Back in mid May I attended the Fortune Leadership Summit.  A fellow EO member named Marc Ostrofsky also attended the event, and although he was not a scheduled speaker, he did take a few minutes to speak to all of us.

Marc has a successful background in entrepreneurial start-ups, with his current portfolio of online businesses generating over 75 million a year.  When he got on stage, he talked about making money online and the vast opportunities available.  One story that he told literally made my jaw drop.

He told the story of a guy who had made a YouTube video on how to jump higher (yes, the vertical leap).  He posted it up just for fun.  The number of hits it received was enormous, so he took it town and built an e-commerce site with educational material, such as videos on how to jump higher.  Users can subscribe to the videos via a monthly payment plan.  Marc said that this guy made over a million dollars last year, with over 7,000 people subscribed and paying $9.95/mo.

Marc told us of a few other stories that are portrayed in his new book called Get Rich Click!.  I just saw a report in this last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal that popularity of his book is growing quickly, up 814% for the week.  What is so fascinating about his story and his book is that it’s an entrepreneur’s utopia of ideas to start making money.  The title of one of his topics is “The Riches ARE in the Niches…$5 Million a Year Selling Cuff Links Online!” 

What’s awesome is when you look at it from the niche perspective.  Think about those areas of life that we are passionate about (discussed in my last blog), which can usually unfold some niche opportunity to scale and sell something that we know and love.  In some cases you don’t even have to invest capital, make a product, buy inventory, or ship anything…you can have others handle that while you simply bring in the customers and maintain a portion of the profit.

There was a great example in the book about a couple of kids that were really into bike riding with their dad.  Tires being the most important gear in this sport, their dad ordered bike tires from a UK specialty shop in just enough quantity for their bike club.  When they came in a color that no one liked, he offered the kids the option to get rid of them (in quantities of 10) and just pay him the cost of $30 per tire.  The kids set up an ebay store and sold the tires for $35 each.  They made a $50 profit, then turned around and ordered more and sold them as well.  This happened back in 2002 when they were only 10 and 12 years old.  They now own BikeTiresDirect.com, and generate over $8 Million a year in sales.  WOW!

We are in an age of opportunity that is unprecedented in our history.  Never before could you start a business with so little, and reach so many customers so easily with the help of the internet.  There is nothing standing in our way, so what are you doing to get started?  Personally, my team just released a beta version of a software tool called Sluice (Join the beta users community) that is built to simplify requirements gathering and collaboration for projects, and we hope to sell thousands.  

What is your passion, which leads to your niche, which leads you to profits…which will lead you to financial freedom???

Tony Hsieh (Zappos), John Assaraf (from the movie The Secret, and author of The Answer), Guy Kawasaki (Apple), Sir Richard Branson (Virgin) and even George W. Bush (need I elaborate?). All of their messages were very educational and insightful, but there is one in particular I want to share with you.

(a marketing firm) and CEO of The Purpose Institute. This was timely given my recent blog on core purpose. His story was about the power of focusing on your purpose.

Roy has worked with Herb Kelleher (former CEO and Chairman) of Southwest Airlines for decades now, and over the years has helped to support their purpose around freedom of the airways.

Roy showed this video called Hallelujah to help us understand what purpose feels like:

He said when you have these 4 things you will know purpose.

1) You have to know the words to the song

2) You have to listen to one another

3) You’ve got to step up when it is your turn

4) It really sounds good when you sing together…

What is the most important duty of a CEO?  Bob Prosen, author of Kiss Theory Good Bye, says “Hiring people smarter than I am and putting them in the right positions!!!!” I have to agree, but creating roles and filling them with people who can play to their strengths in those positions isn’t an easy task.

Last week I did a presentation to my EO chapter on my company’s hiring process, which is built around the Topgrading methodology. It’s hard to express how important this is to us, because we put so much time and effort into taking what we’ve learned from books, speakers, and even bad hires to create something that really works for us. Our process is 13 steps, and has shown us a high success rate of getting the right people in the right places, in turn saving us money. For example, research shows that if you hire someone at 6 figures, and they turn out to be a bad hire (within what amount of time? A year? 6 months?) it can cost you as much as 1.5M in lost productivity and opportunity cost. This is reason enough alone to work harder to get it right the first time, and not just relying on your gut and a resume to make a decision on hiring someone.

In short, this is our process:

This isn’t something that happens in a day, or even a week. I and a few others on the team spend an extensive amount of time with each candidate throughout the screening process, getting to know their background, their work experience and their personality. We hone in on their natural strengths, and match them up to the needs of the company and the position. From another perspective, this also ensures that things they are not good at are not key aspects of the position.

Having a defined process and checklist in place for our hiring process is essential, but it is also extremely beneficial to other areas of business. Think of it this way, thousands of planes take off and land successfully every day. They manage this because they have a checklist to make sure they aren’t missing anything. We don’t want to miss one thing on our checklist, because that one thing could lead to making the wrong hire.

Does your marketing material talk about you? Does it emphasize what you offer, why you are so great, and what sets you apart from competition? Do you notice a trend here? It’s all about YOU. I know our website is all about us. I also know that, if we want to truly relate to our clients, then it can’t be all about you. Why? Because as impolite as it might sound….potential clients don’t care about you! They care about themselves, their pains, and how to fix them.

Are you going to be the one that helps them? Probably not, unless you can show them that you understand their pains and you know how to fix them. Can you really define the pain that your clients experience when they seek you out, and talk about it as if you’ve been in their shoes? Can you talk to them about what would alleviate those pains, without it being a sales pitch? When you are seeking a product or service and you’re browsing the web, aren’t you more inclined to stop and read about something you can identify with? Something that relates to you and your experiences…

I’d heard similar theories time and time again, but didn’t take it into account when we designed and wrote the content for our website. Had I read Reality Marketing Revolution just a few short years ago, it may have been a different story. We’re now in the process of revamping our website, based off what we’ve learned from this intuitive book written by Michael Lieberman and Eric Keiles (a fellow EO Member). These guys put this into a process for approaching your marketing plan that resonated with me. It’s clear, it makes sense, and it’s obvious. We know the pains our clients’ experience, and we know how to help them. Now Eric is going to help us demonstrate that in a better way.

Dewitt Jones tells an exceptional story. He does it with a passion and purpose that he has put into his life as a National Geographic photographer. The title of his talk, Extraordinary Vision, was truly extraordinary. He shares the stories behind these fantastic photographs that make them real and meaningful in a way that sticks with you. I was fortunate enough to see him at both the EO Arizona University and the EO Canada Regional, and was captivated both times. Many people said they felt teary eyed listening to his presentation.

What really got to me, and he does get to you, is how he approaches moments with the possibility of what could be. He goes by a personal mantra, “There is more than one right answer!” No matter how great the photo, he is always open to the possibility that there is a better one. He would capture a moment in time that may have been just what he was looking for, but if he’d stopped there, he wouldn’t have seen the better one that came just moments later.

He spoke about a time where he’d gone to a dandelion field to take some photos, only to find that the dandelions had dried up and all that was left was a field of white puff balls waiting to fly away in the wind. Instead of walking away, he thought that maybe things didn’t end there, that dandelions didn’t make the only “right” photo. Take a look. Who would have thought a picture of a dried up dandelion in the sun could be so beautiful and serene? It wasn’t what he’d sought out, but his open mind and creativity offered something more, and something inspirational.

For me this begged the question, what am I not staying open to? What is the next right answer? Are you dealing with white puff balls instead of pretty, yellow dandelions in this economy? Are you open to the idea that there is another right answer?

Dewitt talked about having Vision, Passion, Purpose and Creativity in the way you approach where you are going. Honestly, it sounded more like something from a Jim Collins book like Good to Great than it did a photographer. He would say “When we breathe in, we take it all in, and when we breathe out, we give it all back!” He calls it the One Breath Meditation…what a good analogy for life.

He believes that when your vision is clear, it’s there, and it will show up. When you continue to believe in the next right answer, you find yourself traveling down the accelerating possibilities curve. He has a vision of beauty and special moments in all of life, and he has captured them over and over again to be witness in National Geographic for over 20 years.

I attended the EO Canada regional conference in Ottawa Canada last week. It was exciting seeing my EO friends and I enjoyed the opportunity to learn from the speakers. It was a busy 3 days with lots of learning and amazing off site events.

Ottawa is the capital of the Province of Canada like DC is to the US. Ottawa is Canada’s fourth largest city and is also where their parliament resides. We took a tour of the different chambers that make up the parliament. It was interesting as well as educational to learn the similarities and differences between Canada and the US.

The highlight of my trip was traveling by train along the river heading north of Ottawa to a small town called Wakefield. The 90 minute journey gave way to some amazing scenery and provided invaluable time to just sit and talk with fellow EO members.

One of those members whom I was traveling with on business was Ben Ridler, the CEO of Results.com. Along with 2 other EO friends, we dined together and each shared stories about our businesses, the economy, and life in general. Accompanied by perfect weather and a spectacular view, this experience was yet another once-in-a-lifetime experience for each of us. It’s not often that you find the time these days to just sit and enjoy the company of friends from around the world all at the same time, with no clock ticking in the background.

On Friday Matt Stewart, one of my oldest EO friends, and I rode bikes alongside the Ottawa River, stopping along the way to take in the massive scenery and hopefully take home a few reminders of it in the form of photographs. We ran into a rock sculptor along the way, an older man full of stories to share as he shaped these rugged rock forms into pieces of art.

Noteworthy are two speakers I had the pleasure of learning from on my journey. I will be discussing them in more detail in my next two blog entries, but for the record:

The first is Peter Thomas who bought the rights to Century 21 in Canada and helped it soar to 9 billion in real estate before he sold it 11 years later. Peter shares his theories on the S curve and adds some interesting perspective on what a business needs to do to get past the end of the curve.

The second speaker I’d like to mention is Dewitt Jones. He had a 20 year career with National Geographic, creating hundreds of extraordinary visions as a photographer and is now rated one of the highest speakers in YPO and EO. His message is powerful and relates to finding the extraordinary out of the ordinary, and that there is more than one right answer. His message applies to life as well as business.

Being an Entrepreneur is sometimes lonely and can be a difficult place. The weight of many peoples lives are depending on you to get it right and to make things happen for everyone’s future. My EO time is very important to me because it is being with my tribe and it makes the world a lot less lonely. The energy, passion and zest for life can be intoxicating around my fellow EO friends and takes you back to what being an entrepreneur is all about: taking a risk and using our creativity to change our own part of the world.

I was born an entrepreneurial spirit, an inherent desire to create opportunities and realize them. My journey has led me around the world, given me the opportunity to learn from some remarkable people, and experience leadership on a whole new level.

In my life I have gone from pumping gas, delivering newspapers, and making clown shoes to creating a mutual fund from scratch that helped carry my firm to $1Billion in assets. I then created the first mutual fund in the world run solely by its shareholders. I have seen my ideas and investments flounder, and I have also seen them thrive. I have felt stupid and genius at the same time, and discovered the world of Dyslexia. I have identified the difference between my strengths and my weaknesses, and learned to use them to my advantage. I have found a world of people who share my entrepreneurial spirit within the Entrepreneurs Organization (EO), and with them I have been everywhere from the Pentagon to the Playboy Mansion.

Today I run a custom software development company called Efficience, with offices in both the United States and India (Effindi). My team and I have realized success and failure, and from that have developed an effective form of execution that we call FlockGPS.

I know that I did not get here alone, and I feel that my path to success is ongoing. My point is this: I got here from what I learned from other people, and it’s only fair that I pass along my awareness and experiences. Our economy suffers right now. We are the only ones who can fix it. I want to succeed, and I want to see Entrepreneurs around the world succeed, as well. We are the ones providing the innovation and job growth in our economies.

I was told a long time ago that if you really want to know something, you teach it. So if sharing this blog exposes you to ideas that will help you grow your business and inspire the entrepreneur inside of you, then I think they refer to that as a win-win.

More and more we hear the term Entrepreneur in the media and from politicians these days. They are saying that Entrepreneurs are the primary creators of jobs in the economy, and I agree completely. But what is it that these Entrepreneurs are doing different? What is an entrepreneur made of and what really describes one?

Growing up I was always looking for opportunities, and I thought it was just because I wanted to be successful and make money. I didn’t realize until later in life that what I was really seeking was more than just money and success. I was fulfilling an inner desire to take an idea, mold it, push on it, worry about it, get excited to tell others about it, and jump up and down at each sign that it was slowly manifesting into existence. Creation seems to be the key here, just like an artist or musician.

How do I know this? Ask anyone who has sold a company for big money, and then ask them what they did after that (I have asked plenty). They may have traveled the world or enjoyed the beach for a while, but they usually revert back to that inner desire to create and manifest. Money was not the answer. Now, especially with the freedom of money, comes a desire to manifest at an even higher level.

This is what Steve Wynn called the Dark Side of Entrepreneurism and spoke to us about at the EO 20 yr celebration in Vegas. You risk it all so that you can continue to create and manifest at the expense of the fortune you have already created. Steve did this when he opened and created Wynn Properties.

The one word that encompasses being an Entrepreneur is the magical word “Freedom!” When you run a business you are free to be who you want to be, to go the direction you see fit and to manage people the way you think best. From that the market place is your gauge for success.

So when you have freedom to create, share and grow (one of our core values) in the areas that you are most passionate about… out of you comes the highest expression of who you are. When you stir this soup, what you get are people running high growth companies that create jobs. These jobs also allow for self expression and living a purpose, which in turn attracts high caliber people generating a positive feedback loop, which leads to more growth and jobs.

Entrepreneurs of the world: We thank you all for your desire to create and manifest, making the world a better place!