Choose Yourself! (12 page)

Rule #7: Customer Service.
You can treat each customer, new and old, like a real human being. “We intuitively sort of knew what we didn’t like in customer service everywhere else: automated calling trees, slow response times, poor problem solving, etc. So we made sure there was as little friction as possible between the customer contacting us and actually getting their problem solved.” When you are a small business, there’s no excuse for having poor customer service. Your best new customers are your old customers, and the best way to touch your old customers is to provide quick help when they need it. Customer services is the most reliable touch point to keep selling your service to them.

“Ok,” I said, “I have to ask. At what point were you making over seven figures?”

By Year 2, Bryan was making over a million dollars and the business was doubling every year. They couldn’t hire fast enough.

In 2011, after four years in business, Braintree took in its first dime of investment capital--$34 million in a Series A funding round. Two years later, according to Crunchbase, they process over $8 billion in credit card transactions annually.

Not bad for someone who quit his job and just wanted to figure out a way to get his bills paid.

So what does this mean for you?

I get BS e-mails all the time. “Make a million dollars buying gold!” “Make a million dollars in real estate!” “Here are the secrets to making a million dollars, revealed this one time only!” Then I click on the link and it’s all BS. Vague answers, some testimonials and then you have to buy a package. It’s all BS.

The rest of this chapter is about brainstorming specific ways to make a million dollars, to do what Bryan Johnson did in less than two years. This is all just brainstorming mind you, and it comes from my personal experience and expertise, so there will be limitations on its scope. But it’s a start. It’s where I start when I want to come up with a new business idea. It’s where you can start, too.
Note:
every idea I mention below is an idea I’ve seen someone pursue to make a million dollars are more. Am I recommending these methods? No. But, again, they are starting points for brainstorming.

A)
Make a service business on whatever the cutting edge of the Internet is. Start with small businesses. In the ’90s, you would’ve made a website business. Right now you can build an app or make a social media agency. Don’t just set up Facebook fan pages for people. Get those people some fans. Set people up on twitter. Then get those people followers. Set businesses up on YouTube, Pinterest, Wanelo, etsy, Quora, Instagram, MailChimp. Every small business (a law firm, a dentist’s office, a flower shop, etc.) should have a working knowledge of some, if not all, of these tools. Your new agency can give it to them.

How do you find clients? Go to the local businesses you use. Ask them what they need and what you can do. Take on the first few clients for free and then start charging a monthly fee. Put out a letter to them each week about what new things you can be doing. Don’t forget: the best new customers are current customers.

If you are an employee somewhere, go to your current employer. Offer them your services. If they say yes, then try to quit your job, start a company, and offer the services again. Heck, make them an equity owner in the company because they gave you your start.

All we are trying to do is make ONE MILLION DOLLARS, remember? Once you have a few hundred thousand in revenues and you start hiring people, sell the business for $1 million. That’s it. There will be plenty of buyers (local ad agencies, bigger ad agencies trying to consolidate, bigger social media firms, small public companies trying to break into the ad space).

You’re always selling: selling your services, selling your customers’ services (!) (this is the real, true secret for keeping customers by the way), and selling your company.

B)
Introduce two people. Every company is for sale. Every company has a price. And there are many entrepreneurs trying to buy businesses. Not just entrepreneurs either, but businesses called “roll-ups,” whose entire business is buying other businesses. These companies buy many mom-and-pop operations in different regions, combine them together, fire all of the back-office staff that are redundant, and now they are a national business with greater margins that can go public or get acquired.

Sometimes companies need help finding buyers. Sometimes companies need help getting in shape to meet buyers. Sometimes companies have no clue about what to do next once they meet a buyer. A lawyer supposedly helps, but not really. They just add layers of process and remove layers of profit.

It’s hard to navigate getting acquired. If you can be somewhere in the middle, you can get paid. There are some regulations around getting paid for this service, but if you can figure them out and build a business around this idea, you can make $1 million easy.

C)
Write a book. I have never made $1 million writing a book. But I have a number of friends who have made millions writing books or information products of some sort. This is a tricky area, so the key here is that you have to be legit. Don’t write a book on a subject you know nothing about. Then you’re just like one of those BS e-mail spammers, except a hundred times worse because what they do in six hundred words you do in sixty thousand. Instead, partner with someone who knows something and write about what they did.

D)
Write a book, part II. Actually, I lied. I just realized I have made $1 million writing a book. My very first book
Trade Like a Hedge Fund
. The book itself didn’t make me that much—maybe $50,000, give or take—but in 2004, I started getting speaking engagements with companies like Fidelity, Schwab, Profunds. A few other institutions would pay up to $20,000 per talk. I’ve probably given well over a hundred talks based on that book over the past nine years. Plus I’ve written articles for them and had other opportunities because of that book. Remember: when you write a book, it’s not all about book sales. Books give you credibility in your area of expertise or interest. Credibility gets you:

• consulting
  (Tim Ferriss has done this very well)
  
• speaking
  (the authors of
  Freakonomics
  have made a career out of this)
  
• other media opportunities
  (TV show, radio show, etc.)
  
• other writing opportunities.
  Most authors I know, even bestselling ones, don’t make millions from their books. But then they get paid to write for big-paying magazines or corporations or whatever. These add up. And if they add up enough, you can outsource a lot of your writing to people whom you trust, as long as you triple-check their work. When I was writing finance articles in 2005, I was writing up to five articles A DAY with the help of a team of cheap labor (high school students) who knew more about stocks than just about any hedge fund manager I knew.
  
• an e-mail list
  you can sell other products to. I have never done this but several of my friends (see Ramit Sethi’s book or John Mauldin’s book) have done it very successfully
  

E)
Financial Repair. I was just visiting a friend the other day who was renting a $5 million mansion in South Beach, Miami. I asked him, “Who owns this place?” He said, “Some guy who figured out a way to make the points on your driver’s license go away.” The house had seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a music studio, a boat docked right off the back porch, and a closet bigger than the typical New York City apartment, and came with a personal chef. She cooked us lunch.

We live in an economy where the media reminds us almost every day how the divide between rich and poor is getting greater and greater. Screw the media! The situation is what it is. Let’s not complain about politics or economics. Let’s actually help people with money issues. Here’s where people need help:

• Parking tickets (like above)
  
• Student loans. There are a trillion dollars in student loans out there. A business helping young people navigate their way through this loophole-filled landscape is easily a million dollar business.
  
• Credit repair
  
• Rent-to-own. I am forever against buying houses but, for better or worse, some people want to own homes. Who am I to stop them? Since 2008, many of these people can no longer afford to buy a home. Banks refuse to give out loans. Remember my friend from “How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found,” who bought up all the homes databases and built his own rent-to-own homes database? He charges a subscription fee for the database. And guess what? People subscribe to it. So much so that he’s expanded his rent-to-own model.
  

He just launched a rent-to-own laptop product. He bulk buys the laptops for $200 apiece and rents-to-own them out for $20 a week for a year. BAM! Huge margins. He started just a few months ago. He’s bringing in $300,000 a month now, and can sell his business for at least several million dollars pretty much any time he wants. And, by the way, he didn’t go to college.

If you’re like a lot of people who are doing this for the first time, all these brainstorming ideas probably make your head swim a little bit and leave you with a lot of questions. Since I started writing and giving talks, I’ve heard them all:

So should I quit my job? I have a million ideas, which should I do first? Do I just need to be a better multitasker? What do I do if I have ideas but I’m a procrastinator? I’m too busy, I have a family, I don’t have time, what do I do then?

I get it. I understand what you’re going through, believe me. This is very hard. Those are very hard questions. And I have specific answers to each of them. Unfortunately my answers don’t matter—and won’t matter—until you start from the beginning and get back to basics.

When I was a kid, I was scared to death of my grandma. When she would come over, the first thing she would do is go to my room and scream at me if it was a mess. We started having to slip more cortisone into her mouthful of daily vitamins just to calm her down.

To prepare for her visits, I started cleaning my room. I could do it superfast. The reason was because all I was doing was sweeping everything under my bed. My room would look spotless but it was actually still a disgusting mess.

The same thing is true of most people’s lives. I don’t say that in a critical way. I just know it’s true. Every time I lost money, it was because I had fooled myself into thinking I was in great shape, but there was still a lot of crap swept under the bed. There’s no getting around it. Cleaning your room, cleaning the house where your freedom lives—the house you want to live in—takes time and effort. It requires you build the proper foundation, by getting back to basics.

The way you get back to basics is by doing your Daily Practice and focusing on the Four Bodies (do one from each, every day):

The Physical Body:
Am I eating well? Am I exercising? Am I flossing? Am I sleeping enough? There are really no shortcuts. The only people I know who claim they sleep “three hours a day and still have a ton of energy” are 100 percent bipolar. No joke.

The Emotional Body:
Am I surrounding myself with people who love me? Am I not engaging with the people who put me down, even if they are co-workers? Am I not gossiping? Am I expressing gratitude to the people who are good to me? I bet this seems corny, right? You’re probably asking yourself,
what does this have to do with a million dollars?

Last year, my friend from Miami (the one with the mansion) made several million dollars in his business. A few years ago, he was broke, living in his parents’ basement. He was overweight and unhealthy. He was in a bad relationship. And his ideas were stale, left over from the last time he made a million (which he of course then lost).

What changed?

Like many people, he realized that he had to do something different in order to get out of the rut he was in. There’s a saying, “It’s your best thinking that got you here.” So the first step is to literally throw away your “best thinking.”

My friend realized that the first step was to get back to the basics. He simply began by jogging and eating better. That sense of self-improvement then started to extend out to his relationships, his creativity, his spiritual life, and all of this together transformed the way he thought about his business. It’s not that his business got better. It’s that his thinking got better because it came from a foundation of health. And from that foundation, you build the house you want to live in.

Now he’s out of the bad relationship. He’s lost fifty pounds. He has a personal chef who cooks only healthy meals for him. He hired someone to help him with the marketing of his business, which helped him to generate new, fresh ideas. And the arrogance that he was known for in his circle seems to be greatly tempered.

The Mental Body:
People have lots of ideas, but they are mostly bad ones. The way you get good ideas is to do two things: 1) Read two hours a day. 2) Write ten ideas a day. By the end of a year, you will have read for almost one thousand hours and written down 3,600 ideas. One of these ideas will be a home run. How will you know which one? Or two? Or three? Well, because you are doing your Daily Practice and focusing equally on the other three bodies, which are essential for health.

The Spiritual Body:
I was leading a retreat at a spiritual “resort” a few months ago. I wanted to charge nothing and title it “Creating Success from Within.” Two things happened. The retreat center said, “No, you have to charge!” And then they said, “You can’t use the word
success
. Our audience doesn’t like that.”

I thought this was funny. Spiritual people hate the word
success
, yet they are more than willing to charge their “audience” an arm and a leg to achieve it. FYI, I’m pretty sure that’s called “a scam.” Not that “success”-oriented people are any better. They hate the word
spiritual
just as much. It reminds them of New Age bullshit or their childhoods, when they were forced into boring, religious instruction by parents who needed the threat of eternal damnation in order to get their kids to clean their rooms.