Startups & Online Business

I have been swanning around for a year or so now after selling my old business. I did ok out of the sale but between my Ex wife and the Lawyers I am not yet a wealthy man.

I am still a member of Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) which requires that you have a business turning more than $1m USD pa and are majority shareholder and founder. (when I joined you used to have to be under 40 as well but luckily they changed the rules just as I was about to age out).

After a business sale you have 3 years in which to create a new EO business ie $1m USD turnover.

The old business used to turn over a few million a year ($4 mill at its peak)

So the last year I spent sailing, travelling, consulting for a Venture Capitalist and building a Online Business Magazine for Start-ups as well as about 7-8 other experiments including www.feedmehomes.com/mashup and www.searchcorp.com.au which is going very well on selling Google Entreprise Search Appliances, Maps Licenses and coming soon Google Apps for Australia.

In order to keep my membership (and buy myself a Porsche) I have set myself the challenge of creating another EO business within the next 12 months.

This means growing my business to $85000 per month.

So the report for October is as follows

Business Consulting $2000

Website Advertising & promotion $2250

Searchcorp Google sales $14500

Total $18750

Still a long way to go but not bad for just mucking about.

Here is the plan, I will be taking on more consulting work over the next year as well as an equity position in another startup.

My old business was an un-scalable services business highly dependent on highly skilled and expensive staff and very hard to grow to a decent size.

I am determined to create a number of highly scalable online businesses with a low requirement for skilled staff.

I have launched just www.networkstore.com.au which is focusing on Niche high value high margin networking products. I love these style of sites, they dont take much update and they provide extremely high return on time invested once you have them running.

For example the Searchcorp.com.au site takes an hour or so of work a month and returns between $1-4k profit per month and this is with the current product range valued between $4-20k.

We have just added the Google Search appliance to this site which must be the most expensive piece of equipment available to purchase online (aside from Cars, Boats and houses) these are valued at up to $1.7 Million for the really big one and the Google Maps Licenses which are valued between $16-400k pa.

Both these sites will grow our revenue, but they are very inconsistent ie some months we will sell 3-4 devices and then next month nothing.

So my guess is that while both of these sites may take me to $50k per month, I think I will need something else to get the next step. So I am still on the lookout.

Anyone else want to join me for the $1 Million New Business Challenge?