I'm not sure if a truckload of experience & reading about fourteen hundred business books makes a dude an authority on micro-business. Here's hoping that it's so. . .
This is what I bring to the table:
36 Micro-businesses in 41 years
6 big-time successes,
25 failures (notice I didn't put anything in-between,)
2 non-profits and
3 still-in-process
Here they are, in all their majesty:
High Sierra Flies. Fly-tying business. 12 years-old. Circa 1981. Back before A River Runs Through It, fly-fishing wasn’t so pedestrian. I like to brag about being early-adopter of the sport, having picked it up at age twelve before it became the rustic version of golf. I knew a lot of fly-fishermen who would fish the California High Sierras for Golden Trout and they had a difficult time finding good flies. I loved to tie, so I went to work supplying their habit. Of course, the business was highly seasonal but fun nonetheless. Success Rating: Humdrum.
Assassination, Inc.. Gotcha Game. 17 years-old. Circa 1986. My High School friends and I discovered toy rubber bullet guns – the kind that would be immediately outlawed today for looking too real -- and it sparked a new business. For twenty dollars, students at Loara High School and Savanna High School in SoCal could fill out a “contract” on themselves and join the game. We’d mix up the contracts and hand them out. Before and after school, the players’ mission was to take out the person whose contract they held. Then, they’d inherit that person’s contract. The game continued until just one remained. It was like Highlander only without the head-hacking. The last person kept all the money, minus my administrative fee. We held two events and each one lasted about a month with the largest involving over seventy students. Success Rating: Humdrum.
Paintball Politic. Paintball Targets. 18 years-old. Circa 1987. I loved paintball and I wanted to upgrade my own paintball gun without tapping the money from my day job. I could draw, so I made up life-size, comic-book-style figures of folks paintballers would like to shoot; Muammar Gaddafi, Fidel Castro, Ayatollah Kohmeini and Jane Fonda. I drove around pitching them out of the back of my Volkswagen Thing. Unfortunately, they were over-priced for the market and I barely sold enough of them to cover my costs and buy that paintball gun – a Gramps and Grizzly Marauder Turbo. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Latin Expedicion. Mexican Handcraft Imports. 22 years-old. Circa 1991. After serving a service mission for my church in Mexico, I had a love for all things Mexican, not including tapeworms. I especially loved the Mexican hand-crafts, which seemed like amazing bargains to me. For a couple bucks you could buy a pair of Huarachi sandals in Northern Mexico. I took on a partner, we pooled our money and we embarked on a two-week tour of Mexico, buying up large quantities of hand-made goods. We brought back hammocks, huarachi sandals, handbags and blankets. Then, we toured the SoCal flea markets, setting up an elaborate Day-of-the-Dead style booth complete with life-size skeletons wearing huge sombreros. We sold off most of our inventory, lost a few bucks and decided the ROI (return on investment) against our time wasn’t nearly good enough. Plus, my friend Steve let my favorite Day-of-the-Dead skeleton, that I’d painstakingly made by hand, fly out of my jeep and splatter all over the 91 freeway. Kind of bummed me out. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Bullfrogger Industries. Paintball De-fogging Device. 23 years-old. Circa 1992. Still fixated on paintball businesses, I invented a device that would solve one of the most vexing problems to face paintballers: goggle fogging. The device was basically a tiny bellows that players carried in their pockets with two tubes that ran up their shirt and into both sides of their paintball goggle. When the inevitable fog rose in the goggle, a few pumps would clear it instantly. I manufactured them myself in my dad’s metal fabrication shop and sold them for about fifty bucks each. I went around to paintball stores and offered them wholesale. I moved hundreds of the little buggers and actually made good money. Unfortunately, several months later, a large mask manufacturer came out with a paintball goggle fan that ran on batteries. It didn’t work quite as well as my Bullfrogger, but it was cheaper and didn’t have hoses running up the shirt. The paintball fan killed the Bullfrogger. RIP. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
North American Consumer Alliance (NACA). Credit repair services. 24 years-old. Circa 1993. (Co-founded.) On summer break from college, I joined up with two paintball buddies to create a national expansion of my friend’s already-thriving, Salt Lake City credit repair business. Our version of credit repair, at the time, consisted of writing dispute letters on behalf of consumers to dog the credit bureaus into cooperation. The service was highly effective at achieving credit improvement, but it was tough to market and the regulatory situation was a nightmare. We mostly marketed through independent agents, the majority of whom were mortgage brokers. I joined the business in its infancy, pioneered several key aspects of the process and was made a partner. NACA made hundreds of thousands of dollars during its five years in business, but it lacked a “Big Marketing Invention” and the marketing model generated only lukewarm sales. The partnership eventually split up to pursue greener pastures. Success Rating: Humdrum.
The Law Offices for Consumer Affairs (LOCA). Credit repair law firm. 25 years-old. Circa 1994. I provided consulting to an attorney to help him establish and manage LOCA. I kept working with a couple of the NACA partners and we marketed credit repair directly to consumers via traditional media. Tired of waiting on agents to sell our services, we felt it’d be best to go direct. After spending millions on newspaper and radio advertising, I learned that traditional media was bunk. My marketing efforts generated substantial revenues – north of half a million dollars a year – but it would never be the marketing homerun that I was seeking. LOCA was eventually sold. Success Rating: Humdrum.
Attorneys for People. Debt Management Company. 26 years-old. Circa 1995. I thought that the same people who needed credit repair would also require debt assistance as well. This little company helped attorneys in offering two debt solutions: lump sum debt settlement and payment-based debt restructuring. At the end of the day, this business was just as boring as that last sentence sounds. The debt settlement service required that people had large, lump sums with which to settle their debts. Few did. The debt restructuring service could work with people who were broke, but the debt restructuring market was all tied up in a monopoly controlled by the credit card companies. Not much opportunity there either. Luckily, when my partnership split up, the other guys took this company as their “piece of the pie.” They actually turned it around and made good money with it until regulation changed and obliterated debt restructuring. Success Rating: Humdrum.
IRS Settlement Services. Tax debt negotiation. 26 years-old. Circa 1995. Even though the credit repair efforts weren’t making anyone any money – yet – I kept thinking that more services would be the answer to success. By way of this quest, I started a company offering to settle federal tax debts. I had amazing success accomplishing tax reductions, but I never could figure out how to market the dang thing. Out of every hundred credit repair clients, maybe one fit the description of a good tax client. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Lexington Law Firm. Credit repair law firm. 27 years-old. Circa 1996. Finally, after poking around for years hassling with credit repair, I turned my attention to marketing. After a parade of advertising attempts, I discovered my knight in shining armor: the internet. By tapping into the new and untested world wide web, I found several ways to market credit repair that worked outrageously well. People could check out the website at their leisure, get a good idea of just how credit repair worked and then make a decision to do it or not. I pointed the website and the marketing engine at a client law firm that wanted to expand its credit repair practice and the firm grew like wildfire. Within five years, Lexington Law became the largest and most effective credit repair firm anywhere. Success Rating: Raging Success.
Homewise Consumer Journal. Boutique Newspaper. 27 years-old. Circa 1996. I thought it’d be cool to make a newspaper that featured the products and services of local businesses, then, mail it to tens of thousands of people. Would tens of thousands of people want to read that? Nope. I got fifteen or twenty local businesses to sponsor the paper and then I wrote articles like “Dust Mites: the Secret Menace,” and “Losing Weight with Fen-phen.” The articles were vaguely intriguing but not intriguing enough to make the phones ring off the hook. It was fun, though, to see tens of thousand copies of my newspaper roll off the press. Unfortunately, that was the project’s high-point. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
CreditRight Foundation. Non-profit (sort of) Credit Education Foundation. 28 years-old. Circa 1997. Still trying to advertise credit repair services more effectively, I took a flailing leap into direct mail advertising. Non-profit organizations can mail stuff much cheaper than for-profit companies. By sending out consumer educational information via snail mail, I could generate leads that would translate into credit repair clients for my attorney clients. I teamed up with a well-known consumer author and we turned out a bunch of educational pieces that taught consumers how to do their own credit repair and debt settlement work. A respectable percentage of people called in to request our free info, but we had a bear of a time getting them to become paying clients. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Finishing Touches, Neighborhood Craftsmen. Home Repair and Remodel. 28 years-old. Circa 1997. (Co-founded.) My brother was a handyman and I was an experienced marketing guy. Why not start a handyman company? We focused on marketing to a select neighborhood and we focused on tight marketing and solid follow-up with our client base. The marketing actually worked well, but we found it difficult to keep good handymen since they kept leaving us and going out into business on their own. Within a couple of years, we’d spawned three or four competitor handyman companies in our “select neighborhood.” Even so, the company made some money and we were able to sell it to one of the employee handymen when we moved on to our next project. Success Rating: Humdrum.
Artist’s Touch. Portrait Painting. 29 years-old. Circa 1998. (Co-founded.) A friend, who was an accomplished painter, wanted to quit her day job. We took the advertising achievements of Finishing Touches and we ported them over to heirloom artwork. Our approach didn’t exactly turn the art world on its ear. Come to find out, even wealthy families don’t hire an artist to paint their kids by looking at a flier left on their doorstep. It was DaVinci meets DaJunkmail. We sold a couple of jobs but it cost more to get those few clients than we made on the paintings. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Tigerstripe Paintball. Paintball Sports. 29 years-old. Circa 1998. A friend of mine had been running paintball games out of the back of his 1976 Toyota Corolla Hatchback. Amazingly, that put him through law school, but only because he was a merciless businessman and was willing to squeeze the last dime out of kids playing paintball with their girlfriends before prom. I bought his paintball guns and his rusted-out Corolla and began hosting paintball games on vacant land. I’m not sure I ever expected to make any money doing it, but I never did, so the disappointment was manageable. At least I got to play a lot of paintball. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Creditrights.com. Consumer Services Lead Generator. 30 years-old. Circa 1999. I had become a big fan of giving information away. The marketing I’d done over the internet suggested that people would sometimes buy a service after you’d taught them how to do it themselves. I created a series of credit and debt websites that answered every question imaginable relating to credit repair, foreclosure, repossession, garnishment, debt settlement and the like. I created each site to maximize its potential to get to first position in each credit-related search term. It actually worked! Creditrights became a fantastically inexpensive lead source for my attorney clients. Today, we'd call that simple SEO (Search Enging Optimization,) but at the time, it was revolutionary. Success Rating: Raging Success.
Cubicle Commando. Humor website. 31 years-old. Circa 2000. If Al Gore invented the internet, then I invented wasting time on the internet while a person is at work. Today, ga-zillions of dot-com companies have “copied” my time-wasting, work-stopping concept such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. This website did nothing but tell jokes and show viral, but otherwise worthless, video. I never had the faintest idea how we’d make any money at this, but in those days of the dot-com era, who cared about actually making money? Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
AfterBankruptcy. Credit Repair Educational Seminars. 31 years-old. Circa 2000. (Co-founded.) Having succeeded in the credit repair world, I was approached by a couple who was doing fairly well providing a seminar series for bankrupt people. Stephen and Michelle Snyder would teach folks who had undergone bankruptcy how to “rise from the ashes.” They were certain that the same people who were attending their seminars and buying Stephen’s book would also like credit repair services. I helped Stephen market the credit repair services and find an attorney to fulfill them. Many years and many thousands of clients later, we dubbed the project a success. Success Rating: Raging Success.
Diamond Expedition. Jewelry Sales. 32 years-old. Circa 2001. (Co-founded.) My next-door neighbor owned two struggling jewelry stores located in college towns. By applying my miraculous marketing skills to a new joint-venture, we succeeded in spending a bunch of money on marketing campaigns that didn’t work. It all worked out in the end for my partner, though. He learned enough from me to start his own credit repair operation that would compete with my own credit repair successes. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Creditrepair.com. Credit Repair Marketing. 30 years-old. Circa 2001. (Co-founded.) I had spent eight years in credit repair and when the owner of the domain name, www.creditrepair.com found out that he had cancer and decided to sell it, I jumped at the opportunity. Together with two partners, I grabbed the URL without really knowing what we would do with it. For years, it paid steady returns just based on its ability to attract natural search on Google and Yahoo. Then, my partner realized that people didn’t know what “credit repair” really meant and they were going to creditrepair.com whenever they were in any type of financial trouble. We developed the website as a catch-all for people looking for financial services. By netting folks who were interested in credit repair AND debt consolidation, credit cards, debt management and bankruptcy, we parlayed our URL into a substantial revenue generator. Success Rating: Raging Success.
Credit Law Firm #2. Credit repair law firm. 32 years-old. Circa 2001. With the success of Lexington Law Firm, my business partners and I were looking to expand. We found another law firm interested in jumping into the credit repair arena. We offered our consulting and marketing services and a new credit repair law firm was born. Though smaller than Lexington Law Firm, this firm rose to become the second-largest credit repair company in the United States. Success Rating: Raging Success.
Chickerdoodle. Baby Clothing Accessories. 31 years-old. Circa 2002. (Co-founded.) I didn’t know the first thing about hair ribbons or binky holders, but apparently they were all-the-rage. A friend already had a tiny business sewing these baby-shower-party-favors, so I stepped in to develop the marketing and to throw some money away at the same time. After investing a few thousand, my seamstress partner disappeared into a pink, lacy mist. Seriously, she dropped off the face of the Earth and never reappeared. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
The Credit Team. Credit Repair Telephone Marketing. 33 years-old. Circa 2002. (Co-founded.) For years, I’d enjoyed a great deal of success offering credit repair services over the internet without much use for the telephone. Together with my brother-in-law and my sister, we started a telephone outfit that would accept inbound calls from people interested in credit repair, as well as call back people who requested a consultation. It seems obvious now, but it shocked us to discover that a vast number of people were willing to sign up for credit repair services if they could talk to someone about it first. The Credit Team grew very quickly and generated a robust stream of revenue and profit. Success Rating: Raging Success.
Credit Einstein. Credit Card Portfolio Management. 34 years-old. Circa 2003. Everyone knows that Americans have a ton of credit card debt. And, everyone knows that Americans don’t pay much attention to the interest rates on their credit cards when the rates go up or down. People pay attention to their home mortgage rates, but they don’t watch their credit cards. I thought that I could monitor peoples’ credit card rates for them and switch them to better cards when their rates got to be too high. Customers would pay me a monthly fee and the credit card companies would pay me a commission every time I brought them a new customer. Alas, the same Americans who don’t pay much attention to the interest rates on their credit cards are also the same Americans who don’t have the attention span required to read this paragraph. We never figured out how to describe the service in a way that the ADHD-plagued American consumer could understand. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
CreditAss. Humor/marketing website. 34 years-old. Circa 2003. Among my more embarrassing lapses in judgment, CreditAss was a multimedia website that offered funny, supposedly-viral, games and videos related to credit repair and credit cards. Some of the stuff that came out of CreditAss was really amusing to those of us who took part in the creative process. Everyone else thought, “Why are these guys trying to make credit and debt funny?” Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Special Ops Paintball. Paintball Marketing and Products. 34 years-old. Circa 2003. I thought I saw a market opportunity. That’s what I tell myself to feel better about the ungodly amount of money I lost with this business. The paintball market had turned away from its Rambo-roots and I thought I could make a pile of money turning it back. I was right about half of that equation: the sport of paintball was ripe to be turned back to its Rambo-roots. While an amazingly-talented team of artists, product engineers and programmers led the charge, I paid for a revolution in the sport of paintball. The paintball industry took note of the revolution Special Ops was leading and copied everything the company did. But, fate would have the last laugh. The paintball market imploded a few years later. Everyone lost their shirts, but none more than me. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
The Living Christmas. Non-profit Charity. 35 years-old. Circa 2004. (Co-founded.) After watching the movie Pay it Forward, I decided to parlay some of my business experience into building a non-profit organization. Lots of people play “Secret Santa” during the holidays. They find a family in need and then buy them Christmas, usually dumping a pile of gifts on the doorstep, ringing the doorbell and scurrying away. My wife and I thought we could put this concept on steroids by organizing it and making it tax-deductible. Low-and-behold, the Christmas spirit is alive and well. Each year for many years now, volunteers have stepped forward to buy Christmas for hundreds of families through the Living Christmas program. Success Rating: Raging Success.
The Great Life Foundation. Non-profit Life Coaching. 35 years-old. Circa 2004. (Co-founded.) When I was twenty-five, I went through a life training that totally transformed my worldview. For four days, a cranky, German-American “trainer” lambasted me and a hundred other “trainees” about how our lives were all messed up. More or less, we eventually discovered that he was right. The experience radically altered the trajectory of my life and I came away convinced that this kind of training contained a recipe for good. The only thing that sucked about these trainings was that every one of them in the United States was led by a leader who was too full of himself. This tendency toward promoting a figurehead was a little too Jonestown for my tastes. In 2004, I joined a group of like-minded graduates of such trainings and we created a non-profit, graduate-directed life training company. After a few years, the organization found its rhythm and proved that a life training could succeed without a cult leader. Success Rating: Raging Success.
DrugTalk. Teen Drug Abuse Education. 36 years-old. Circa 2005. (Co-founded.) I came into this micro-business late. In fact, it was too late. DrugTalk was built on investor money and it had zero discipline when it came to spending money. For one thing, hundreds of thousands of dollars had already been spent and nobody knew if parents would buy drug abuse education. In the final analysis, a parent’s denial would prove stronger than a parent’s fear. Nobody wanted to be educated about the possibility that their kid was sneaking around doing drugs. Mental note: never start a business where your target audience actually hates the thought of your product. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Armchair Commandos. Paintball Reality TV Show. 36 years-old. Circa 2005. I’m still mystified why this project didn’t work. In my mind, the concept was utterly cool: two groups of diametrically opposed people, such as five punk rockers and five rednecks, come face to face on the paintball field. As if that wasn’t enough, we sweeten the pot with clever paintball scenarios such as “blow up the bridge” and “downed pilot rescue.” We slap a helmet camera and microphone on every player, place cameramen strategically around the field and we even put a helicopter in the air to film it all. Before the paintball event, we film the punk rockers talking trash on the rednecks and vice-versa. The two teams play against one another for the benefit of a charity of their choice. The pilot show had all the hallmarks of a great reality TV show: interpersonal rivalries, gripping action, people breaking down in tears and a heart-warming wrap up. After half a year of shopping the pilot around Hollywood, we eventually gave up. We got a lot of initial interest -- high-level talks with several of the major cable TV channels – but nobody ever bit. What a letdown. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Recon Magazine. Paintball Magazine. 36 years-old. Circa 2005. While I was busy pouring ungodly amounts of money into paintball, why not start a magazine, too? "Recon" was a full-color glossy magazine with amazing writing and even better photography. It published almost three years of quarterly issues before finally closing down. Like so many businesses, Recon had serious trouble marketing itself. We couldn't get enough advertisers to pony up, even though we struck a major distribution deal and got the mag into Barnes and Noble. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Progrexion Marketing. Telephone & Internet Marketing. 37 years-old. Circa 2006. (Acquired.) With the growth of the internet marketing of Lexington Law Firm, a larger credit repair consulting business demanded a larger, more robust base of operations. My partner led the acquisition of Progrexion Marketing to add to our internet marketing bandwidth. While Progrexion was anything but a micro-business, it launched its own internet sales operation from-the-ground-up and saw excellent success. Ultimately, Progrexion would consolidate with The Credit Team and form a juggernaut of inbound telephone sales. Success Rating: Raging Success.
After Divorce. Post-divorce Financial Services & Coaching. 37 years-old. Circa 2006. (Co-founder.) Before the economic crisis of 2007, the single biggest cause behind bad credit was divorce. When a couple breaks up, there is enough emotion and chaos that the couple’s credit rating usually goes to pot. Myself, my wife Pamela and two other partners created a series of services that would act as “silver bullets” against the monsters that almost always plague a divorcing couple’s finances. The coaching and services were excellent, but the marketing was a failure. We were counting on divorce attorneys to offer the After Divorce package to divorcing couples. What we discovered was that divorce attorneys are virtually all swamped and that they have only one thing on their minds: legal fees. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Elite Weekend. High-price, Adventure-intensive Paintball Event. 38 years-old. Circa 2007. Special Ops Paintball was already known as the premium source of paintball adventure, so it made sense to put together a big event. Of course, we didn't stop there, we made it the Biggest, Most-awe-inspiring, Teeth-rattling paintball even in the galaxy. We charged over $1,000 per person for attendance and we still lost money. There were paintball tanks, helicopters, smoke, bombs, celebrities, true machine guns, wildly complicated game scenarios, tons of prizes, a free paintball gun, a signature set of camos, on and on and on. It was a logistical nightmare -- but it was certainly spectacular. It sold out, but when we went to do it again two years later, the economy had turned south and paintball had slowed way down. We lost money and we couldn't make it happen more than once. Success Rating: Fabulous Failure.
Pathways. Drug Abuse Treatment Counseling. 39 years-old. Circa 2008. (Co-founder.) Probably the most promising thing to come out of the DrugTalk fiasco was the discovery that recovering drug abusers would choose in-home treatment to residential treatment, where they have to live at a treatment center. If it could be marketed, in-home treatment could bring a lot more people into drug treatment and form the basis for a thriving business. Pathways has a proven, scalable model. As with most micro-businesses, marketing Pathways has become the real challenge. Currently, the business operates on pure word-of-mouth, which is a good indicator that the business is delivering value, but it doesn’t do much to put up big numbers. Success Rating: Work-in-progress.
Kingfisher’s Perch. Alaskan Salmon Guide Service. 37 years-old. Circa 2006. (Co-venture.) I’ve fished with Kingfisher’s Perch every year for the last thirteen years and almost all of that time, I’ve been providing informal business coaching. When the proprietor, Josh Hughes, came to me with a proposal to expand his business, I agreed to participate. By investing money in the company, I allowed Josh to expand his boat fleet, add an ocean-going boat and blow the doors off his marketing. To date, one misstep after another has plagued the business aspects of KFP, though their guide service continues to be best-in-class. In 2009, the Alaska Fish & Game shut down salmon fishing in the rivers served by Kingfishers and this clobbered their business. Fortunately, the ocean boat business sky-rocketed during the same season. Still, the wisdom of partnering in KFP remains a huge, personal question mark. Success Rating: Work-in-progress.
Third Paycheck/Micro-buisiness Fanatics. Micro-business Coaching. 39 years-old. Circa 2008. After the economic downturn of 2007, it’s never been a better time to start a small business. Simultaneously, the internet has revolutionized itself yet again to produce the miracle of social media. With tools at-hand like Facebook, Twitter and Google Wave, it’s possible to bring together tribes of micro-businesspeople who’ll support one another. Add a dash of personal coaching from experienced business coaches, and it should be a recipe for win-win-win. Success Rating: Work-in-progress.
Tactical Stitchworks. Adventure Soft Goods. 40 years-old. 2009. With Special Ops Paintball in shambles, a good friend and expert in sewn products, Brian “Mo” Russell, decided to continue making paintball and adventure vests and other “soft goods.” We branching into scuba products, archery products and hunting products as well. Mo already has steady orders coming in, so the risk of failure is low. Stratospheric success might take some doing, though. Success Rating: Work-in-progress.
