Is A Partnership Right For You?
How My Partnership With Gideon Shalwick Generated A Quarter Of A Million Dollars In Under 12 Months
When I first started this blog the Internet was younger and many of the current big success story online companies had only recently risen to dominance.
I was fascinated with the background history behind the companies that featured heavily during the dot-com boom, some of which survived post the bust like eBay, Paypal and Amazon.com, and others that had fallen far from their glory days, like Napster.
I read biographical books that covered the people behind these companies and enjoyed hearing how the initial concepts were sparked and what path led from idea to multi-million, sometimes even multi-billion dollar companies.
You can read reviews of some of the books in the archives of this blog, including the PayPal Wars, the The Perfect Store – Inside eBay, Google And The Mission To Map Meaning And Make Money and All the Rave – The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster.
Two People Are Better Than One
I can’t remember where I read it first, but somewhere I recall hearing that many really successful companies, both offline and online, were started as partnerships. Two people, for all kinds of reasons, are able to achieve more than an individual.
The stories behind some of the big Internet success stories reinforces this idea, as is the case with Google, Microsoft and Apple. There are two founders who drive the vision behind the company, taking it to good performer and beyond to where most companies never go, to industry leader and even cultural phenomenon.
On a smaller scale, many of the people I interview in my podcasts on this blog often are part of a two-person partnership of some kind. One person may be in the limelight more than the other, but behind the scenes, there are two, who complement and motivate each other to get things done.
Up until 2007 I was a solo-entrepreneur, and I liked it that way. I read this fact about partnerships resulting in big success stories online as interesting, but it wasn’t compelling enough for me to run and find a partner. I had no interest in sharing my profits, or needing to negotiate with someone else to decide what to do. I enjoyed my independence as the only captain steering my ship.
Of course there are success stories of individuals creating massive companies too, so I wasn’t concerned that my desire to work alone might hurt my potential for success.
Despite my lack of intention, I have managed to find myself in a successful partnership that will very likely dominate the direction of my business for years to come. It’s worthwhile explaining how this happened, and what it has done for my business, so you can decide whether a partnership could benefit you too.
Random Strangers
One of the wonderful things about life is that you never know what’s coming up next. The only constant is change. This can be a terribly frightening idea if you become attached to something for fear of loss (relationships, objects, places, people, life itself), but also wonderfully liberating because it means whatever you don’t like about your life now will change, it’s a guarantee.
In some circumstances what appears as the randomness of change means you are completely oblivious to what comes next on a conscious level, so when it arrives, it’s a surprise. This idea can make you live in a permanent state of excitement or of course fear, depending how you look at life.
I had no idea that in 2007 I’d attend a typical pitch-fest Internet marketing event, which for all intents and purposes wasn’t anything special, except I met my future business partner there, Gideon Shalwick.
Many people have asked how Gideon and I met, so here’s the story in brief…
How Can You Make Passive Income Online?
I had a meeting with a friend and his business partner last week. The request was to “pick my brain” on the best way to move forward to generate some passive income streams online.
These two particular people are like a lot of people I know. They’ve got tech skills, they know the Internet well and they have lots of ideas for cool Internet business applications and websites.
Unfortunately they’ve managed to dig themselves into a situation where they spend all their time working on client jobs, running what you might call a “consulting” tech firm, completing various programming and web development projects for other people’s businesses. The money in this business model can be good, but it has some serious downsides too, namely -
- You have to deal with clients, usually one-on-one, a very low leverage interaction and often just painful as you have to work you way through lots of annoying clients to find the good ones
- You work very long hours, which my two friends could certainly testament to
- You know a lot about a lot, yet have difficulty specializing in anything
- You’re in competition with every other jack-of-all trades web development firm out there, which means you unfortunately end up competing on price, and it’s certainly not nice to have to undercut yourself simply to work with bad clients
Those points aren’t necessarily true across the board, but I’m pretty sure any person who has ever consulted or done any kind of web development work for clients will know what I’m talking about.
My friends are smart enough to realize the path they are on is not going to lead them to where they want to go, so they’re looking to make some changes.
The goal is to develop some form of income stream, or several, that could replace the need to take on client work. As always, the relationship between time, money and freedom of choice is heavily integrated here, as my friends are looking to make more money without drastically increasing their workload and eventually freeing up their time so they can do what they want to, rather than what they have to.
Let’s Not Be Strict About Passive Definitions
I’m about to reveal what I talked about during our meeting with my two friends. In terms of what I suggest you do if you are looking to make some passive income online, I don’t want people to get too caught up on the idea of “pure” passive income.
The methods I’m about to talk about are not pure passive income sources, however they have the potential to be low work, high return income sources that can potentially become very close to pure passive longer term. The fact is, it takes time to develop these income streams, but we all love the phrase passive income so I’ve decided to use it here in the title of my post.
So to clarify, what we are looking to do is start up completely new projects that have the potential to become good sources of near-passive and possibly pure passive income, it just might take some time to get there.
First, Understand Your Unique Opportunities
One of the first things I discussed with my friends was taking their present situation and turning it into something that’s less work for them. Sometimes the “lowest hanging fruit” is just a simple adjustment to the business model you are following now, transforming your core skill from labor intensive, to hands-off delivery, or at least much less work.
Here’s some examples of how you might do this -
A Day In The Life Of An Internet Entrepreneur 2009 Edition
Back in August of 2005 I wrote an article that outlined what a typical day in my life was like. I linked to the post in my about page as I see it as a subject people are very interested in – what’s it like to live each day when you make money from the Internet?
You can read the original article here – A Day in the Life of an Internet Entrepreneur (August 2005)
I wrote that article after just over half a year of blogging and it represented what my life was like at the time. Now, four years later, things have changed and it’s time to update what a typical day in my life is like in August of 2009.
My Business Is Different
At the time I wrote the original day in the life piece, my main business and income source was BetterEdit.com, a proofreading service I started and built up over several years.
One of the major roles I performed to maintain the business was controlling the email communication system, connecting each proofreading project with an editor and providing customer support. This role was literally the main “work” in my life back then, taking several hours per day on average.
I eliminated the email management role when I hired an assistant, my good friend Angela, who to this day is still in charge of the day-to-day operations of BetterEdit and is also admin manager for my current business too. If you’ve ever sent me an email, chances are you have communicated with her.
I still have to deal with email of course, but the time pressure is no longer there and I only deal with emails that are about things only I can deal with. About 80% of my email is filtered away by Angela, meaning I never see it. She either responds with the appropriate template we have set up, or answers using her knowledge of my business and her supreme customer service skills.
If you want to know more about the systems we use to handle customer service, you can read the articles here
In 2007 I sold BetterEdit, leaving me to focus just on my blogging and information publishing enterprises. I also sold off all my non-blogging related websites, narrowing my focus to the aspects of my business I really wanted to grow.
I Don’t Do The Same Things Anymore
You Are As Good As The People Around You
During the opening campaign for Membership Site Mastermind I actively observed the conversation occurring at other blogs about what I was doing.
One of the less-talked about benefits of conducting a major launch is the education you receive about your market. As Jeff Walker points out in his Product Launch Formula (PLF) program, each launch is an entirely different beast and once you begin the campaign you never truly know what will happen.
Eben Pagan, while presenting at one of Jeff’s PLF live workshops, stated something similar, explaining how each launch he has done has been different, teaching him new things as the campaign goes to unexpected places.
One of the great skills a marketer can develop is his or her ability to think on their feet and dynamically respond to what they see going on during their marketing campaign.
The very best marketers have an innate understanding of how they need to respond to what the market is telling them. For example, producing new content that is designed specifically to tackle an objection that they have observed coming from feedback during their campaign. As Jeff notes, he can “feel” how a launch is going, even before a product goes on sale.
Rich Schefren wrote an entire follow-up report to his first report (I believe it was the Missing Chapter follow-up to the Internet Business Manifesto) to specifically address a major sticking point he saw in his market. What was particularly amazing about this situation, was Rich was able to write the entire report DURING the launch campaign.
In my case, much of the content I published following up after the Masterplan report I released at the start of my campaign, contained elements designed to respond to specific rejections and talking points I saw in my market.
There were however, some things I couldn’t address during the campaign simply due to lack of resources (mostly time). There’s one thing that stuck in my mind since then that I wanted to write about here on my blog. This is a particularly important issue because I think it’s a mental hang-up you are likely feeling right now, which is significantly holding you back from success.
Why Entrepreneurs Need To Invent Their Own Time Management Systems
This is a guest post by Blog Mastermind graduate student, Francis Wade, who you may recognize as the time management expert with the Jamaican accent from his testimonial video. You can read about Francis and find more of his time management tips at his blog – http://2time-sys.com.
Managing your time = Managing your money
This simple equation has driven entrepreneurs from one time management class to another in search of tips that will transform them into ultra-productive professionals.
Most courses on time management run for two days, where you learn a new system of habits developed by someone who has invented a way to be more productive. The new system works so well for the inventor that he/she decides to package the approach into a detailed prescription to be followed by everyone.
The problem is, why should a time management system that works for the “expert” in their New York corporate world work for your internet business run out of your bedroom in Hawaii? You live a different life, with a need for flexible hours (i.e. midnight shifts included), and you don’t have the luxury of a secretary, IT support and real vacations away from email.
Plus there’s that habit that you have of taking a mid-afternoon nap… which you are sure helps you…to say nothing of the difference between the culture of Honolulu and Wall Street!
Instead of telling you to “follow me,” why can’t they tell you how to do something similar to what they did, so that you can also invent a time management system of your own? Did they follow some kind of method that you could use, and is there a process to follow, or were they just very smart or extremely lucky? You are a different animal, and you know that your habits are different from theirs, so why should you be expected to be successful following their system?
The fact is that most people who take time management courses have a hard time implementing a whole bunch of new, foreign habits all at once. Habits are hard to break, and the 101 new habits and 66 new tips in the new system they are learning are just impossible to learn overnight.
But, you give it a good try and it works – for a while – until the first crisis hits and you do what we all do — go back to what’s familiar. We feel bad, and we wonder how something that seemed so easy in class could be so hard to do in reality.
But in the back of our minds, we still want to be more productive and need to find a way to harness the insights that exist in all the programs out there… but who has time to attend them all?
