew the difficulties of working with Mark’s personality type and I put up with it for 3 months for free in the “Hopes” of winning the bid. Could you imagine how pissed off I would have been if I didn’t win the bid? If I am to devote this much time to hand holding and building an SOW again, then I need to charge an hourly rate for this service and all of the consulting advice I was giving. I also consciously knew that I was going to be putting up with a ton of frustration working with Mark because of his personality type, yet I still cut my margins in order to win the bid. Cutting margins in favor of “just working a little harder” is a losing mentality that will eat you and your business alive.

A much more subtle lesson learned during this reflection is to watch how much I talk about my business and the strategies I use to run it. Throughout our meetings before and during this project, I have discussed in great detail how I have built my business, hired foreign workers, and created systems and operating procedures to scale. Over the past few years I have been involved in so many different entrepreneurial ventures and aspect of business that my peers can only dream of doing. When asked targeted questions, my narcissistic side takes over and I tend to flex my big dick by telling all of my strategies. While reading the 48 Immutable Laws of Power by Robert Greene, I realized that there is a certain benefit to leaving some questions unanswered. Having a certain level of mysteriousness to your accomplishments can actually be of great benefit. Not that Unlimit3d would have the ability to “steal” and implement all of my ideas/strategies, but when explained in detail, they lose the wow factor. A great example would be how I coordinate all of my shipping and fulfillment for Cave Tools products across the country. When explained in detail it all seems very logical and realistic, but if all you knew was that I’m a 24 year old guy that manages national distribution of his products in his free time, well…you get the point.

We started working on Milestone 1 on 7/15/13 with an expected completion date of 8/23/13. Today is 11/05/13 and we are still working on Milestone 1. So what happened?  How could things have gone so wrong? While I am about to discuss quite a few flaws and problems that have occurred, I need to take responsibility for everything myself. Over the past 4 months I have blamed all of my frustrations on my client and have allowed them to put me through a living hell. However, my role in this process is supposed to be the project manager. It doesn’t matter what the client does, it is the project manager’s responsibility to keep everything on track and to enforce deadlines. If I was managing myself, I would have fired myself 30 times over by now. When I look at the root cause for all of my actions and allowing things to get this way, it all comes down to me chasing the money and chasing the recognition.

I prepared for the start of this project by customizing a project management platform that would facilitate perfect communication between my team in India and Unlimit3d. I allowed my project manager in India to handle the majority of communication with Unlimit3d and I spent my time tending to other clients and building Cave Tools. I put blind faith in the fact that my project manager could handle a personality type like Mark’s and keep things moving with me checking in occasionally. Regardless of the fact that I can barely handle working with his personality type, I ignored the fact that Indians are notorious for not speaking up when there are problems. Everything is always “ok” until you specifically confront them. Three weeks into the design phase we still had very little progress and that’s when the problem was truly addressed, not in weeks 1 and 2 when it was obvious that we were not on track.

In order to remedy the situation, I had to step into a much more operational role in dealing with the client. This was not scoped for and has required more hours of my time than I ever could have imagined. Upon taking over control, I quickly realized a few major problems. The first was that there was no clear leadership role on Unlimit3d’s side. They were a team of 5-6 people all trying to exert their wills. This caused very slow decision making on their end and it also resulted in us doing tons of rework by modifying designs every way imaginable. I finally forced unlimit3d to funnel all decision making through 1 person and to ensure quick turnaround times so we could catch up to schedule. The person they chose was Mark. Mark has an amazing ability for giving ambiguous requests and having a short memory when those requests are implemented.

The overall look and feel for the website was quickly taken out of our hands and everything had to be done exactly to the Unlimit3d specifications. As a designer it is important to be able to add your own creativity into the design. Unlimit3d was constantly asking our opinions on every single tiny detail of the website design and then after we spent time crafting our expert opinions, they would ignore it and go with what they wanted. While this sounds fine, it put us into a reactionary mode instead of a proactive mode. We became robots and did exactly what Unlimit3d asked because the design was no longer our creation. This caused major problems down the line because Unlimit3d did not foresee issues with color schemes clashing and how different layout styles would not work well together. These are all things we would have been able to foresee if the design was even somewhat related to our idea, but Unlimit3d was calling all of the shots. Before we knew it, they were having us generate 8-10 design versions of every page and spending tons of time redoing different designs.

After 2 months of work, Unlimi3d approached us and wanted to completely redo the design. I allowed this to be charged as a change order like we put in the contract, but in reality, I should have confronted the situation then. My team in India charged me 50% more than our original change order rate because they were frustrated and this was a much larger job than just a change order. I took the hit to my margins without passing a 50% increase on to Unlimit3d because I didn’t want to disturb the waters. Once again I was making concessions and chasing the future potential of the deal.

After the change order was complete, I placed greater pressure on them to be more specific and detailed in their feedback so we could wrap up the design phase. Mark responded by asking for weekly face to face meetings on Mondays. This seemed like a good solution because it would help move things along quicker. The reality of these meetings turned out to have no impact at all on feedback and design turnaround times. They ate up at minimum another hour of my time each week and in many cases prolonged feedback times because Mark would wait until after meeting with me to give feedback. In addition to reviewing his feedback, we would also spend time on general conversation and of course Mark asking about how my business was going. I would respond by flexing my big dick about all the cool things I was doing as mentioned above and before you knew it the meeting was 2 hours long and accomplished nothing. If anything, these meetings were me coaching Mark on how to run/build a business and how to be decisive and provide clear feedback.

Our meetings never resulted in actual feedback because Mark would then need to go home and discuss with Azeem. The deal was that he would send me the final feedback before 9pm at night so I could get it over to India and they could work while we slept. Not only did they rarely make the 9pm deadline, but the quality of feedback was often so poor that I would still need to go over everything and rewrite it in a way that my designers could understand what they wanted. This resulted in me working full days managing both Hyacinth Marketing and Cave Tools and then coming home for a few hours break and then working late hours so I could filter feedback and send to India. Working an outrageous schedule like this quickly wears you down.

I can’t imagine how much money I have lost because I have allowed the Ulimit3d contract to consume me. In essence, they got 3 months of free planning work out of me and they paid for 30 days of work for milestone 1 and have now gotten 4 months of work out of that payment. I can’t even begin to put a dollar amount to the 6 months of free work they have gotten from me, the impact of lost sales opportunities I haven’t been able to pursue, the drop in performance for my current clients, the lack of time to focus on promotional activities or Cave Tools, and the inability to work on forward thinking projects to take my company to the next level and generate more income. It’s truly disturbing when I think about everything I have put into this project and how little I have received in return. Chasing the money and recognition is the underlying factor that has been clouding my judgement.

After living through all of this and reading everything I have just written, I just can’t believe I allowed things to get so far out of control on my watch and my wallet. I think it has been a combination of a sense of duty because we signed a contract, and the fact that I had a personal relationship with Mark before entering into our business relationship. I have never been one to back down or to give up on something and dropping this project would have been accepting defeat. My personal friendship with Mark has also caused me to give him so many concessions and non charges even when they were clearly justifiable based on the terms of our contract. On the other hand he has clearly exploited our friendship and has used it to take advantage of me. Parts of me wish he hasn’t realized what he is doing, but he has slipped a few times in conversation recently which suggests otherwise. He is fully aware that he is taking advantage of me and knows that I have been bound by a contract and handcuffed by the potential social fallout if things do not end smoothly between us.

This brings me to the current situation today. Since Unlimit3d insisted on taking the lead for all of the designs, the project has gone vastly out of scope. They have cherry picked ideas and features from all of the major websites on the internet and thrown them into the website. Every time they have added a new feature, I have been put in the bad guy situation where I need to advise them that this is something that we never planned for and is out of scope. Things like adding in Google + Circles for social interactions, advanced preloading scripts, various algorithms from sites like Imgur. From their perspective everything on the web today is drag and drop, so they think it should be as easy as copy and paste. In reality, there are hundreds of hours of programming that go into creating these things. They expect a 5 hour change order, but when I tell them it would most  likely be another 30-40 hours they argue and complain as if I am taking advantage of them. Every time something comes up the persist and make us spend hours working on the design of the new feature, even though they will most likely want to cut the feature out when they see the bill. More work completed on our dime that will result in nothing tangible. Based on the 3 months of working together to build the scope, we outlined a very nice feature rich website for them. Now when I try to explain what they are doing, it’s almost like we scoped out a Corolla and they want a full featured Mercedes…for the same price. It’s classic bait and switch, but I’ve allowed it to go on without taking a firm stance.

We scoped out Milestone 1 to include the graphic design of the main pages and some preliminary coding to get the website up and functioning. Unlimit3d has taught me to never mix design and coding together in the same milestone. After 4 months of work on this milestone, there is no money left for the coding portion. Since the coding portion of this milestone has changed so much by going outside of scope, I have discussed with Unlimit3d that we need to re scope and re propose the website.

Right now we are trying to finish up the final designs for the website so we can get to the point where we can re propose. The problem however is that my team is so frustrated and so sick of working for basically free that their work output is dwindling. It’s like pulling teeth trying to get the modifications done correctly so we can finalize designs. This is causing me to spend even more hours operationally to make sure we get the designs right.

Our plan for when we re propose is to make sure we can make up some lost money in the later phases of the website. As I see it now, even without me jacking up prices to try and make anything back, the price is going to be so astronomical that they will either cancel the deal or try to go a la carte and pull features out of the website until they get the price down to something reasonable. Either way, I am screwed. If they go somewhere else, I need to accept a major loss on the books and 7 months worth of work down the drain. I also feel the social ramifications of explaining to mutual friends my side of the story versus his. If they go a la carte, then the 100s of hours we put in to designing these features are all for not. Do I now charge them to remove these from the designs? If It is as simple as deleting a layer from a design file, do the 1 hour change order really do justice to the work we put in to that? Do I then pull a number out of my ass and say to remove anything it will cost you X amount because of the time we spent on it? All signs point to this ending badly in some way or another.

Up until a few weeks ago losing this website would have represented a major failure for me and would be the last thing I wanted to happen. Now, I feel just like my designers and programmers feel. I just want to get rid of these guys once and for all and never have to deal with them again. Even if my new proposal is accepted and results in me being heavily compensated, is it worth it to go through 7 more months of this? They are a poison I have allowed them to be a poison to my business, my bank account, and my mental and physical health. In this situation, I feel as though the only way to stop the poison is to cut the limb off.

If I ever find myself in a situation like this again, there are probably 100 things that I would do differently. For starters, I would definitely separate graphic design and coding. I would also hire an American designer and charge them out at an hourly rate. That way they could work in real time with the client and get everything done according to specifications. I would structure the contract to be heavily in my favor as the company. When we built the contract with Unlimit3d, it was very Democratic and I made a bunch of concessions (which came back to butt fuck me) in order to get the deal through. I would obviously price the website accordingly and make the change order rate very painful so it could serve as a stronger deterrent. I would also set up the milestones to be much shorter in length. That way we could never get to far off track and we could always keep cash flow coming in. I would also manage the project with a much firmer hand to ensure things didn’t get out of control. When you have the mentality of chasing the big win, you tend to make poor judgements. When you have the mentality of this is the way our company does things, you make much more objective decisions.

The key to success lies in your failures, not your successes. In the grand scheme of things, this will probably be a small failure for me. However, in my world as it is today, I have just failed on a large scale. This reflection post has helped me to finally come to terms with this failure and accept whatever consequences arise over the next few weeks. I know I’ve learned more from this project than I even realize right now and I’m actually glad that I had the opportunity to weather this storm. Learning from your mistakes is the essence of entrepreneurship and builds the foundation for your future success.

This is more of a general update kind of post where I want to touch on a bunch of different things that are going on and also take a snapshot of what I’m thinking right now and planning for in the coming months.

Hyacinth Marketing

First things first, we have Hyacinth Marketing. The company is doing pretty well right now and I have been using almost all of the profits to support the growth of Cave Tools. If I didn’t have my clients at Hyacinth, I wouldn’t have nearly enough capital to be as aggressive as I am with Cave Tools. Right now the only sales I’m doing for the company is attending my breakfast meetings with the Million Dollar Marketing (MDM) group. In the past 2 months I’ve given 3 prepared speeches to this group of Doylestown business owners and these guys literally think I’m the smartest marketing person they’ve ever met. I share a ton of strategies and advice with them and they have been referring a good amount of clients over to me. It’s literally like having my own sales team working for me. They actually invited me to a golf outing next Friday with a ton of business owners in the area, so I’m really excited about that. Apparently the keg is tapped 2 hours prior to tee off so it should be a fun day.

Unlimit3d

The Unlimit3d project also started almost a month ago. I built a project management platform for this entire project and between my team and theirs, we have about 9 people communicating and sharing files every day. However, even with the ease of collaboration we are already falling behind schedule. As far as my estimates go now, I think we are between 10-20 working days behind where we need to be to keep pace. The problem is that we are still stuck in the graphic design phase and because Unlimit3d has so many people involved on their end, nobody is taking the lead on feedback because they are afraid everyone wont agree. This is causing us to have feedback response times of close to 48 hours sometimes and it is really slowing things down. I’ve had a bunch of talks with Unlimit3d and my development team on ways to improve efficiency with the feedback process. They’re getting better, but at this point we are already behind and there’s not much we can do about it because we don’t want to start coding and then have to do a ton of rework. The entire website is broken into 6 milestones, so the longer milestone 1 takes, the longer I need to wait for my milestone 2 payment and the less aggressive I can be with using that money on Cave Tools.

Cave Tools

Speaking of Cave Tools, we’ve gone profitable! Well…only for a short period of time. I described Cave Tools to my friend the other day like this, “I started out by digging a 2 inch deep whole with my initial investment. As soon as I filled it up to the surface, I decided to dig a 4 inch hole in the same spot. I’ve filled that up a couple inches so far, but then the other day I just dug another 6 inches deep.” Basically, due to such a lengthy supply chain (approx 2 months), even though I am making profit, I am not making enough to support growth on the timeframe that I need it. Therefore, I’m drawing money from Hyacinth to drive growth and hoping to make it back on the backend.

Right now I have another shipment of 2,000 grill brushes on its way to me now. Due to the money restrictions, I was late on placing my replenishment order in time to make sure I don’t stock out. It took 20 days to manufacture the next batch of brushes, but because of my tardiness I had to split the shipment into 400 brushes via air and 1,600 via boat. To put the cost in perspective, it costs me about $900 to ship 400 brushes via air and about $1,200 to ship 1,600 brushes via boat. That’s a ton of money I’m now losing because I don’t want to be faced with a stock out. This also counts as 2 separate imports, so instead of paying the fees twice, I decided to get a continuous import bond. Now, I’m a registered importer and can do as many imports as I want for a year without paying a fee each time. It’ll pay off by the end of the year, but for now it’s more money. The 2,000 grill brushes was my 4 inch hole. My new product line is the 6 inch hole…

Product Development

My next product line is a 3 piece grill set: Spatula, Fork, Tongs. From a money standpoint, this is pretty much triple my initial investment for just the brush because we have 3 new items. Depending on my cash flow, I may have to actually take investment to afford it, but I really don’t want to do that.

I haven’t paid to start manufacturing yet though because I’m waiting on my samples to arrive, hopefully this upcoming week. I’m super excited about this because I literally spent hours researching different sets and designing these samples. For the grill brush I just picked out a certain model, but the 3 piece set I actually designed. I also had a mold developed so I can brand them with the Cave Tools logo. Here’s a few pictures of what they look like:

I can’t wait to get my hands on them and just hold them! My goal with this set was to make them incredibly strong and durable. I took the average steel thickness in the grilling utensils market and increased my thickness by 20%. For approximately $0.40 per unit extra in steel, I will probably be able to increase my sell price by about $4-5. I have 2 sample sets coming in right now. One has a strengthen slot, which curves the metal a little bit to make it stronger and the other is just flat steel. I’m going to be comparing the two and also soliciting feedback from people to see which they prefer more.

These sets will most likely retail in the $30 dollar range. The best Weber set sells for $31 so I’m thinking of charging $32-35. I have a bunch of marketing ideas planned for when I finally launch the set and I’m also going to be building an early bird waiting list primarily via facebook where people can get a 20% coupon. I’m also thinking of doing a direct mail campaign to all of my grill brush customers. Something like a teaser post card with a coupon code.

Sales Trends

From a trend standpoint, I have noticed that my week to week growth has started to level out. We’re still making solid sales numbers, but the growth has slowed down, which is not good at all. I think it is do to a combination of our promotion efforts slacking a bit (Because I am very busy with Hyacinth) and possibly the seasonal effect. We are getting closer to the end of the summer so people are probably just not buying as many brushes. I have a couple of solutions on my success list to keep my growth trending up and protect against a winter slump in sales. My success list is different from my daily to-do list in the sense that these are strategic business advancements that will take my business to the next level. Building my wholesale program for instance was something on my success list.

Success List

At the top of my list right now is utilizing Multichannel Fulfillment to increase my ecommerce footprint. So what does this mean? I’ve outsourced all of my warehousing and customer service to Amazon and yes, they charge me an arm and a leg for it. Since I’m already paying them for this stuff, I might as well use them for sales I make outside of Amazon. Basically, my goal is to get listed on as many ecommerce stores as I can and when orders come in from those channels, I pass them through to Amazon and have Amazon ship for me. This means I can now get listed on websites like Buy.com and newegg.com and the other big ecommerce stores on the internet. There are many benefits to this from a marketing standpoint, sales, brand awareness, etc. I’m in the process of compiling a list of sites right now that I want to target. Then I need to build the processes to automate order handling from the various websites. This creates more of a management aspect for me unlike Amazon where when I make a sale they instantly do all of the order management. If I’m late on passing my orders through, then I get bad feedback and pissed off customers. That can’t happen. I also need to build processes to track my profit and loss on each website so I can be sure to focus my marketing efforts at the high converting channels. Finally, I need to figure out how to simplify all of this so my assistant can handle everything for me and just give me a weekly progress report. Sounds difficult, but I get a chubby for business development work, so I’m excited to take on the challenge.

Next up on the success list is becoming an expert at media buying. Media buying scares the shit out of me because it costs a lot of money and I have heard tons of stories of people losing their shirt with poor purchases. In short, media buying entails building out a profile for my ideal customer (ex: Male, 21-35 yrs old, interested in grilling, etc.) and then running targeted banner advertisements on the websites that the person hangs out on. I could run the adds by going through an advertising network or by doing direct purchases from individual websites. In order to do direct purchases, I need to build my own ad server to rotate and serve my ads. This is cheaper in the long run, but to get enough test data I’m going to need to go through an ad network.

The ad networks used to be reserved for just the big brands like Coke because they have outrageous minimum budgets like $10,000. Just to get enough sample data to optimize a campaign, you need to blow through at least $5,000 and have enough money left over to make it all back. However, Real Time Bid (RTB) networks have become readily available in the past few years which makes it easier for someone like me to break in. Basically, I’ll be able to bid in real time on remnant advertizing inventory that wasn’t sold via the big networks. I’ll still have to blow through about $500 in a test budget, but then I can optimize my campaign for the highest converting websites and approach them for direct buys.

My strategy for Media Buying is to target websites with a large visitor base that matches up to my demographic and also target sites with a visitor base primarily in the southern U.S. states. This way I can keep my sales consistent during the winter time in the north. In order to do this the right way and not lose a bunch of money, I need to do significant competitive intelligence research to figure out what the highest converting offers are for the grilling industry (ex: Free Recipe books, discount coupons, etc.). Once I figure out what my offer will be, I need to create it and then drive traffic to an email opt in form where I will give it away. Then I need to convert email leads into product sales on the back end. It sounds funny, but I don’t want to do what Weber is doing because they are very corporate. A lot of their marketing is designed for branding, not direct response marketing. I’ll probably end up breaking down all of Grill Daddy’s advertising because they are more of an internet based company.

Retargeting is also going to be a big factor in boosting my conversions. Retargeting is placing a cookie on someone’s browser when they visit your site, which then shows your ads all over the internet and literally follows them around to make it look like you’re everywhere. The majority of people will leave my offer page right away without giving me their email, but if I retarget them I will reclaim a lot of those visitors at a later date.

To be clear, my experience with paid advertising is limited to just Google pay per click. I’m pretty good, but I’ve never run any type of campaign this complex before or built a significant email list. I have a shit ton to learn and I want to get this all set up by October so I can be ready for the winter. I purchased a media buying course the other day from some pretty respectable internet marketers and I also got my hands on some training documents from Gauher Chaudhry, who is one of the biggest paid traffic guys in the world. I’m trying to do about an hour a day of studying and then I need to start testing on a small scale so I can scale up. As scary as this is to me, I know that if I master Media Buying, I can scale the shit out of my company and start to become a big player.

Traditional Marketing

I decided I need to be doing some more traditional marketing for myself as well. Instead of just doing online press releases, I need to start getting featured in newspapers and branding myself as a young up and coming entrepreneur. This will bring publicity to both of my companies and will also help drive traffic online and give me back links from authority news services. Regardless of how much money I’ve made so far in my career (very little compared to if I had a job), my on paper resume sounds ridiculous right now: “23 year old entrepreneur who has started 2 companies in the past 2 years, conducts business all over the world, and has 8 employees in 4 different countries. Has never accepted any investment and has built everything from scratch with hard work, determination, and virtually no budget.”

I dropped a quick email to a reporter that covers the bucks county area and I have an interview coming up next week. My plan is to get featured in the business section for print and online and then use that credibility to approach larger newspapers.

Couch Surfing

I originally planned to leave for my couch surfing across America trip in September after our fantasy football draft in Atlantic City. There is no way in hell that’s a realistic option for me anymore. I have way too much shit going on to just pick up and leave. I’m also strapped for cash right now because of everything I’m working on. I’m thinking a realistic departure date is going to be sometime in March/April of 2014 because it will be getting warmer for my trip and that also gives me time to do test runs where I couch surf for say a week at a time and learn how the logistics are going to work.

Working From Starbucks

I had quite the week this week working out of different Starbucks. The only people that are in a Starbucks during the day for the most part are entrepreneurs and people doing business meetings. I always have my headphones on, but when I hear an interesting conversation going on, I turn the music off and eavesdrop with absolutely no shame. They think I’m working and listening to music, but really what I’m doing is qualifying them. For the most part, I listen for a couple minutes and then go back to work, but sometimes I find some gems. This week was a good week for me.

Early in the week, I overheard people discussing a business plan for some SAT tutoring service. They talked about SEO and the need for a website multiple times in the convo, so as soon as their meeting was done I introduced myself and gave them each my card. Later in the day, they both checked out my LinkedIn profile and then within a half hour I had a voicemail on my business line asking for a meeting with me. Easy Peasy.

On Thursday, I overheard a conversation between a real young kid and a business attorney. He’s only 21 years old and his business which I will not include here, has already done over $1 million in revenue for the year. He recently fired his cofounder because she blew 250K on bull shit and now she is causing legal problems for him. After the meeting was over, I grabbed the kid and went with the I love meeting other young entrepreneurs approach. We talked for 15 minutes about different stuff and exchanged cards. I’m planning on following up with him sometime this upcoming week and seeing if he wants to grab a few drinks. Surround yourself by smart people and build relationships with movers and shakers and somewhere down the line it will pay off.

On Friday, I was working out of a starbucks in Philadelphia. This old dude was working behind me and looked at my screen and asked if I was building a website. I wasn’t, but a conversation ensued and this guy who I thought was a kook, actually turned out to be incredibly interesting. He went from being a taxi driver, to landing a job from a passenger in his taxi, to becoming a self taught programmer, to designing one of the world’s first heart monitoring machine software’s, to becoming #1 ranked in the world at competitive air hockey, to having an asthma attack in which the doctors fucked up and paralysed him. Ever since the accident, he has problems focusing and he talks weird, which is why I thought he was kooky, but he is intelligent as fuck. We literally talked and exchange stories for 3 hours on Friday (which I made up by working until 8:30pm fml) and he has invited me to stay at his house in South Texas when I do my couch surfing trip. He also took my card and wants to introduce me to a bunch of business people he knows in Texas. During our talk, we got onto the subject of encryption and I got an entire rundown of how to encrypt devices and back them up. He was at Starbucks on Friday rebuilding a computer’s operating system and he had a bag of flash drives. Each flash drive contained its own linux operating system on it. He basically had 7 different portable operating systems stored on these encrypted flash drives that he could plug into any computer and boom he was up and running.

Based on what I learned from Joe, I set up a bunch of encrypted files on my computer today. With my level of encryption, not even the NSA could break into my computer to look at my documents if they wanted to. Seriously, and the NSA knows it, which really pisses them off. Not that the NSA would ever solicit my documents or anything like that, but if my computer were ever stolen like it was in Montreal, all of my information is safe. Furthermore, I now plan to back up my files everyday on my encrypted flash drive so I can be completely portable instead of having to drag my laptop around. Bad Ass!

Buckle up, this is a good one. I almost contemplated calling this post the legend of Matt Zinman because the weekend out in Newtown was truly legendary. Let’s jump right in.

The first time I met Matt was when I was working with Wayne in Doylestown. Within 15 minutes of the start of Wayne and Matt’s meeting, an argument erupted and Fuck You’s started flying back and forth between both of them. This was classic conversation style for Wayne, but I figured Matt was just responding to Wayne in the same manner. It  turns out they’re very similar people, except Wayne actually had his shit together. On Matt’s way out that day, we exchanged cards and he told me he was impressed with me and would like to stay in touch for future business together. A quick, “Nice to meet you Mike. Go fuck yourself Wayne.” and he was gone.

Matt always works out of the Starbucks in Newtown, so I would run into him every now and then and keep the contact warm. He has a non profit that “attempts” to raise money for unpaid internships and has had quite a few conversations with Justin and Dreama before, so we had that in common. A little over a month ago I get a call from Matt and he wants to start doing business together. He wanted to do hourly work instead of by the project, which is not something I normally do. He gives me the classic start small and then work up to bigger dollar value projects pitch and I figured whatever, I’ll do some hourly work for him.

Before he has ever given me any work, he starts CC’ing me on tons of super long emails that have nothing to do with me at all. I’m talking like 3 emails a day of 5+ pages. He also asks me to do a conference call with him where he introduces me to everyone as his marketing guy. I eventually had to have talk with him because he was wasting my time and not giving me any work. He’s the type of guy that wants a ton of work done without paying for it.

After my “talk” with Matt, he starts giving me some graphic design and programming work. In addition to having my guys do the work, I’m wasting tons of time just trying to manage him. He keeps calling me and asking form y opinions and basically trying to have me build his marketing strategy for him. Meanwhile, I’m busy as hell with Cave Tools and 4 new Hyacinth Clients and he is destroying my efficiency. I finally tell him that I am not “on his team” and I charge $100 per hour for consulting if he would like to continue calling me for everything. Otherwise, we will do the work he asks us to, but that’s it. This is now strike 2 for the guy and during that phone call he was raising his voice and getting aggressive while I was trying to remain calm and diffuse the situation.

We continue doing hourly work for him and everything needs to be done right away. Now, Now, Now. Most of the time, we didn’t have any passwords to access the sites he needed work on (we had to hack into 3 of them to reset pws he lost) for about 2 weeks. Then I would get an email at 3pm on a Friday and the immediate work for the last 2 weeks now needed to be completed by Saturday morning. At this point he is really getting on my nerves and he has the balls to tell me I am missing my deadlines.

He asks to have a quick meeting with me in Newtown and since I’m already there shipping out some grill brushes to somebody in Regina, Canada (Amazon only ships domestically), I tell him I’ll meet him at the Starbucks. I walk in and see him sitting in his chair wearing a muscle shirt and we start to make small talk while I’m waiting for my coffee. He tells me about how he almost got in a fight over the weekend with a bunch of 20 something year olds at a bar in Richboro and then slips in that he’s been getting kicked out of too many bars from drinking too much (He’s mid 40s). He also said he needs to clean up his act because he is going to be a very prominent public figure soon…

When we sit down, he starts showing me all this random shit that once again has nothing to do with me. I keep looking at my phone and showing strong disinterest and tell him we’ve been here for over a half hour and haven’t discussed anything yet. When we hit the 45 minute mark I tell him I need to go and then he jumps right into what he intended for the meeting, giving me more work to be done immediately. I tell him that we need to close out the first invoice before any more work because we’ve been working for over a month without any payment. He starts to get aggressive again and I tell him that we won’t do anything until we finish this first round of work and can get paid. Tensions rise and he is now raising his voice and making an ass of himself in the middle of a packed starbucks. Then he starts poking at me and trying to get under my skin. This is pretty close to how the rest of the convo went:

Matt: Look at you man your face is all red, you need to calm down. What’re you threatened by me because I’m wearing a muscle shirt?

Me: Matt, have you ever heard of Pareto’s Principle?

Matt: Yea, the 80/20 rule…

Me: Yea, 80% of my profits come from 20% of my customers. 80% of my frustrations also come from 20% of my customers. What side do you think you’re on?

Matt: Are you kidding me?

Me: We’re no longer doing business together

Matt: Are you fucking kidding me? You’re going to reject my money? (Freaks out and makes an even bigger scene)

Me: This meeting is over. You’ll receive your invoice by the end of today.

I start walking out to my car and he follows me out screaming about how I’m ruining the launch of his non profit. I tell him we’re doing our best for him and if he’s unhappy he can work with a different marketing company.

Later in the day I get an apology email from him. I respond and tell him I thought about things and am sticking to my decision. The next day I get a pissed off email from him saying how work is separate from an invoice (insinuating he isn’t going to pay me the $1,500 he owes me) and that I’m ruining his launch, and his website isn’t working because of mistakes by my team. I check his website and it’s working fine so I tell him that all work has been completed exactly as asked and his website is working fine. I attach the invoice again and say if he has any other questions to let me know.

His response, “Oh, ok my bad. Nothing else then…besides the fact that you won’t work with me.”

Now for the good part. Last Thursday I’m outside at Isaacs in Newtown with a bunch of friends and I’m telling them this story. About 10 minutes later our friend Hank comes over and says, “That little Italian dude is here again buying a bunch of shots for random people.” He describes Matt to a tee and tells a story about how Matt got kicked out of Isaacs last time he was there. I decide to not go in because I don’t want to get into any drunk altercation with him.

After Isaacs, we go over to La Stalla because it’s cougar night. This place is known all over the internet for the best place to pick up cougars and people drive from all over to go there on Thursday nights. Its pretty ridiculous. Tons of divorcees and 40+ year old moms all dressed up in sorority outfits dancing with old fat dudes to rap and hip hop. Tons of rich plastic trophy wives too. The whole place is a show in and of itself. Watching old creepy dudes pull the same moves that didn’t work in high school 30 years ago is hilarious.

Anyways, I’m waiting in the line for the bathroom and across the room I see Matt in an argument with one of the waiters and screaming at him. When I come out of the bathroom he’s gone. I had to leave because I had work in the morning, but apparently Matt came back after I was gone. He walks up to my friend Kurt and says, “Hey dude I just started my own business, isn’t that cool? By the way, if you see anybody walking up behind me can you let me know?”  Within 5 minutes, Kurt said the bouncers came over and carried him out and said he’s been kicked out too many times and he’s never allowed at LaStalla again.

The next night, we are all out in Newtown again and I see Matt at the Black Horse Tavern. He’s talking to Hank again and since all my friends were over there, I decided to just say hi to him. We make no small talk and when he realizes these are all of my friends, he just walks away. About 15 minutes later there is a bunch of commotion and we all go outside to see what’s happening. I have no clue what happened, but Matt was across the street on the ground with the bouncer pressing his face into the sidewalk. I think he tried to fight a bouncer or something. Every cop in Newtown shows up to the scene, but it was too late because Matt took off running down the road already. I guess because he is going to be this big public figure soon and that would be bad press…

Everyone outside the bar has their own stories about Matt and how he has literally been kicked out of every bar in Newtown. The dude is an absolute mess.

As For an update, Matt will not respond to any of my emails. He is approaching the 30 day mark for his invoice and I’m assuming he is going to try and not pay me. He has about 10 more days left to pay, so we’ll see what happens. My attorney has a collections department, which I can use, but ideally I would like to just get paid and not have to ever deal with him again.

I said I would write an update post when I made my first sale and of course that never happened. Been way to busy writing content for SEO purposes to write for my own personal blog. That’s all about to change soon though because I’m testing out a key hire this week. If she does good, she gets the job and I get to start cranking things up. I’ll write about that later though. For now, I need to back track and write about how “un smoothly” the launch went.

Mike O’Donnell has a run in with Murphy’s Law

Hopefully I don’t mess up the details too much because we’re talking about events from a month ago. Murphy’s Law states that “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”  During the launch, I ran into a ton of problems. Starting with the shipping, the grill brushes were continuously delayed. They sat in China at the airport for 6 working days before they ever left. No updates were given to me because the people in the U.S. didn’t know why they weren’t shipping. I finally got notice that they shipped on a Sunday. They were received that Tuesday morning and I told my shipping agent to coordinate the trucking so I could get them shipped to my drop point. There were no trucks available so I was told they would be out Wednesday morning. Keep in mind, I was going down the shore for Memorial day weekend and I needed to receive the boxes and ship them back out to 3 different fulfillment centers across the U.S. before I left. Wednesday came and went without the boxes ever getting on a truck.

We never received the boxes until around 2pm on Thursday and the last UPS truck out on Thursday was at 5pm. I ran down to The Parcel Place in Newtown where I received the boxes and started trying to coordinate 3 outbound shipments and get all of my shipping labels in place in time. We also had to open all of the boxes to put Amazon labels inside. I basically took over the place and was running around like crazy trying to get everything set up before the UPS guy arrived. While coordinating the shipments, I found out that since my grill brushes were 21 inches long and not 20 inches (the cut off), that my products qualified as oversized. I took over the Parcel Place manager’s computer in the back and was going back and forth with Amazon customer service, but rules were rules and I got screwed. Oversized products means higher shipping fees to get out to the fulfillment centers, higher shipping fees to send to customers, and lower inventory limits in the fulfillment centers. My inventory capacity went from 5,000 units down to 500 units across the board.

So I scrambled around and got everything in order just in time for the UPS guy. Helped him load them onto the truck, then I had to bring 2 cars down so we could take an additional 500 units (10 big boxes) and store them in my garage until I had more room in the warehouses. I need to post solid sales numbers for 9 weeks straight before they will lift my capacity limit. After sending the brushes out to Tennessee, Arizona, and Virginia, I cut out and went to the shore for the weekend with a bunch of friends. My inventory was never stocked until about 4 days later because of the holiday.

My launch day was on May 28^th. I set up a big Facebook event and a coupon code so people could get free shipping. I announced the company and the promotion week sale via video and tons of people all over Facebook were liking and sharing everything. I got tons of support from everyone, including neighbors of friends and cousins. It was really cool to see everyone getting behind me. The only problem was that the coupon code I set up for free shipping wouldn’t work because I’m a fulfillment by Amazon seller and can’t offer that (even though the system let me do it and it doesn’t say that anywhere). So after being told by tons of people that my coupons weren’t working, I decided to just bring the price down to $8 a brush so I could cover any shipping costs they would have had. Of course I had to then post an update video because of all the people it didn’t work for. Some people went back, but I lost a lot of potential sales on the initial momentum. It wasn’t until a week later that I finally realized that since my products were oversized my Amazon fees went up as well. This threw off all of my projected numbers  for unit price and I actually ended up losing close to $250 on my launch sale. The special was also only supposed to be for people I knew, but like a dumbass I advertised the coupon code and ended up selling 70 units. That’s almost a 10^th of my inventory sold at a loss!

Mid week I went into my Facebook page and noticed that it wasn’t facebook.com/cavetools like I had set the url to and had included in all of my press releases, lead magnets, and marketing materials. My page link was still the really long url.  Facebook had a technological error and I lost the ability to manage the /cavetools page and was stuck with the other page. My likes had been split between the 2 pages and none of my updates went to the short url page. Facebook of course is impossible to reach and after 3 weeks of continuous complaints I still haven’t heard back from them. I had to cut my losses and create a new vanity url Cave Tools Facebook. Still working on updating all of my past marketing efforts to include the new link.

I feel like I’m forgetting some other things that happened, but overall I just pushed through and things are going great now. June 28^th marks my 1 month anniversary for selling physical products online, so I will hold off on the good news until then 😉