Do you plan to be a slave for the rest of your life?

I expect not since you are reading about how to create an Internet-based business.  Most people want to start a business so that they can eventually earn their personal freedom from a J.O.B.

Most fail though.  They read instructions like these and then go out and actually perform those instructions themselves.  That leads to creating a J.O.B. (just over broke) for yourself.  You trade in an employer who works you like a slave for 40+ hours a week for owning your own business and slaving for yourself for 80+ hours per week.

That’s a mistake.

You don’t need another J.O.B. and you certainly don’t want one.  So what is the solution?

These instructions are meant for you, but they are NOT meant for YOU to carry out.  They are meant as a roadmap to start a company.

Let’s look at the Wiktionary definition for “company”:

A group of individuals with a common purpose.

Isn’t that interesting?  It doesn’t say anything at all about becoming a slave yourself.  A company is a “group of individuals”, not a single individual doing all of the work themselves!

If you eventually want to earn your personal freedom, then you have to not even be one of those individuals!

How do you get a “group of individuals” to become your company?

There are a lot of ways that have been done in the past.  They even have names associated with them:

Partners
Shareholders
Employees
Contractors
Interns
Vendors
Agencies
Volunteers

Some of them aren’t paid.  Some are paid in cash.  Some are paid in less direct means (such as co-ownership in the business).

I’ve used all of the above methods to build companies.  My current favorite is paid contractors.

A contractor is someone who owns their own business and provides services to your business.  There are massive advantages over having employees.  You don’t generally buy office equipment (or even provide an office) or tell contractors what hours they can or can’t work.  You never pay overtime (unless you create a contract where you offer that).  You never have to fire anyone.  You can just stop using one contractor and start using another.  Lot’s of taxes (such as unemployment insurance and social securty) are non-existant in a contractor relationship… or they pay for them.  The same goes for health insurance.  They run their own company and you run yours.  You aren’t responsible for paying health insurance in someone else’s company.

There are lots of contractors who are actually one-man companies (doing exactly what I don’t recommend… but it’s very popular out there).  Your relationship with a contractor can be very similar to employee with some major exceptions:

1. You don’t control their hours.  You can ask for a guarantee of a certain number of hours per month or something like that, but they don’t work for you in the way an employee does.   You don’t get to call them into your office and chastize them for being 5 minutes late to work.

2. You can’t provide them an office and office equipment.  That is strong evidence that your relationship with them is as an employee and not a separate company.

Neither are big enough disadvantages in an Internet business to use contractors vs. employees.  Of course you can also try to attract interns and volunteers.  At one point, I had over 25% of the work being performed in one company by unpaid interns.   I benefited from free labor.  They benefited from learning how my business ran.

Most of us struggle with getting paid help right away for two major reasons:

1) You don’t have money to invest.

2) You don’t have a good “hiring” process.

Most would actually state that #1 is the reason.  The reality is that #2 is the real culprit.

You see… every human resource you add to your business should increase net profit.

Let me say that again.

Every human resource you add to your business should increase net profit.

Hiring isn’t an expense!  It’s a way to build your business.

I recently met with four coaching clients who were supposedly following what I teach to build their business.  They were all profitable, but their profit was tiny.  It basically just added some extra spending money every month instead of providing a real income and true freedom.

I went through their metrics to find out where the problem was.  I assumed it was one of those three things I always talk about:  Traffic, Conversion, Product.

Those are the three things that contribute to the amount of net profit, so I carefully review those with each one and asked about the procedures they were using for each part of the equation (which we’ll cover in future chapters).

Their answers were all consistent.  They were following good business practices as I taught them and it was working… but only with a result of a tiny amount of profit.

I didn’t get it.  These are the same procedures that I run in my own businesses.  I didn’t understand how it was possible that they weren’t making more profit.

I thought maybe growth was simply somehow happening at a microscopic rate of speed for them, so I asked them how many human resources they had.

All four gave me a blank stare.

I thought maybe they didn’t know how to answer because it’s not really the number of human resources you have that counts.  Some types of human resources only work 2 hours per week.  Some work 80.  Some (like vendors that are a group of people) can work 2,000 hours in a week.   Hours doesn’t really count either.  Some will be less effective with their time than others.  Some you can’t even measure in hours (like vendors).  They don’t even tell you the number of hours.  You pay for results.

So I clarified by telling them how I measured that metric overall.  I asked… “How much did you spend last week on all of your human resources combined?”

A received another blank stare and then some stuttering.  Then the truth came out.  There were working a J.O.B., not running a company at all.  They were doing all of the work.  They worked 80 hours the prior week, but didn’t pay any kind of human resources to do anything!

That’s a problem.

You can’t build a company without the company part!

You need to hire employees or contractors or vendors or in some other way get some human resources at work in your business or you simply don’t have a business.

The first excuse really doesn’t cut it.  Everyone can come up with a $1 if it will make them $2.  Everyone would do that all day long if they could.  Wouldn’t you buy as many $2 bills as you could if they only cost $1 each?

The 2nd excuse is the real culprit, not a lack of money.  You’ll find money if you know you can easily turn $1 into $2.  The real problem is the hiring process.

I realized that several years ago.  I tried various ways of building a company and found out quickly that people are flaky.   Actually, they simply don’t care about your business as much as you do.  That gives the appearances of people being flaky, but the reality is that they simply have other priorities.

It takes a long time to build a hiring process that is profitable.  Of course key to that whole concept is having profitable things for them to do after you hire them, but we’ll have to cover that in future chapters as well.

Fortunately, I now have a “hiring” process that is quite profitable when teamed up with my other business procedures.  I use it over and over and over with every single business I start.

A client asked me for my hiring process and I promptly began selling it.  It’s a very simple written procedure with a video.  I also use some software, but I didn’t include that.   Some customers of that procedure were able to implement it without the software.  Others weren’t.  They fell victim to the fraud problem (another part of the reason I previously said that people are flaky… people will say they want a job and then claim they performed the job… but they really didn’t).

My software solves the fraud problem in my business.  I tried giving my customers the methods I used abstractly.  I couldn’t tell them exactly how I had solved the fraud problem using software because then my contractors would find out and possibly be able to get around the fraud prevention methods I used.  We would get into an escalating war where I had to constantly change the fraud prevention methods and then unscrupulous paid contractors would openly see what I did because it was released to customers… and then they could get around those new procedures.

So I was stuck.  I couldn’t share my software and so some of my customers weren’t able to duplicate my success.

Then one day a customer said… “why don’t you franchise it?”

It’s an obvious solution.  It’s how McDonalds became a multi-billion dollar company.  Every McDonalds franchise follows the proved procedures and much of it is embedded in software that they can never actually see, but never-the-less practically forces each franchise to be profitable.

I’m now going to do the same thing.  I’m going to start with my “hire” procedure along with all of the infrastructure behind it.  I’m not willing to sell my software for the above reasons, but I am willing to franchise it for a monthly fee.

Here’s how you will get access to the software and maintain control of your company while I continue to maintain control over the software any my company:

1. You pay the basic monthly franchise fee for hosting, access to the hiring procedure and access to the infrastructure that makes all of the other procedures function.  Later there will be other procedures that will be offered as plug-ins for a much lower monthly price, but for right now you start with the hire procedure because that’s what EVERYONE needs in EVERY business.

2. You register a domain for your business and point the name servers where we tell you to point them (so we can host the site for you at no additional charge).

3. You choose a password to access the email, blog and various other administrative areas of the site.

4. You choose the amount you wish to pay people for performing the hire procedure itself.  Or you can use the defaults we use which have been optimized for profitability (recommended).

5. Daily you will receive an email with a file you can upload to PayPal to pay your contractors.  They are only promised that they will be paid weekly, so you can choose a day of the week and upload all 7 files that were emailed to you that week.

6. Optionally, you will have a blog on the home page of the above site.   You can add links for new products that you have created and can blog about things happening in your company.  Otherwise, you can put up a single blog post welcoming people to the site and leave it at that.

There are other optional things you could do that we’ll teach you about once you are a franchise member.  These things help your business to grow faster, but aren’t mandatory.  In the end, you want your freedom.  The only thing in the above list that is mandatory and is done more than once is uploading your payroll to PayPal to pay your contractors.  Obviously you can hire someone local that you can trust with your PayPal password to do that for you, so this can become a 100% turn-key business.

I know.  I’ve done it several times now.  I currently own 3 businesses that are 100% turn-key and I do absolutely nothing with them.  I just spend the money they earn.

Here’s what we will do when we receive the above information and your first payment:

1. Provision hosting for your company site.

2. Install the blog software using the password you provided us.

3. Install all of our software using the password you provided us (so you can access the administrative screens if you wish).

4. Give you an email where you can send suggestions for future releases of the software.  The software works.  It is what we use in our own business.  However, we would love to hear your suggestions and we will implement any that make sense for everyone and are proven to be profitable.

5. Tell you how to launch your business (by running the hire procedure yourself a few times… or by hiring someone locally to do the same).

After that, it’s a machine.  The machine assigns new hires to hire more people.  You can slow down the process by paying less.  You can speed it up by paying more.  I recommend maximum growth by leaving the payment amount at our optimized level for maximum growth.

How do you make money?   Well, I already mentioned that you control the blog.  You can put links and articles about your products on that blog.

You will now have some significant traffic to that blog.  People who are interested in working for you are visiting the blog.  If you followed the advice in prior chapters, you have a product that is attractive to a large segment of the population… including those now visiting your blog.  Some will purchase.

More importantly though… you receive the email addresses of every contractor who actually performs a task in your business.  You can assign them new tasks that are different than the hiring task.

I will be providing new procedures in future chapters that allow you to increase your traffic, improve your conversion rate and even create products.  You can then just plug them right into the franchise software or you can assign them manually outside the franchise software by sending emails to the contractors who are actively working for you.

Are you ready for a true turn-key business?   It all starts with the hiring procedure.  Any company that offers franchise opportunities has a perfected hiring procedure.  You can go get a McDonald’s franchise (not very attractive to me) or you can buy in this much less expensive and much more turn-key solution.

Here’s the URL to get started:

http://www.DiegoNorte.com/services/Franchise/

P.S. We are only offering five franchises right now.  We have beta-tested our franchise system with four others already so we are ready to roll… but we would like to roll out the franchise slowly to see if there are any scaling issues.  If there is no subscribe button on the above URL… that means all five slots have been taken.  Thanks for your understanding.  We’ll open it again later.

P.P.S. If you want to see how our system works from the perspective of paid contractors, you can apply here:
http://www.DiegoNorte.com/apply/

You may reprint the above article in any publication online or offline as long as you do not modify it and give credit to Diego Norte as the author. No link is required, but links are always appreciated.