Читать книгу Million Dollar Micro Business - Tina Tower - Страница 8

That day I sat looking out at the blue ocean spread out before me, reflecting on my past 10 years in business and how much had changed. I was just a couple of months into a round-the-world trip with my family, and we were staying on the island of Ko Lanta in Thailand.

I was having my first proper go at this online course thing I had seen people try. With a background in franchising and a work ethic based on the creed ‘while they sleep, I work’, I didn't quite believe the hype. And yet, in business I am a curious experimenter. I want to know how things work and the levers to pull to get different results. For this new game, I was still figuring out what the levers actually were.

I had given myself 10 days to write, record and market my new eight-week online course. Of course, it was only possible because I didn't know what I didn't know. Now, having launched courses over and over again, I know the parts I was missing and how ‘amateur hour’ this first effort was.

But was it actually? In that 10 days in Thailand I had created and sold my course to 11 people. A small number? Yes. But 11 people had purchased a course for $997, or six monthly payments of $199. I knew I was offering spectacular value. I knew they would be able to take the lessons from it and earn back that money multiple times. I also knew that now I had created the course I could sell it many times over. See, putting together an online course is laborious, but once it's done it can be sold again and again and again.

That was when I knew that a million dollar micro business was actually possible. It was the moment I fell in love with this new way of doing business, and knew I would be sharing everything I had learned to help other highly skilled but overworked people to package their expertise and sell it at scale.

I am certain that you have acquired knowledge and skills that are practical and useful, and that you have your own unique spin on them that could help other people acquire the skills and knowledge you have. In this book I want to help you wrap that neatly with a bow into a simple online course so you too can have your moment of staring into space and thinking, ‘Holy guacamole, this actually works!’

The way we consume education, like the way we do business, is constantly changing and evolving. Recent technological advances have greatly facilitated the business of online education. Information on any topic you could possibly want to know about is at the tip of your fingers, courtesy of Google and YouTube, but it's often delivered in a disjointed, unmediated flood, like drinking from a fire hydrant. Professionally created online courses provide a linear learning experience that allows the client to define and seek out their desired transformation and access a complete start-to-finish, step-by-step guide. The goal of an online course is to guide a client from where they are to where they want to be in the simplest, most cost-effective and timely way.

I began my further education at university, where I studied Organisational Learning. At the end of my first year I was advised that I wasn't cut out for the corporate world (how right he was!), so I transferred to a degree in primary teaching. I love education. I love learning and teaching, and I knew I had found my calling. Though I have never taught in a classroom, I have been a teacher all my life.

In my second year of studying education I launched my first business, a toy store and tutoring centre on the main street of the suburb where I lived. It was a traditional business in every sense of the word. Business hours were 9 am to 5 pm six days a week and 10 am to 4 pm on Sunday. I employed 17 staff, bought stock from wholesale suppliers, included a mark-up that allowed us to stay competitive, and added value with our custom gift wrapping and branded bags. It was respectable, busy and stressful — all the things expected of a traditional, bricks-and-mortar retail- and service-based mixed business. Four years into it, my first child entered the world.

I went through what a lot of women go through when they have children, beginning with that moment when we realise that the life we had before is no longer going to work for us. I had to figure out how I could operate a business I absolutely loved, maintain my financial independence, satisfy the ambition that burned inside me and be the mum I always dreamed of being.

The possibilities for scaling were sparse. Traditional businesses usually see two avenues for growth: work more hours or hire more staff. Neither option was very attractive to me. So I took the curriculum I had created for our tutoring centre and licensed it so other teachers could use it in their own tutoring centres. I then closed my beloved store so I could stay at home with my babies and grow a business around their sleep times. The combination of my love of learning and personal development and my ambition was never going to allow me to keep it slow and steady.

Now, at 37, I have identified a pattern: in everything I do, every plan I make, I seek to escalate, to realise its full potential, and I will help everyone I come into contact with to do the same.

After two years of licensing, I opened our first franchised tutoring centre. I finally experienced the scalability of business!

I imagined I would have franchisees open and operate the centres while I stayed home with my children, a win–win for everyone. But slow and steady was not a game I knew how to play. The business escalated, and in the following four years we opened more than 30 locations. I was working every moment I was awake. I loved the business and dreamed of achieving over 100 locations nationally and operating in multiple other countries around the world. We were already getting proposals for international expansion. On the outside the business looked textbook awesome!

Again, it was a respectable traditional business. When new acquaintances asked what I did, I would say I was the founder and franchisor of a tutoring franchise with 30 national locations (I was still under 30), and they would give me that slow nod with their mouth turned down that said ‘Hmmm, impressive’. But it wasn't impressive — it was a yucky way to live a life. The demands were sky high and the expenses even higher. Sure, we had revenue coming in and the business was profitable, but there was always some new improvement I needed to invest in, some giant expense that would swallow up the next allocation of what was supposed to be my financial reward for all the work and sacrifice. I was earning decent money, but I couldn't see how I was going to earn on the scale I wanted in my life without working myself into an early grave.

Although it broke my heart, in 2016 I decided to sell the company I had been building since I was 20, and dare to venture into the unknown — to explore who I wanted to be when I grew up.

Looking back, the six months after I sold my company was a hilarious comedy of errors. I've said that in business I'm a curious experimenter. I'm sure you've been there too, stuck at doing one thing for so long that you've actually forgotten what brings you joy in your work. Or you no longer recognise where your skills and natural gifts lie, because you've had to get good at doing so many other things in your role and now you don't know who you are or what it is you actually want to do with your life …

Sorry, I escalated that a little too quickly! In my case, I opened six new businesses in six months in the hope of discovering what I really wanted to do. Here's how that worked out.