Intro

[smithytzu]

Hi All,

My name is Ben.

I'll give you a bit of a background of my business history.

I've never actually had a "normal job".

My parents had a small business, my grandparents ran many businesses over their years and same with my uncles etc.

Growing up to me, a normal job was actually abnormal.

My unofficial business career started at 12 (official at 16). When I was 12 years old me and a friend sold yo yo strings at school varying between 50 cents to $2. My father was in a business at the time where one of his suppliers sold different kinds of nylon and other kinds of rope, so my friend and I at the time came up with the idea of selling strings. We used a lego technics motor system to wind up/thread the strings it was pretty genius!

Yo yo strings was some nice little pocket money. This followed over the years in the mid/late 90's with then shareware game/software demos which we also sold to friends etc in school, shareware games like doom spanning over 4 floppy disks, good times.

So that was my pocket money.

When I was 16, I got into software development and released a range of Mp3 programs, this was around 99/2000 when Napster hit the scenes and mp3 was the new big thing.

I released a range of free Mp3toWav programs and it went balistic, for those on here too young to remember, when people first started downloading mp3's they wanted to get them onto CD's, the ipod was still a while a way, so to burn them to a CD you needed to convert the files first because the cd burning software didn't do that at the time, we were getting 20,000 plus downloads of the program each month, at the time software hosting sites were hard to come by and I hosted the files on my fathers businesses web hosting, I remember he was pretty pissed when he got the hosting bill for the first time!

I also had paid versions of the Mp3 software and I received about $200US a month from that. In hindsight back then if I had of worked out a way to monetize our free programs I would have already reached my goals by now! But I was still young and there wasen't an obvious way to monetize it back then.

In 2011 I managed to get some software published with a company and got it released nationwide. It was quite an achievement to see my software on the shelves of my local big brand tech store, certianly a proud moment.

The recurring revenue from the software sales but we pretty average, it seemed that most of the profit if any was taken from all the people in between myself and the consumer, by the time the money got to me it wasen't much more than I had made online.

So I decided to sell the title that we had released, source code etc, sold it for a few thousand, which at the time was a big deal, brought my first car etc and looked towards my next idea.

Around this time, I had just left school and despite my parents having a small business themselves, they still had the mainstream thoughts, they encouraged me to go to uni, get a job etc because while I had made some money with my projects, my father wasen't really convinced and wanted me to follow down that path.

Despite the pressure, I persued my own path.

Having now been in possesion of a car, I setup my own onsite PC repair business and advertised in the local paper, at first I would probabally get one job a week, but it slowly started to grow and within about 2 years I had my own business living off my own income comfortably.

By this time, my parents decided they wanted to move town, I stayed and grew my business.

In between onsite PC repair, I decided for a bit of fun to make my own clothing label, I designed some cool tshirts on the computer and had them printed off, did up a website and started selling the shirts, I went out to clothing stores and tried to get them to buy our gear. Eventually I had a thought, While we had no distributors etc I did basically have a complete business so I decided instead to sell the "clothing business" and I made a bit doing that.

I then did that another 3 times over and made even more.

So by this time I had a bit of cash and my own computer repair business.

In 2007, I decided to take the leap to a large retail store and hired a couple of employees and went down that path. Once again, in hindsight it's something I should have never done, but none the less, it was a good learning process.

I ran the store for about a year and a half and then got out of it with about 40k of Debt, bricks and motar retail is frankly just shit, I'm not saying it can't be made to work, I'm sure some forms can be, but in the end, I sat down and did the sums and realised that the onsite site of the business was funding the retail store's existence. Further more, the concept of spending half an hour of my time to sell a mouse which we made $5 on just seemed illogical to me.

I ditched the retail front and went back to a home office without knowing exactly where it would take me, I was in debt, and was certianly in a bit of a lost place at the time.

I had a re-think of my strategy, at around the same time we had picked up our first rsl club client, those in Australia would be familiar with the big RSL clubs, they have on average around 40 odd poker machines(some have hundreds), large dinining rooms, pub facilities etc they're like mini casinos.

So after picking up our first club client, I decided to focus on the clubs business and specialise in it, this proved to be successful and within a couple of years I had picked up every club within a day driving radius of my business. I started doing less residential stuff and focused more and more on the clubs (which eventually lead to a business name change etc).

By this time, I had paid off most of my debt from the retail nightmare.

One of the things I noticed in the Clubs industry was how poor some of their software systems were, I spent a lot of time fixing them for clients so I eventually decided we needed to make some of our own.

We went down this path and eventually build loyalty systems, the problem was that the buiness was just too expensive to be in due to regulation etc Additionally, the major Gaming businesses had a ridciously strong hold on the clubs, I remember one year when we did a mail out to a few clubs, and one manager emailed me back offended that we would even propose the use of our products compared to xyz company that they exclusively use.

A small company literally just couldn't crack the market, we had some small victories with some clubs, getting some of our basic software sold, but it was just impossible without the bankroll of the majors, the majors had control over every level of the business, including the regulators(most likely).

One of the majors, in a blunt move, brought out the manufacturers of our pcb's and that was basically the end of that.

The thing of it is that the market, despite having big clients, was only a small market and with the majors having strong control over it, the game on that one was over.

So I continued along the path of servicing the industry, rather than pushing products. The thing of it is that, I had hit a brick wall, while I was making enough money to live comfortably, I wasen't making that much money and ultimately it wasen't the big success that most of us here have dreamed of since we were a kid.

Additionally, I was working 9-5 (most days a lot longer) 5/6 days a week and what I began to realise (certianly since reading Mj's book) was that I actually just had a job, without the added benefit of being able to slack off and take sickies on mondays. It wasen't really the business I had imagined in my earlier years.

After reading Mj's book, although obvious, I actually realised what I was missing, that being scaleability i.e. only so many hours you can work in the day, only so much you can charge per hour etc, So early 2012(and quickly approaching 30) I sat down and did a detailed analysis of where I was at, some of my current businesses strengths etc something of a swot analysis.

Out of all that I came up with a product idea to leverage my existing experience and knowledge of the last decade that was scaleable, didn't have limits like time or hourly charges etc and as of the start of 2013 I have now just launched the solution.

I funded the whole thing out of my day to day onsite work, and I'm hoping now by mid 2013 it'll replace that day to day income.

So that's me.

That's my business history, there's obviously a few other side stories (including getting elected to the local municipal council and managing a 90million budget on a yearly basis) but we'll leave all that for another day.

Hope people get something out of these, looking forward to sharing some of my knowledge.

 

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