Here are the prices, book it now. I mean, for the last three years I owned the company, I was just playing a lot of grab ass, just gambling, just you know, I was working the proverbial hour work week. So I was like, do I want to step into this [?? So in , I decided to sell it, and it took me two years to sell it.
And I sold it to a company that would take it in that direction. I still own part of it, actually, so they are doing my vision of actually turning it into a booking company. When you sold it in , how much was that first iteration of the company doing in business and why did you sell it in the year ?
Good profits, also? The same kind of profit margins? MJ : The margins have been pretty much the same. Why did I sell it in ? Andrew : What were you thinking? Stupidity is simple, but you were a smart man.
You built up a successful company at that point. You got there for a reason, and you made the decision, too, for a reason. Why do it? Now looking back, I look at it as a mistake but also as a learning experience. Andrew : Why were you eating ramen noodles, considering how much revenue and profit you were generating?
MJ : Excuse me? MJ : This was before I was making the money. So you built up this business. You sold it. How much revenue were you making? MJ : In the second time? Andrew : The first time. Andrew : Okay, all right. MJ : This was during the boom when companies were just buying stuff. They were buying, you know, domains for cheap. They were buying companies with no revenue whatsoever. They liked my company as kind of a cookie cutter.
The first company that bought it is a cookie cutter that they could replicate in different industries. And after about a year after they bought it, they ended up going bankrupt and tried to turn it into an application enterprise developer. Andrew : I see. All right. So you sold because you were living on ramen noodles.
You said, I need out. These guys are offering me a lot of money. They gave it to you in cash and largely it seems like stock, if I understand this right? MJ : It was a half million in cash, and then the rest was stock options, which obviously are worthless. MJ : And then of that half million, I promptly blew pretty much half of it.
Which is not bad. MJ : Yes, and I got caught up in the Internet implosion. I put a lot of money into tech stocks at the time, and again learning. Andrew : Forgive me. One more question before we continue with the story. MJ : Was this what? Andrew : And did they buy the lead gen model or they bought the directory model? MJ : No, they bought the lead gen model. Andrew : Lead gen model, okay. So I can see.
They ended up with a great business. You ended up with a big potential for money. I understood why you took it. I understand also why they failed, and then they offered it back to you, and the way that you financed it I thought was interesting. Can you share with my audience how you financed that quarter million dollar repurchase of the site that you sold?
MJ : Sure. They actually came back to me, and said, hey, you know what. Would you be want it back? And I said absolutely.
You know, within two years, I had it paid off. I would come home at the end of the day, go to sleep, wake up and go to the office like a monk and just work. It sounds like you were living better. Can you take me through for just a moment — this is a diversion from the main interview — but can you tell me a little bit about how your life was impacted when you were doing that well?
I lived that life for many years. But at some point, the company became automated where the people that I had in it were running it, and I could go off and do whatever I wanted to do.
And how your life changes there is when you realize, oh my God, this is incredible. I gave up a lot of that stuff to create what I call a money tree.
So go ahead. Andrew : I wrote down a couple notes as you were talking about money tree, about automation. I want to come back to that in a moment about how you did it. I know how much you sold the company for, but can you tell the audience in your words how much you sold the company for in ?
MJ : 4 and a half. Like you gave an example in your book of a teacher who teaches health and nutrition. Can you talk about that? This is the guy. MJ : A guru who teaches health and nutrition? Andrew : Health and nutrition, yes. MJ : I wrote it three years ago. You talk about walking into a room. Now I remember! Andrew : Oh, go ahead.
Do you want to tell it? MJ : About the professor that will teach you how to earn the body of your dreams, to live a life of health and fitness. So that, to me, is a guru hypocrisy where, and I see this with a lot of financial experts.
So that, to me, is kind of a hypocrisy. I mean, a great example is the gurus. Have you ever met a year-old millionaire who got rich because he clipped coupons? MJ : Well, they teach the slow lane, and they get rich in the fast lane. In other words, they teach one financial road map, but then they leverage another financial road map.
These people get rich because they create brands that scale to a multi-million audience. They impact millions, therefore they make millions. I mean, do people seriously believe that Susie or any of these other authors are rich because of their k or because of their IRA? Well, there. You opened his book and it says something about stop drinking coffee. Are you rich because you stopped drinking coffee? You have a half billion dollars under management. And you wrote 10 books. Say, you know what, this book, you know, if it becomes a best seller, has the potential to make me much more wealthier than I am now because it leverages the same equation.
Andrew : How, by the way, could the fast lane make you rich? MJ :Well, it leverages the same question. I mean, how many people in the world are interested in financial independence or entrepreneurship or, you know, attracting wealth in a short period.
Millions and millions and millions of people, and I see that when I see orders from New Zealand and Australia. Well, my upper limit on a book that people actually find useful and not one I have push mercifully, but the upper limit is virtually millions, if not billions of people, so yeah, I can print 10 million of these books without much issue. I wanted it when I was in my 30s. I wanted when, you know, I was still young enough to enjoy it.
The crux of that whole plan is time. Put your life savings into the stock market, wait 50 years. To trade time is to trade life. What else? Help me understand this one.
You said, I spent 5 years in college. Wait — let me read it right. I spent 5 years in college for a phone book. What do you mean by that? MJ : Well, one of the interviews I went in after college graduation, and I went on the interview just to humor myself.
It was an insurance company. And I just remember that moment, looking at that cubicle, and thinking to myself, I spent 5 years in college to sit in a cubicle with a telephone book? No way. Andrew : I was kind of thinking you meant something different, and of course, now that I think of it, the paragraphs underneath that heading — I spent 5 years in college for a phone book — explain just what you did.
In my mind, I was thinking of the one reason that people say they went to college. And when I think of it in light of this sentence, really you spend 4, 5 years in your case, in college just so you can have some contacts? And for what? For nothing. MJ : Yeah, and not to slight college or anything, but I learned more in my first year of failing, you know, just trying different things with business than I did in 4 or 5 years of college.
I think application and just going out and doing and not being afraid of the failure, that is the best education there is. I know a lot of people who have gotten a lot out of it, and I also believe my mission here is not to knock anyone. It is to suck as much information out of everyone as I can, so let me learn directly from you, MJ. What are these five commandments for? What do we get if we follow them? When I say fast lane, I mean can this business grow exponentially and possibly create exponential wealth in my life?
And the first one. Do you want me to go through the first? Andrew : Yeah, actually. What is need? MJ : Need. The commandment of need, I believe, is basically you want to start a business that solves a fundamental need in the marketplace. I mean, when I started my company, there was 12 other companies already doing a similar thing. I just did it better, so sometimes the need is just about being a better executor and not necessarily finding or inventing the new segway or something groundbreaking.
What can your business do for me? Why should I give you money? A great example that I have is people that have read my book and have absolutely loved it. Do they care that I hated writing it? What if I told you I hated writing it? Does it matter to you? You just want to know what can it do for me? What problem can it solve to make my life easier? One of the lines in there was about American Idol. MJ : Correct. Andrew : Number two. The second thing we need to look for is Entry. Can you describe that?
What does that mean and what are we looking for? MJ : Entry basically states that as the lower the barrier entries are to any particular business, the worse the opportunity becomes. Because as a marketplace becomes more saturated, obviously the profitability or the margins of that particular space go down. So we want to have businesses that have to be started or created as a process, not as an event.
And by process, I mean it usually takes weeks, sometimes months. The example I like to give is I have a friend that has a bed and breakfast in Napa Valley. I have to go find a place.
The whole process of competing becomes a process, and that keeps people out and keeps the market, you know, not air tight but secure. Those are the kind of things you want to avoid. Andrew : Right. MJ : Downloading WordPress and just throwing up.
So you need to be the high barrier to entry for the business to have the right possibility for you. The other commandment is you need control, and you gave this great example of ad sense and what happened with your forums.
Can you describe what control is? What are we looking for and tell the story about ad sense. And they immediately canceled the ads. Another example is I had an affiliate program at my company.
Pretty good money. I could have canceled it. Maybe they changed something. You want to be offering them. You want to offer drop shipping. You want to be selling them. You know, you want to be the top of the pyramid. Think, you know. Andrew : Next is scale. MJ : Scale is, again, that wealth equation I talked about earlier.
You want to be involved in a business you can scale to the masses. It can be a niche. Pretty big but still a small niche, but everyone can use it around the world. So scale is about having a business that has the potential, meaning a wealth equation or a speed limit, that can reach the masses. Andrew : All right and finally time.
And you say this over and over. Detach your business from your time. MJ : Time basically says, are you building a company that can turn into a money tree? And time is probably the least important but is also the hardest as well. I mean, it took me years to get my company automated. And I think a lot of business have an implicit time component.
I mean, the Internet is number 1 because Internet is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He has these five commandments. You do this. Under the Internet section, you talk about the importance of building subscriptions. Can you talk about the power of a subscription-based business?
MJ : I think the subscription-based business is probably the most potent fast lane there is. Based on or predicated on the fact that you have a valued product. Well, you can do the math there. You immediately can scale it to a multi-million dollar audience via the Internet. And once you have, the biggest challenge of that, obviously, is getting it started, and I think a lot of people will start it, but not really have a value product there.
I get that a lot. It needs to be free, so people can consume it. Andrew : So how then do we find the product? How do we find it? Just the other day, someone was on my forum, and said, hey, is there a mixer juice[SP] site that does brick and mortar? So I believe all these opportunities are always exposed in our environment, in our everyday activities.
I mean, every time I go into a customer service situation, I see an opportunity. You want to know why? Because customer service sucks. So again, look in your language. My fast lane forum started by a problem. People were complaining on another forum that it was just full of scams and network marketing stuff and just a bunch of crap, so I went and started that based on that need exposed in another forum.
Andrew : Okay, so that brings me to the community. Your community is incredibly powerful. And these guys are persistent and caring and I would even email them back and say, why, what did you get, what did you learn from MJ? MJ : Customer discipleship, and that involves having a product that people genuinely love. If they genuinely love your product and you back it up with customer service, they will talk about it. Andrew : I see authors, though, who have good books who have said things that are interesting and other sites talk about them, and they even get blogs that are well read.
And many of them have, and it is tumbleweed. For example, I think today to just check up on you before this interview started, I checked your Twitter feed and I also checked your message boards, and I think today you posted a few comments.
You responded to one guy who had a question about email newsletters. You should offer it for free and gave him a whole explanation, so you are very active in those boards. What else do you do to keep your community engaged and to get it to grow?
MJ : Well, engagement, you know. I was at a forum before where the guru of that forum never showed up. You create people, you know, that will tell somebody about you. My marketing on my book, it sucked. The people who have read my book and told other people, and that is what is driving my sales right now, not some master marketing guru skills that I have done. Andrew : What are you generating in sales from the book? Andrew : So, go ahead. MJ : No, no, no. Andrew : Oh, 1, units a month.
MJ : Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see, okay. MJ : Nope. Andrew : This is it? This is it? None of that. MJ : I have no idea. This is again, I talk about being market-pulled as opposed to me pushing market. If the market wants me to write another book, I will. I might started another Internet co. I might retire for another 5 years. The company's online rental marketplace for limousine and other cars enabling its travelers to compare and book pre-screened car services.
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