POWER OF FREE! #6: What’s Your Story in Intelligent Content Marketing: Starting Out In Business

So I graduated from the college of law passed the solicitor’s final examination. Now, I was supposed to go to the UK one year later to start my legal career with a law firm called eversheds.

And I thought, well, I’ll hedge my bets here, I’ll see if I can get something going. That’s that’s lucrative in Hong Kong, and then see what that means for me. And what I’m going to do in the UK subsequently. So long Behold, I started a legal consulting business by accident effectively, that stuck with me all this time. And when I first started, I didn’t have a clue about business. In due course, I came to understand that I had an absolutely rubbish business model, because effectively, what I was doing selling legal consulting services, which meant company and corporations, and trademarks, and employment contracts, and all that kind of boring stuff that needs to get written down in businesses. Really, all I was doing was selling myself as as a poor man’s alternative to a solicitor selling my time, at a discounted price. It just seemed to me that I was a terrible business model. So I didn’t want any of that. And then I read a book that changed my way of thinking. And it’s, it’s this book called focus by our ease.

And this simple, simple, simple proposition was that in any marketplace, what you need to do is specialize in something. focus on one thing, and then do it well. So here, I was doing companies and trademarks, and all this kind of stuff and doing some immigration as well. Thinking, yeah, what do I do, where’s the best place to focus. And it became apparent to me that it’s got to be immigration because nobody else was doing it. So that changed the way I thought about business. So a couple years later, I wrote the first version of the Hong Kong visa handbook and put it on the internet for free, and it kind of made me and I have quite a bit of money that I made out of those out of that, out of that time, and I put it into other businesses, I thought I was bulletproof. We, I invested in a company called micro sulis, which was the head of very high technology, microwave product for treatments or certain physiological conditions. And I had a deal with my ex partners. With my immigration practice.

I was running both of these deals at the same time thinking that I was absolutely Superman. And then the Microsoft deal fell over with 911. And then after having made some rather strange mistakes in interpreting the nature of the relationship that I have with my partners, in the big immigration deal, I effectively handed over the keys to my practice that I built up over more than a dozen years in 2006 to those people without really receiving any compensation for it. But that was as a result of stupid mistakes made. In my in my career, whilst we were midwives in the process of making all of those mistakes on the immigration side and the business model development side, before I did the big immigration deal.

My now business partner, mitre and I, we were looking for an opportunity to brand, a particular immigration service in Hong Kong, because we recognized that there are 17,000 people each year, that has to track down to the Immigration Department to get their visas extended. And it’s purely for the most part, a matter of administration. And so because we understood that, I thought, I think I believe that we can build a complete product proposition where we could sell the solution to that problem for people for less than 1000 Hong Kong dollars, everything included. And this was an 79. So this was 2000 2000. So in 1998 1999, we were doing this, so we called it visa time. And because of the big immigration deal that I did, we never had an opportunity to really take that to Market. But what we did was we built our very first purple cow we just didn’t realize that you know You would call something like that a purple cow back then.

But we never had an opportunity to test it in the market. And that was called visa time. So, during all of this time, I made the decision that I would have to bring my family out of Hong Kong and move them somewhere where they could grow up with grass under their feet. So we will live in out in cycling at the time, and we’re living in to store to store two floors of a three story building and it was very nice and we had a couple of helpers. But we really felt that Australia would be a better place for our kids to grow up.

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