Here’s the next update for Maverick Business Adventures.

My friend Jeff Walker called me and said I was crazy to release my mindmap into the wild

I really appreciate the comments and feedback so far from readers on the blog.

Looks like a lot of people like the yearly membership. I had two of my friends, Rob Olic & Chris Zavadowski, come over last night and we brainstormed some other details for the project. Amazing what luring them over for a steak dinner will do.

Rob came up with the idea of having an exclusive gathering each year of everyone who attended the trip. Probably some sort of Maverick Millionaires Summit with big keynote speakers like Richard Branson if I can get him. (Hey, I helped pay for his rocket ship)

I wonder how much the right price for membership would be if we include this big event? And that also includes x number of DVDs/Audios from the “What’s working” section and guest lectures. Then Chris came up with the idea of giving people back the membership fee based on the number of trips they go on a year. I like that so that essentially makes the membership free. I like that a lot – plus it helps incentives people to get on more trips and have more FUN!

I’ve had over 232 people take my survey and from the results there was interest in not just having more “extreme” trips like I’m into but having more typical adventure excursions. I’d like to come up with a list of 10 trips and then whittle it down to 2-3 and have those be our first trips in the beginning of ’08. Looks like some good interest in Whitewater rafting, bicycling and the Offroad Baja trip (which from personal experience I can is absolutely awesome!)

1. I’ve had my virtual assistants start researching even more of the competitive landscaping. Here’s what I asked them for:

a) Competitors – is there anyone else doing this for individual entrepreneurs?

b) “Side” competitors – people who put on corporate trips (incentive,team building,etc) combined with adventures.
For these I’d like sample pricing, what they get, etc.

c) What are the most popular adventure travel trips. You might need to call a few outfitters.

d) Articles/info on entrepreneurs combining fun pursuits with business

I wanted to get up to 3 hours of research and then we’ll re-evaluate direction and/or continuing. I’d like this info in the next few days please.

What I’m looking for is a “marketplace gap” to figure our where I can make the most differentiation points.

2. I also put up a “first notice” coming soon page  at www.surefiremarketing.com/maverick until my site propagates. Be sure to sign up there if you’d like to know when we open up for the first trip. Now after the survey is taken – people get taken to this page to start generating a list.

3. I also started tapping into some of the people I know. For instance, I emailed Tim Warren for consulting since he specializes in working with adventure travel outfitters. And it looks like we’ll be speaking this week. I had met Tim 2 years back when I first started researching this project and he was doing smart things (marketing-wise) to help outfitters. We had corresponding and he actually attended the Underground seminar.

I was looking through one of my journals and here were the words I wrote about no project in particular –

• Entrepreneurship
• Masterminding
• Brainstorming
• Adventures
• Fun
• Luxury
• Unique experiences
• Partying

That might be the guiding factors for this project (and not necessarily in that order)

More to come…

Something else before I forget – let me be the reminder that you should back up everything! Yesterday, my son, Zak, decided my cell phone looked thirsty and dunked it into my cup of tea. Ugh! I had over 200 numbers in there and never backed it up. I had bought some software/adaptor a few months ago to back it up to my computer but, of course, never got around to it.

So I had to send out the sheepish email to people asking for their contact info again. Who knows? Maybe my phone will dry out and I’ll actually be able to get the data off of it.

Trust me, I know it’s annoying back-up data, files, etc – but once you lose it you’ll be kicking yourself. For my computer I use Mozy.com because it’s so simple and does the back-up automatically without me thinking about it. Somebody mentioned there is that option for Verizon cell phones – I wish I had it now!