Authors: Chris Guillebeau
The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future (7 page)
A spa takes away stress while making guests feel loved and accepted. A popular message is, “We’ll do everything for you—relax and leave the details to us.” This is also the message that a good restaurant sends, not, “Come back into the kitchen and make your own dinner.”
Brooke Snow, an artist and musician, struggled to make a living by teaching classes in her small Utah town. She got by without working a real job and paid for college without going into debt, which could be considered a success on its own, but making ends meet was a continual battle. One day she realized the obvious: Instead of putting up flyers in Logan, Utah, and hoping for enough phone calls, what if she could teach anywhere in the world?
The change happened by accident, ironically after one of the worst days of her initial business. “I had to cancel a class due to underenrollment,” Brooke says. “At the time my husband was starting graduate school, and we had an eight-month-old baby and a
new home.” Needless to say, the pressure was mounting. When she phoned Micah, one of the few students who had enrolled, to notify him of the cancellation, it turned out he was a doctoral candidate in instructional technology with an emphasis on distance education.
Brooke describes herself as a good photographer and teacher but not highly technical. Happily, she is also good at bartering—and in this case, she offered private lessons to Micah in exchange for his help in setting up an online course. Since it was almost perfectly in line with what he was studying, Micah was thrilled to help Brooke make the online transition.
In the last year Brooke taught all her classes locally, she made $30,000. In the first year she offered the class online, she made more than $60,000. Nice! Going from offline to online helped a lot, but Brooke also attributes the successful transition to something else: the idea of always being willing to share. Early in her career, she went to a seminar where she heard someone say, “If you make your business about helping others, you’ll always have plenty of work.” Here’s what happened next:
That statement changed my life. I was in an over-saturated market of photographers competing for portrait work, all of whom were very closed about sharing any trade secrets. I let go of fear and embraced the concept of helping others (so I could have “plenty of work”!) and decided to start teaching classes on photography in my basement. One family skeptic cautioned me that I would be “training my competition.” Thankfully, making my business about helping others has proved itself over and over.
We’ll return to Brooke’s theme several times throughout the book. I call it the freely receive, freely give approach. When all else fails, ask yourself how you can help people more.
What do people really,
really
want? At the end of the day, they want to be happy, and businesses that help their customers be happy are well-positioned to succeed. The V6 Ranch creates modern cowboys. Kelly’s yoga practice helps busy executives prepare for their day in peace. The restaurant we went to at the end of a stressful week—when it’s not making its customers pop back into the kitchen—helps its patrons relax and decompress over a glass of wine and great service.
Conversations with the group returned to this theme many times in different ways. The common theme was to figure out what people want and then find a way to give it to them. This is the road map to a successful, profitable business. As you build your escape plan, keep your eyes on the prize: creating real value by giving people what they really want.
KEY POINTS
Value
means “helping people.” Our unexpected entrepreneurs discovered that when they focused on providing value above all else, their businesses were successful.
*
See the “
Fish Stories
” appendix at the back of the book for twenty-five more examples of how to reframe a descriptive concept as a benefit-driven story.
“Passion, though a bad regulator
,
is a powerful spring.”
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
L
ike many of us, Gary Leff begins his day with email. As a CFO for two university research centers in northern Virginia, he’s in touch with colleagues from morning to night. It’s a good job that he enjoys, and he has no plans to leave. But the “early early” morning email traffic comes from another source: Gary’s part-time business as a specific kind of consultant.
Like me, Gary is an active “travel hacker,” earning hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles every year through various airline promotions. Many executives also earn plenty of miles, usually from business credit card charges, but earning miles and redeeming them for actual vacations are two different things. The executives typically have no idea how the process works and don’t have the time to learn. How many miles do you need for any specific trip? What if the airline tells you no seats are available? If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s easy to get frustrated and give up.
That’s where Gary comes in. For a fee (currently $250 for up to two passengers with the same itinerary), Gary will set up the trip of your dreams based on preferences you select. Clients tell Gary
where they want to go, which airline their miles are coming from, and any restrictions they have on their travel dates. Then Gary gets to work, combing databases to check on availability, phoning the airlines, and taking advantage of every loophole.
It may sound strange to pay $250 for something you could do on your own for free, but the value Gary provides through the service is immense: Many of the trips he arranges would otherwise cost $5,000 or more. He specializes in first- and business-class itineraries, and some of them feature as many as six airlines on a single award ticket. You want a free stopover in Paris en route to Johannesburg? No problem. You want to allow plenty of time to visit the Lufthansa first-class terminal in Frankfurt before continuing on to Singapore? Done. If he’s not successful in booking your trip, you don’t pay—the business succeeds only when it provides real value to clients.
In addition to executives, Gary’s clients are often retirees headed for cruises and couples planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip: basically anyone who has a bunch of miles but doesn’t want to go through the hassle of figuring out how to use them. Business picked up after he was featured in
Condé Nast Traveler
, but aside from calling the airlines to book the tickets, Gary manages communications entirely by email. The part-time job brought in $75,000 last year and is on track to top six figures annually. Since he has the full-time CFO gig and other business ventures, Gary invests the money instead of spending it. “I honestly do this because it’s fun,” he says. Meanwhile, he cashes in miles from his own bulging mileage accounts to travel the world with his wife, squeezing in luxury trips to the Philippines and Thailand between financial planning meetings back home.
