Working on a new book for Entrepreneur Press called Maverick Startup: 11 X-factors to bootstrap from zero to 6-figures (and beyond)

I think it’ll be coming out early next year. The publisher and I are using crowdsourcing to design the new cover. (btw – if you haven’t tried 99Designs.com you should consider them. I’ve used them on a lot of projects and always pleased.) We had the founder, Matt Mickiewicz, at a previous Underground – he was incredible.

If you could take 1 minute and cast your vote – I’d appreciate it. And if you leave a comment here (after you’ve voted) – I’ll randomly choose 3 of you guys to get an autographed copy of the book when it comes out.

(Note: I don’t know if the publisher will be going with the final voting on here but it’ll help with direction.)

Need a Print & Packaging Design? Try 99designs

Let me share a quick story with you that you might relate to…

My personal trainer, Jeff, and I have been working out for 10+ years. In that time he’s seen me build my online businesses and develop quite a few hot-selling product in several marketplaces. In fact, way back in 2001 or 2002 we actually co-developed a product called “Get Fit While You Sit”. I had the idea that there could be something for people sitting at their desks or watching TV and he created the workout programs to fit.

It wasn’t a barnburner but it made some steady checks for several years.

I’d always told him he should create his own products and Jeff finally agreed. He started with a workout program for brides to get them into shape before there wedding. I liked it. It was a good niche market with a strong desire for the product. Well Jeff did what so many would-be product creators do – he spent countless hours developing the content, filming it and just making it perfect. Then he purchased a small run of DVDs to have on hand ready to ship. By this time he’s probably out a few thousand dollars and who knows how much time – but the product is done and he’s excited. Now comes the moment of truth, he rented a small exhibit at a regional bridal expo and sold like 2 or 3 copies of his DVDs that weekend.

Bummer!

I mean there’s nothing more deflating that putting in a crap-load of hours and then realizing the marketplace might not be there for what you’ve created!

Ouch!

It took about 1 year and a half after that disappointment to wear off and for him to listen to my badgering to try again with another product. This time I helped him develop the angle of a real “hard-core” trainer giving people no excuses to get into shape. Again, he spent a whole lot of time pulling together new exercises together, putting up a site and pounding out a video sales letter. Jeff went online to sell it and started getting a few sales to keep his interest up — but not enough to be profitable based on his traffic costs.

So this project fizzled too and now he’s pretty much sworn off creating products or selling online.

I can see where he’s coming from and I know so many others might be in the same boat.
I hate to see talented people with a lot of insight, knowledge and passion to share get discouraged and ‘give up’. I think about all the people that could be helped by them but never would be.

Personally, I have about a 2 out of 10 track record. Out of every 10 “good ideas” I have about 2 of them are really nice winners. But the only way to ever figure that out is get them into the marketplace. And usually this involves a whole lot of work – until now…

That’s why I’m so excited with this new business models that turns all of this on its head. It gives you the ability to get paid before you spending the time in product development. And having that cash gives you the energy, motivation and confidence to know you’ve got something!

I call it the “Cash on Tap” System and it’s a totally new way to harness the power of the marketplace to get paid before you spin your wheels working on a product that may or may not fly. And the cool thing is it totally works even if you’re starting from a complete standstill as a complete “unknown”.

Is this the ultimate ‘no-fail’ business model?

I’ve given this a lot of thought and have been interested in why some people succeed and others do not. On the surface two people might have similar backgrounds, education, support and resources at their disposal but they have totally different results.

What makes the difference?

It probably doesn’t come down to just one thing but if I had to really narrow it down – I come to the conclusion its about getting a positive “response” back to what you put out.

Here’s what I mean. Let’s say you decide to blog and you realize you’ve got to build an audience so you keep blogging and blogging but the site is pretty much a ghost town. You’re lucky if you get 1 or 2 comments for every third post. And it doesn’t take too long before you’re pretty darn discouraged putting out your best ideas and insights with nobody responding.

Or maybe you decide to run some ads for an affiliate product but don’t get a “response” with anyone buying right away – it’s extremely frustrating as you keep spending and spending.

Or, maybe you go full bore and create a product. You could easily spend hours writing your ebook, pounding out a sales letter, setting up the payment processor, hooking up the autoresponder, adding analytics, testing, etc. And then after all that work maybe you only sell a handful (and one of them was to a relative who rhymes with “Tom”).

Ugh! Pretty disappointing, right?

That’s why I say its the response that gets us excited to keeps us going, creating, producing and growing our business.

When you’re hearing from customers about how you’re changing their lives and the cash is rolling in you create the momentum to keep building on your vision for the future.

Unfortunately too many people never get there because most things we try are not going to work. (Remember I said I was at about a 2 out of 10 track record.)

But what if there was a way to almost eliminate almost all the risk of having a failure before you spent too much time or got too deep into any project? And then let’s take it one step further — imagine how empowering and exciting it would be get paid *before* you even created your next product.

Now that’s pretty awesome!

There’s nothing more motivating or empowering than to have a stranger pay you for one of your ideas. It gives you the rocket fuel you need to have the confidence there’s a market for your product. (The cool thing you can pretty much put this together in a weekend with a few bucks and it doesn’t matter if you’re a total “unknown”.)

Unless you’re seeing results it gets harder and harder for your spouse, partner or family to stay in your corner.

I’ll be doing a special webinar covering this topic on Wednesday, October 5th at 12pm ET. There are a limited amount of spots so you can sign up here:

I hope you can make it for this LIVE presentation. (And I’d love to hear your comments on what effect seeing a response means to you.)

[Update: The Webinar link sign-up is fixed now]

Not only did we have the children (ages 6-19) learn about business but they actually participated in running different ventures. There were 2 product businesses selling July 4th related products and one service business selling photos with Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty.

They were given blueprints like this:

Then they were provided the cost of inventory and had to figure out how to package and sell their product or service to make a profit. And on July 4th they hit the streets selling to the crowds gathering for their famous 4th of July Parade with over 70 floats.

It was great seeing how creative and excited the kids were before July 4th as they planned out bonuses, pricing, created their signs, etc. Check out a few of these pictures of the kids prepping the day before the parade:

Here you can see Team #3 (the Noise Maker team) getting their packing together. They were bundling up noisemaker sticks with clappers and a tattoo all for one price. Smart.

I wasn’t sure how Zack would do in this setting. Missy thought he was too little (he’ll be 6 in Aug) and I was borderline on it. But I wanted him to sit in the sessions to see. He actually really enjoyed it. In fact, we play a little ‘game’ each night where I ask the kids about their 3 favorite things for the day. (It puts them into a positive state of mind and builds confidence.) Well, his #1 favorite thing that he shouted was “Learning about business!”

So that was pretty cool. Hannah, one of the older girls really helped him and designed his sign with him so he was ready to go:

I’ve got his first sale right here:

Zack making his first sale

It was really exciting to see the kids gain confidence as they started to make sales on July 4th. And lots of them were antsy to get back to selling right after the parade and after lunch. It was awesome to see how engaged they were.

Even back in the hotel when Zoe was asking Zack for a glow necklace, he refused. I stepped in and asked if I could buy it. He said sure for $2. I guess I’m creating a mini-capitalist here. I’m really proud of small ‘ripples’ like this that might have started from the event. Everything from sparks of entrepreneurship to new friendships developed by the children there. One of the parents of an 8-year old said she wasn’t sure her child ever felt out of place in her “regular” school but she instantly bonded with other kids here because they were all the same. Even our sole 19 year old on the trip, “Critter”, said he got along great with the other kids because of the same reason.

Quite frankly there were a lot of lessons adults could learn from the kids. Everything from creating packages to giving customers a choice to two items to buy instead of just asking for a yes/no sale. Plus, they learned about getting attention (some of the costumes) and advertising (signage). Wouldn’t you want to get a photo taken with this crew?

Now it wasn’t all work here especially since the Maverick philosophy is about creating unique experiences & memories. The families spent time at Olympic Park with the Summer Comet Bobsled pulling nearly 4G’s, the Alpine slide and Zipline.

Here are a few of Mavericks getting ready to shoot down the bobsled track:

And Mommy and Zoe taking on the Alpine slide:

Some of the best feedback was from the kids themselves who called this their best vacation ever! But my favorite,might have to be from Sten Schmidt, who told his Dad,

“Mr. Silver is cool!”

I couldn’t have said it any better!

From the kind of response we got from parents (and kids) we’re going to do it again next July 4th, probably in Park City, UT again. So make sure you let us know if you want to be part of it or just sign up at MaverickBusinessAdventures.com to stay up to date.

Now if you’re a parent and wanted to work with your children – I have a couple resources for you from the special guests who were here and others who contributed.

“Avoiding the Entitlement Trap:
How Entrepreneurial Parents Can Raise More Positive, Independent & Responsible Children”

This Tuesday, July 19th, I’m conducting a free Teleseminar with Richard Eyre, author of the #1 Best-seller “Teaching Children Values” and the upcoming “Entitlement Trap” book…

One of the highlights for parents was an intimate session with best-selling author, Richard Eyre discussing the ‘Entitlement Trap’. It was so well received that I asked Richard to present to other parents in our network to share his wisdom in the upcoming book by the same name. (Note: You can pre-order it on his site)

Sign up for the special teleseminar here or to make sure you get the recordings.

Secondly, we had the winner of the 2010 Financial Educator of the Year, Elisabeth Donati, coming in to work with the parents and children. Elisabeth is the founder of Camp Millionaire and the Money Game. She played a shortened version of the Money Game with the kids having them physically go around the room collecting their earnings and paying bills. Then the game got more interesting when they were able to buy assets like real estate or businesses. That’s when they internalized the lessons of getting paid without a correlation to the number of hours worked. It’s an excellent way to make it fun to teach your children valuable entrepreneurial skills. She now sells the game separate and its worth picking up for your family or gather a group of families together to play. Definitely check it out!

Finally one more resource, Amanda van der Gulik, author of “Teach your child about money” has 7 gifts for inspired parents. Amanda wasn’t able to make it out to Park City but she provided Mavericks several additional resources and she said I could share with our InternetLifestyle blog readers too. Everything from 50 money making ideas for kids to her 6 magic piggy bank system and the ‘Allowance Secrets’ report written the top 25 ‘Kids and Money’ Experts from around the world! BTW – Amanda is pretty ‘excited’ on her welcome video

Team Maverick winning the NFTE Ignite Spring Break challenge

A few weeks ago I spent the week working with students from the local DC-area NFTE group. (NFTE is the National Federation for Teaching Entrepreneurship). These high school students had given up their Spring Break in order to help consult me and 2 other entrepreneurs on our business challenges.

The challenge I laid out for them was around our stalled Maverick1Million.org platform for young entrepreneurs. I got a lot of great advice from Sabera, Ivonne, Dion, Autumn, Kalan, Nytiah, Shahara and Percell (thanks guys!) and now I want to take it the next level with others engaged on this project.

And now I’m excited to have our new superstar intern, Adam, who is going to be commandeering this project so the time is right to throw this out again and build the 2.0 version of the site.

I’m asking for help for feedback on the project and potential volunteers that want to be involved. But first let me give you a snapshot of what would be included (as of today):

2020 Goal: 1,000,000 Young entrepreneurs, between the ages of 13-23, impacted, engaged and inspired to create or enhance their own business start-up.

Maverick1Million.org is a FREE multi-media platform for online learning, virtual mentoring, community, funding and idea incubation for young entrepreneurs. It consists of the following sections:

• Maverick Entrepreneur Knowledge Bank –
• Success Secrets Interviews of successful Maverick1000 members and celebrity business icons (i.e. Sir Richard Branson, Tony Hawk, etc)
• Tools and additional resources provided by members and partners (i.e. Dan Sullivan’s thinking tools)

• Maverick Business Blueprints - Step-by-step advice from fellow young entrepreneur Maverick1Million members detailing how to start a particular business. (i.e. everything from a lawn care service, baby sitting business to an iPhone app)

• Maverick Upstart Platform – This allows young entrepreneurs to showcase their ideas to compete for seed capital through crowdsourced funding. Young entrepreneurs can choose to make their ideas public for wider funding or just private for Maverick1000 members to see, fund and virtually mentor them.

• Maverick Idea Incubator – Maverick1000 members and other successful entrepreneur mentors have many business ideas that are not the right fit for their current ventures for numerous reasons. But instead of letting these ideas lay dormant they can be uploaded into the Idea Incubator so young entrepreneurs can then develop them. The affinity for the original ideas would drives one-on-one virtual mentoring and possibly even a full pledged partnership as agreed on by both parties.

• Maverick Q&A – Threaded questions and answers that voted up/down for usefulness about all aspects of business. Becomes a reference guide and living learning tool. (Quora.com or Stackoverflow.com are 2 good examples.)

Why am I building this?
You might be wondering why am I doing all of this? Quite frankly, I believe entrepreneurship is the driving force for innovation, change and value creation in our world. And right now is that incredible golden area where you can start something small and see what happens.

I’ve been incredibly encouraged by research from authorities like the Kauffman Foundation, the largest foundation dedicated to monitoring entrepreneurship. They reported that 2009 had the great number of starts, even exceeded the peak 1999-2000 tech boom.

Now couple that with surveys I’ve seen where the majority of high school students want to have their business instead of getting a job. Plus, mix that in with the social entrepreneurship and “conscious capitalism” I see in many young entrepreneurs ideas and you have an amazing combination.

It’s clear to see entrepreneurship is on the rise but sadly, there’s very little real-world education aspiring business owners would get in school to help guide them.

One of the core DNA’s of my group of Maverick companies is to be that RIPPLE. And what bigger ripple can we create than with the young entrepreneurs. Personally, I get fired up and excited hearing and working with startups.

So if you’re with me, I need some help. In the comments I’d love to hear your thoughts on a few things…

Q: The Name. So first thing first. What do you think of the name? The Maverick1Million name is a reference to the big goal of a 1,000,000 start ups. But we’ve also registered a few other options:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Q: The Platform. After building a much more complicated version in the first version of Maverick1Million.org I want to create something lean and simple to start with. I’m strongly leaning towards the Word Press platform with a host of plugins that should be able to handle a lot of the functionality I want. If you want to dig deep – here’s a mindmap included the sections and plugins I’ve researched. (The #2 in blue means it would a phase II item.)

I don’t know if WP will be the ideal platform to handle the large volume I’d like to grow the site to – but I’m of the opinion that when we get to that point the site/platform will look different and the needs of the users won’t be the same anywhere anyway. I’d rather get something out quick and see what parts are used and what members say they want more of.

Q: What should be included/deleted/featured? The NFTE students really liked the main parts of the site we had outlined. They also thought there should be some sort of way of incorporating the Maverick Business Adventures into an optional experience for the young entrepreneurs so we would consider using a Meetup.com API for that.

But what do you think?

What are the most important elements to be featured? What should be deleted and/or added? If you were 13-23, what would be the most helpful to start your own entrepreneurial venture inside this platform?

Q: How do you track the success of the young entrepreneurs start-ups? One of the biggest parts of this I struggle with is how would you track and measure the success? To me, if a young entrepreneur made $1from the material – I think they’d count towards the goal.

The working idea would be to have a separate spot these members can post their success and perhaps it’s incentivized by a sponsor. (i.e. prove you made your first $1 and you’ll get a free domain from GoDaddy.) But I’m sure there are better ways. Thoughts? Ideas?

And finally…

Call For Volunteers:

Quite frankly I don’t know exactly who we need or what kind of talents. I’m certainly thinking someone well versed in Word Press and membership sites and cool user interface would be a great start from the tech side! If you are inspired and excited about young entrepreneurship and want to be part of building Maverick1Million.org (or whatever its going to be called) I’d love to hear from you. Just drop me a note at teammaverick1million@gmail.com with your name and what skills/talents you bring to the table. Even if its I’m willing to promote the hell out of this thing – I’ll take it!

And please let me know what you think in the comments and drop me a note if you want to help out. I’ll continue posting on the blog the progress and updates.

Here’s the deal…

You put together about 100 ambitious and aspiring entrepreneurs with a mixture of tech and non-tech skills. Then have them pitch their ideas for 60-seconds each on Friday night with the 20 best ideas, as voted on by the group, get selected to be developed. Everyone divides up into teams based on the idea they were most excited by and then the fun begins. The teams have 54 hours to create the project and get something working by Sunday night. On Sunday they pitch their idea to a group of judges for cash and prizes.

I love it!

To me, the thing that makes this work is the hard deadline. They all know they’ve got until Sunday night to have something working to show the judges or else they get zilch. That hard deadline is part of the magic and something we can all add into our lives. (See a previous post I made about “tricking” yourself into action.)

I was up there helping out the different teams as a roving mentor or coach. I’d pop my head into the different groups and ask what they were working on and how I could help. I brought an element of actual marketplace knowledge from taking 8 different products and ideas from startup to seven figures+. Some of my typical questions were around:

• “What problem does this address?”
• “Does this problem mean people will pay for the solution?”
• “What is your revenue model here?”

It was an cool mix of projects. Some were pretty blatant iterations of companies that were hot at this moment (i.e. Groupon). Some were pretty original and solved unique problems. It was also interesting to see the mentality of some of the teams. Many were focused on the unique technology and building something without even verifying if there was a marketplace willing to pay for their solution.

I wasn’t able to make it to the judging on the Sunday but it was great to see the Twitter stream with the hashtag #BaltSW active with the results and updates from the weekend. It was very smart that the organizers gave you a tshirt with the hashtab on the arm of the t-shirt. (I’m actually wearing mine as I type this.)

I was keeping track of the winners through the hashtag and I’m happy to report my brother’s team actually won the top prize. Their idea is “Parking Panda” which is a real-time location parking tool for events and crowded downtown areas. So it matches together private driveway owners with people that are frustrated with not being able to find a parking spot or who want to pay less than a garage. It’s really cool and can’t wait for them to roll it out in Baltimore.

You can see a raw video of Adam’s winning pitch here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8bHkXxvKB4

It was great to see the startup spirit come together for one long red bull powered weekend. And it was awesome to have the Baltimore Sun there covering some of the action with not one -- but 2 different articles. It’s events like this that get me fired up with the entrepreneurial notion of starting from scratch and building something in just one weekend. If you get the chance -- I’d recommend checking out a Startup Weekend.

If you’re an entrepreneur ages 13-23 (or know one) this is a golden opportunity…

We’re in search of the next generation of young thought leaders and mavericks ready to make their own rules and build their online success story. 10 select individuals will get the ultimate young entrepreneurial experience at the upcoming Underground Online Seminar® 007.

Every year since 2003, the sold-out Underground Online Seminar® has provided high-level Internet marketing information from real-world, in-the-trenches presenters quietly making their fortunes online. It’s become the top networking and learning event for Internet marketers with presenting attendees such as Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, Mike Faith, CEO of Headsets.com, Darren Rowse, ProBlogger.com, Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy.com, Gary Vaynerchuk, author of “Crush it” and Jessica Jackley, co-founder of Kiva.org.

Winners will be chosen based on an application process and a panel of distinctive business judges for a VIP experience at the upcoming Underground event, March 3-5, 2011 in Washington, DC. If you’d like to apply (or know someone this is a fit for) please check out all the details here.

Quite frankly, one of my favorite things is getting back feedback and success stories from our previous Underground scholarship winners and see how they progress online. (And even if you don’t fit the 13-23 age group – I still love hearing so many of the success stories that come out of Underground.)

If you haven’t signed up yet – this is a good time to get in before the final early-bird discounts and bonuses expire.

A few weeks ago I attended the INC500/5000 conference and had the opportunity to connect with Ari Weinzweig. I had heard and read a bit about Zingerman’s approach to business and knew it was interesting and different…but didn’t realize how unusual it really was until I dug in.

I attended Ari’s breakout session, had a few conversations with Ari, I read his new book called “A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business” (highly recommended), started researching them, etc.

And the more I saw — the more I really loved how their built their business, the philosophy, the culture and more so I knew I had to get an interview with Ari. If you missed it – please check it out here and leave a comment.

Here are a few of the insights we covered:

• The exact 8-step recipe for writing a vision of greatness and getting clear on the future you want.
• How to get your entire team onboard with your vision and who should create the vision.
• The difference between a mission statement, a vision and a strategic plan (and why there is a HUGE difference)
• Who you should absolutely share your vision with as you’re developing it.
• Why “positive futuring” really does work. (Zingerman’s actually has each employee work on visioning regardless of their position in the company because it’s that important.)
• How often you should re-visit the vision.
• How to “reverse-engineer” your vision and create your ideal future.

Listen to the replay here. Don’t worry there’s nothing to buy though I absolutely, whole-heartily recommend Ari’s new book “A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business“. I think you’re crazy if you don’t add this to your library before after you hear this!

The awesome thing is that five of the 25 young entrepreneurs spotlighted in this book are former Undergound Online Seminar scholarship winners. It also features Michael Dunlop and a UG6 speaker Andrew Fashion. I got to sit down with Nick and his partner in writing and business, Nick Scheidies, for a quick interview.

— —

Yanik: How did you come up with this idea?

Nick T: I saw all of these kids doing mind-blowing things with entrepreneurship and really taking it to the next level with their fresh perspectives. I wanted to get inside their heads, find out what makes them tick, and uncover the secrets to their success. If there had already been a book out there like that, then I would’ve just bought it. There wasn’t, so we wrote it ourselves.

Yanik: Is there any common element in most successful young entrepreneurs you’ve interviewed?

Nick T: Perseverance. Sabirul Islam was rejected by 40 publishers before he decided to self-publish ‘The World at Your Feet‘ (he promptly sold 42,000 copies in nine months). Just imagine that: being told, “This can’t be successful,” 40 TIMES and never losing heart. That’s the type of tenacity you need to succeed. It WILL pay off.

Nick S: Absolutely. But I think it’s a lot easier to take those punches when you love the fight. Every kid we talked to had an unwavering passion for their project. There’s no way it’s a coincidence: it’s a lot easier to put in the hard work when it hardly feels like work.

Yanik: Do you think entrepreneurs are “born” or “learned”?

Nick T: We wouldn’t have started this project if we didn’t believe that it would help transform the lives of people around the world, “learn”-ing them to be better entrepreneurs. But one of the most striking commonalities shared by our interviewees is their instinctive drive to start early, selling things like pokemon cards before they had even heard the word ’entrepreneurship’. To me, that hints at something of an entrepreneurial DNA.

Nick S: A year ago, I couldn’t have cared less about entrepreneurship. I didn’t think that I had an entrepreneurial bone in my body. But when I started listening to these kids tell their stories, my ears perked right up. I’ve still got a long way to go, but I truly believe that the entrepreneurial spirit can be awakened in anyone. We’re counting on it.

Yanik: What was most surprising from your interviews with these success young entrepreneurs?

Nick T: I expected to learn a lot from the interviewees, but I didn’t expect them to turn my entrepreneurial world completely on its head. That impact is probably my biggest surprise. I’ve never had a more clear vision of what it takes to excel in entrepreneurship — not just in theory, but in nitty-gritty reality.

Nick S: It’s surprising to me that these kids aren’t getting more attention. Adam Horwitz had a million-dollar product launch last week, breaking all sorts of ClickBank records. He’s 18. The fact that he sat down with us for an hour — along with Catherine Cook (myYearbook.com), Michael Dunlop (incomediary.com), etc. — is pretty amazing.

Yanik: What have you learned about internet marketing through this process?

Nick T: Every internet entrepreneur should have a blog. But before you ever launch, make sure that you’ve got something to give away for free — like an eCourse, a report, or a pre-recorded webinar. Once that’s in place, you can begin leveraging it to collect the information of the people who are interested in your message. Build that community, provide them with truly valuable content, and you can’t go wrong. Eventually, they’ll want to give you some of their money.

Take Joe Penna, YouTube’s Mystery Guitar Man, for example. He makes 2-minute videos twice a week, for free. Through his videos he’s built a community of over a million subscribers who will buy just about anything he sells.

Yanik: What advice would you give to someone who wants to live the internet lifestyle?

Nick T: Go out and learn from the people who are already doing it. There’s no better resource. The more you learn now, the fewer mistakes you have to make down the road. Of course, at some point, you’ve got to stop learning and start forging your own path.

Nick S: If you want it, then go get it. You can come up with a 100 reasons why you’re not living the life that you want, but nothing and nobody has greater control over your ultimate reality than you. Recognize that and you can’t be stopped. Every one of the 25 kids we interviewed were once in your shoes, struggling to break through, and they simply bent the universe to their will. You can do the same: stop making excuses and start making it happen.

——

Nick T. and Nick S. have also made a few videos with some entrepreneurial quotes from the guys in their book like the one below:

And this book isn’t just for young entrepreneurs – Barry Dunlop, a Maverick Global Intrepid Member, had this comment: “Nick and Nick – just wanted to say this is one of the best Young Entrepreneurs videos I have ever seen on YouTube. Very inspirational – even for an old entrepreneur like me. Well done guys.”

As you may know, part of my life’s mission is to inspire one million young entrepreneurs by 2020 and this book is going in the right direction. Nick and Nick are giving away a free interview from the book at YoungEntrepreneurs.50interviews.com.

Since I got in pretty early and I knew the other guys would be sleeping – I rented a car and heading off the Agassi Prep Academy out to a pretty rough section of Vegas beyond the strip.

A few weeks before for our Maverick ‘Sky’s the Limit’ adventure we brought in Ben Sayeski, Chief Education Officer and Darian Borowiak, Director of Development for the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education. They really go into our “Hook Me Up, Yo” business session, with Ben even wearing the infamous clock when explaining what the school does.

We asked them to compile a list of questions from the kids about entrepreneurship. Then we had Maverick members roundtable the discussion and provide some real-world insights from success business owners. I came bearing the DVD recording and to get an inside glimpse at what the school was doing.

Agassi Prep (www.agassiprep.org) works with children K-12 in an underprivileged area to get them into college. Last year was the very first year they graduated a senior class and I was excited to learn about a 100% success rate for getting into college. I’m a huge advocate of education that’s done in an inspiring way with real results. I popped my head into one classroom taught by Prof Russell Andrews-EL and it was just awesome the way the kids were on the ground spread out learning Trig with whiteboards. He tried to create a similar environment to college, with less structure and without the formal desks.

One of my favorite structures at the school is the bridge that Seniors get to cross after graduation. It symbolizes a transition from high school to college – only graduating seniors have this privilege. At the end of the bridge is a turnabout and that’s where the graduates write notes back to the next class behind them. I love the symbolism this ritual invokes.

I love the symbolism of this bridge

After touring the school and seeing what is going on there, I’m hoping the Maverick members will come back to do a guest lecture on entrepreneurship in the near future and work to mentor some of the kids there.

Regardless, I still only got about 2 hours sleep before flying out to Park City, UT. That was the site of our Maverick team’s strategic retreat. More on that in a minute because I want to share our “Painted Picture” for 2012 and give you some insights into what I’ve learned this year about creating an exceptional organization.

But before we get there, I want to share some pics from my final West Coast destination, the Mojave desert. Last Monday was a truly historic event with the unveiling of Virgin Galactic’s VSS Enterprise rocket ship, the first commercial space vehicle.

As you might know, I’m #144 on the list to go into space with Virgin Galactic. This is a significant milestone with flight-testing starting on the rocket immediately. The best estimates are mid to late 2011 for the first flight (and I’ve approximated I’m flight #26 if all goes well).

Rolling into Scaled Composite’s HQ in Mojave I was hoping the weather would cooperate since it had rained for a full 2 hours on the ride up from LA. I thought it was a good sign when I saw SpaceShip 1 with a rainbow behind it. (Note: SpaceShip 1 was the first commercial spacecraft to go into space twice in 2 weeks and win the $10M X Prize. This is the technology Virgin Galactic licensed.)

SpaceShip One with a rainbow behind it

Over 800 future astronauts, VIPs, dignitaries and politicians came in for this historic event, including Governor Schwarzenegger and Governor Richardson from New Mexico.

Governor Schwarzenegger's opening remarks

Check out the name badge I got – probably one of the coolest ones I’ve seen:

Probably one of the coolest name badges ever

They told us it was the coldest day in the Mojave – there were wind gusts of wind 70-80mph. It was a good thing they gave everyone some nice jackets – but that still didn’t really keep up warm enough. But who cares? It was amazing seeing SpaceShip 2 come down the runway. They had a pretty major light show with music going to set the scene.

Here’s the first glimpse I got of the craft:

Virgin Galactic Spaceship 2 unveiling

And here I am in front of SpaceShip 2 looking pretty frickin cold!

Freezing my ass off at Spaceship 2 unveil

Here’s a little video of the unveil including Governors Schwarzenegger and Richardson breaking champagne bottles to christen the ship. (I was a tiny bit worried about them breaking bottles on it.)

The party started immediately after the unveiling in some really cool tents and lounges they had set up for the night – they even had an ice bar with glasses made out of ice.

Cool lounge tent (that later got blown away)

Absolut Icebar Mojave

Martinis with “ice diamonds” from the actual Ice Hotel in Sweden. Supposedly it would take 2 days for this ice cube to melt

Everything was perfectly choreographed – except for the weather. I’m sure they weren’t expecting the hurricane-type winds we got. In fact, they shut the party down early at 7:30 and immediately cleared everyone to the busses to get us back to LA. It’s a good thing too, since I heard later the press tent and the other party tents blew down. Crazy!

I actually ended up sitting on the bus next to Dr. Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X-Prize and one of our previous Maverick Business Adventures® guests. I love talking to Peter and hearing what he’s up to. The guy is such a big-thinker and visionary. He’s involved in creating a NASCAR-like Rocket racing league and was showing me the first version of the iPhone video game they’ve got out.

When we got back to LA, me and about 10 other Virgin Galactic party-goers made the most of it and hung out at the SkyBar at the Mondrian talking about the future of Space flight.

Back to The Future

It’s a pretty amazing time to be alive when you can actually go into space as a tourist and not be limited to a government space program. As I mentioned, I think 2012 is what I’m anticipating for my flight – and that’s a year I’ve been giving a lot of thought around.

No, not because I think the world is coming to an end or anything like that. But because I’ve been working on our company’s “Painted Picture” for 2012 with my business coach Cameron Herold’s help. Cameron is the former COO of 1-800-Got Junk and helped build that company from about $2M – $100M using this concept of the painted picture.

The way this concept started was taking the same methods Olympic athletes use to visualize their performance and applying them to a business being built. Brian Scudamore, the founder of 1-800-Got Junk, sat down on his parents dock when they were a $1.5M company and wrote out what the future would look like.

Cameron was the guy to execute it. I’d been working with Cameron for several months and he kept bugging me to get this done and I kept putting him off – until he finally backed me into a corner to commit. (Side note: Cameron is an amazing coach and speaker. If you have a fast-growing company you owe it to your business to pick-up his DVDs before he realizes what he’s doing and starts marking them up.)

I felt like I’d found my “Cameron” when we made our first major hire in Andrew Way. He’s officially our VP of Operations and has the task of taking our Painted Picture and figuring out the “How”. We’ve got some big plans for the next 3 years to grow the Maverick brand and merge what we’ve been doing with other companies.

Quite frankly, the last 2 years have been a serious transition from simply being essentially a “one-man” band to working on growing an exceptional organization. Many times I’ve felt like I’ve taken 2 steps backwards for every step forward (and maybe more than 2 steps backwards) but we’ve kept pushing – because we’re building something beyond just an info product or two.

In fact, a lot of my thinking has evolved based on the kind of impact we really want to have. I would never have believed 10 years ago that company values or a mission statement mattered. I thought stuff like that was all bullshit.

I mean, look at a company like Enron and their mission statement – including typical phony corporate-speak words like “Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence”. Obviously a crock. But when I started hanging out and learning from Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, I saw there was a difference in what he talked about and that he actually meant it. He keynoted our last 2 Underground seminars. He really harped on values and how they incorporate their 10 core values into everything they do, including hiring, firing and promoting based on those values. (Btw – if you want to check out a free video of Tony keynoting Underground 4 – you can view it here.)

That helped form our “DNA” and core philosophies –

Maverick DNA and core values

Or reading books like “Peak” written by Chip Conley, CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality group in San Francisco -  that got me thinking about what we’re doing for our team members and customers/members beyond satisfying normal needs. We’re now moving to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

We’ve also starting using Kolbe profiling to figure what our team’s natural connotative ability is. It helps to figure out how people instinctively approach a project or a problem. I’m a 4-2-10-2, which is “Explain, Adapt, Improvise, Imagine”. My score reveals why I’m quick to jump on a project because I’m a 10 in the “Quick Start” category – that’s off the charts. And it also reveals why I do so many mindmaps and diagrams when trying to get my point across. (That last number – “2” – means I’m high in imagination and don’t need a concrete model of something.) There are no right or wrongs for Kolbe profiles – it’s simply what you are. (It’s worth trying it yourself, and possibly doing it for your whole team.)

That’s also gone hand-in-hand with the work I’ve been doing at Strategic Coach, created by Dan Sullivan. (Btw – his Unique Ability book is one of my favorite books out there.)

As the saying goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” And that was the case for me, with additional insights formed by the book “Tribal Leadership” by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright, about building incredible company cultures and evolving to a “Stage V” company. One of the biggest shifts from a typical company to an extraordinary one was having a huge mission that everyone on the team knows and can get behind. This leads to a real powerful change of direction, intention and motivation.

One famous example is Microsoft’s original goal of “A computer on every desk and in every home.” When you create a big vision or goal like that – you’ll find people getting on your team to help achieve it. My friend, Tellman Knudson, has set the goal of raising $100M by running across the country barefoot. I think that fits the bill – and he’s partway through right now.

Our company’s 2020 goal is 3-fold:

2020 Goals for Maverick

There’s been lots of thinking, prioritizing and culling from what and where I believe our companies are heading for 2012 and beyond. I created a graphic to represent the big picture of the impact we want to have in each area of an entrepreneur’s lifecycle, from Start-Up to Growth to Legacy.

Maverick Mission

I’m really excited to share the Painted Picture with you because, quite frankly, I need all the help I can get to reach our ultimate 2020 goals. You can download the PDF here.

I’ve already shared this with our team and I’ll be sharing it with all of our key suppliers, partners and people I meet. Lots of big things in store for 2010 and beyond. If you’d like to be part of this or have a thought on what we’re doing please leave a comment below!

Tomorrow, I’m off on our Maverick Business Adventures® Totally Rad 80′s Road Rally from LA to Napa. (Follow me on Twitter @yaniksilver) for some random pics and observations along the way.) There’s going to be some great footage from it because it’s a video scavenger hunt with teams competing for cheesy 80′s prizes.

Our celebrity business icon guest is John Paul DeJoria, who holds the rank of #261 on Forbes list of World’s Richest with an estimated $2.5B net worth. He’s the co-founder of John Paul Mitchell Hair Care Systems and Patron Spirits Company, however he started with incredibly modest beginnings – even finding himself homeless at times. We are contributing to the Boys and Girls Club of Echo Park, CA in his name. Plus, with October being Breast Cancer Awareness month we are also contributing to another charity John Paul supports, which is Cancer Schmancer started by comedienne, Fran Drescher.

If you’d like some of the priceless info from our Maverick Business Adventures® members – we’ve set up a donation page here. For a $50 donation you get exclusive audio plus some “blackmail” pics to boot!

I’ll be around interviewing a few Maverick members about business topics, tactics and secrets while they’re getting their mullets coiffed. John Paul has a personal philosophy of “success unshared is failure” and this echoes MBA’s commitment to always pay it forward to the communities we visit. From the charitable donations to actually taking the time out from every adventure to teach and mentor young & aspiring entrepreneurs around us. (Note: if you’re around the San Francisco area – this Saturday, Oct 3^rd we have our next free Young Entrepreneur session.)

All of this is part of our 2020 mission -

“To have 1,000,000 Young entrepreneurs, between the ages of 13-23, impacted, engaged and mentored to create their own business start-up.”

I get so excited thinking about the Golden Opportunity, for truly anyone, to get going with their own thing now – but I really feel the most passion around young entrepreneurs. There’s such a low cost of getting started, tons of tools & resources to help you and some gumption.

If you’ve read the book “Micro Trends” by political strategist Mark Penn, there is a trend he identified called “High School Moguls”. He correctly assesses the Internets help in making possible for young “kids” to start making some major money online. In fact, according to a Business Week survey in 2000, 8% of all teens were making money online. Obviously, some were just making a few extra bucks on eBay but many, like the winners of our Underground® scholarship, are doing some really impressive things.

I’ve been getting a few updates from our Underground Online Seminar Young Entrepreneur scholarship winners, who attended the last LIVE event.

A recent one came in from Alex Maroko via an IM:

Not too shabby – before his senior year in college he’s sold over $100k of valuable info online, helped a ton of people and bought himself a convertible. I love it! [Side note: I just did a candid interview with Alex about how he started and what he did to build this business from scratch after attending the Underground®. It was in the latest issue of the Underground Secret Society newsletter. If you hurry you can subscribe and receive that interview.]

Here’s part of our candid interview

Yanik: This is going to be really fun. So we had 10 Young Entrepreneurs between the ages of 13 and 21, I think. And we had 10 scholarships to our Online Underground Seminar, which is a $3,500 ticket, and you got in.
So are you 20 years old now or 21?

Alex: I’m still 20.

Yanik: You’re 20, going into your senior year in college. And what got me really excited was – you and I have IM’d every once in a while and you’ve emailed and kept me up to date on the things that have been going on – and you sent me an IM the other day and said “Hey, I’ve made $100,000 in the last three months selling my products, and now I’m getting ready for my senior year so I’m really excited!”. I was like, “Wow, that’s pretty good!” So I’m sure the people listening and that will be reading this transcript would love to know just a little bit of the background and how you got started. You got started when you were 16 or something, right? Or was it before then?

Alex: Yeah, I was always doing things at a young age. I started training athletes when I was 16 years old, I had my first certification as a personal trainer and things like that. I was a basketball player originally so I was mainly training basketball players when I was younger. When I was 17, I was already training some NBA and pro-level type players. So
I had a lot of experience with that, but I never thought I could take it online or anything like that. Basically I would say it all began in November of 2008. I had a couple of other trainers who were doing some marketing online in the fitness
niche and who were big, like Ryan Lee who is an awesome dude who does a lot of cool stuff there. They said “You should check this out, we’re making some money online. Just give it a shot and see what happens”.

Yanik: Did you know them personally or did you just see them online and see what they were doing?

Alex: It actually happened when I was in college. My first year I went to a different college and was a basketball player. The school was in Florida and there were a couple of trainers who had a gym a couple of blocks from school and I was training there. I started talking to them. I’d be there lifting weights and they’d be up in the office on their laptops all day. I was like “What are these guys doing?” It was kind of eye-opening for me that they were putting their training businesses online all because they were making more money online.

Yanik: Interesting.

Alex: Yeah, it was very interesting. So my eyes were opened and I said “I’ll give this a shot”. So I put together my first ebook – kind of like everyone else, that’s the first thing I did. I wrote the whole thing, it was like 100 pages, in one week, just to knock it out. One of my friends who knew the internet better than me put up a WordPress site and put up a
simple sales page. We were taking orders through PayPal. It was very rudimentary and we probably made something like eight or nine sales within a few months, between November and February.

Yanik: What was the subject, was that on the basketball stuff?

Alex: It was just a book about ball handling, teaching players to dribble better. So I had the niche part down without ever knowing it, so I guess that was pretty good. That was probably the smartest thing I did. But obviously I didn’t know anything about internet marketing at that time. I just thought you put a product up and people started buying it. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? It sounded great, it just didn’t actually work out like that. So that’s basically what happened for the next few months. I wasn’t actually doing anything to drive traffic to the site. If you had told me something about testing, I’d have said “You’re crazy”.

So I heard about the Undergound Online Seminar scholarship offer from a friend of mine. He was like “Dude, you’ve got to apply for this. You’re young and you’re trying to do stuff online and you should give this a shot”. So I filled out an application. And what’s funny – I don’t even know if you know this, Yanik – but I was the 11th person to win a scholarship. Number 10 apparently couldn’t make it and I was fortunate enough to get that last one. Going to the seminar was just a huge break for me. Obviously the speakers were incredible and there was a lot of technical information to be learned, but I think it was definitely the people I was able to meet and the relationships I was able to build that really made the biggest
difference for me. Just talking with people in the lobby and going over ideas. It was just so eye-opening for me at that event, just seeing what possibilities there were for me online. And at that point, once I had that belief that I actually could do something online, that nothing was holding me back, it was just like a slingshot. I just took off. I knew what I was going to do and I started putting all my plans into action for my ebooks.

But the first thing I thought of, there was a guy named Greg Poulis  who spoke at your event who actually lives about 15 or 20 minutes away from me. So we actually So we started talking and I had this great idea: I’m going “relaunch” my ebook that’s been on sale for a few months. So I basically put the whole thing together within a couple of weeks and we
did something like $20,000 immediately the very first week.

Yanik: Okay, let’s back up a little bit. So when you walked in to Underground 5, what were you doing with your ebook business? About how much?

Alex: At that point I’d probably sold, I think, eight or nine books, I think at $14.95. And I think I chose $14.95 because in my head that was the price. I was like that is the most amount of money anyone will ever pay me for anything online. So that was what I’d done up to that point.

Yanik: Okay, so you were still kind of struggling. So then you met a bunch of guys. You were actually on the hot seat, I think, during this lunch that we put on with the Maverick Business Adventures members. Is that
right?

Alex: Yes. At the luncheon I got to go up in front of all of the Maverick Business members. I had like 10 minutes. I talked about business for a couple of minutes and then had everyone firing ideas and improvements and tests and things like that. So that was obviously awesome.

And then after the luncheon, basically right after the hot seat, I stood up and went back to my seat. And a friend of yours, Craig Ballantyne, came up to me. We’re in similar niches, he’s kind of like the top guy in fitness right now, and he started talking to me. We spent probably two or three hours together that whole weekend after that and his entire focus was on
my business. And that was just huge for me. A guy who’s doing so well online in a similar niche to be working at my business for me and planning things out for me for the long term. It’s just so motivating and
inspiring when you see something like that.

Yanik: So you went home from Underground, obviously all excited, pumped up, had lots of ideas, met some contacts. So what did you do then to get this ball rolling so to speak? That was a bad pun to use with ball handling, but… So you met Greg Poulis who was at Underground, talking about launches and relaunches and…

Alex: What I had in terms of internet marketing product: I had a digital version of Mass Control and I went through that in like a couple of days. And it’s not just for launches, but I figured out exactly how I was going to launch it. And then I had all the technical stuff from talking with Greg in terms of how many days it’s going to go, what I’m going to do on each
day, things like that.

Yanik: Tell us a little bit about that. Do you remember your plan?

Alex: Yeah. The launch date I had set up, I think it was April 21st, and I think I got that from your event, maybe 5 or 6 weeks before that. So I had a small time to plan out this entire launch. So it was an April 21st launch, we started the pre-launch on April 14th. We just went with a seven day pre-launch period. I don’t want to jump in too far but when I got back from your event, which was probably very smart of me, was research and start contacting affiliates, JV partners, people I thought had subscriber lists or had a lot of reach to people who would potentially buy my product. So I started contacting people, and I probably found 50 or so people online and I put together a good email and I sent the same one to everybody. I only had something like five or six affiliates who actually took part in this launch with me. I was fortunate that one of them was actually a pretty big affiliate and he’s a really cool guy and he made a ton of sales that week. So finding good affiliates was really big for me.

Yanik: How did you find those affiliates?….(continued in full version)

—Snippet from Interview from Secret Society newsletter. If you hurry you can subscribe and receive the full interview –

Another shining star is Danielle Herb. I think she turns 16 years old in a few weeks! When she came to Underground® she was having some tremendous success working with ADD/ADHD & Autistic children. At the event  she got on the Hot Seat and let the Maverick members dissect what’s she’s doing and give her some direction for how to make it bigger.

And she has – currently she’s working on raising $50,000 by Oct 1, 2009 to secure a world class training facility in Ocala, FL where she will be able to provide free horse therapy to kids. Nicknamed “The Horse Capital of the World,” Ocala lends itself to being the perfect location for Danielle to give support. I just donated and hope you might consider too. Go to www.DropYourReins.com to see what she’s doing.

There’s also Michael Dunlop, who is the 20 year-old son of Maverick Business Adventures® member Barry Dunlop. Michael and Barry attended my recent Millionaire MasterMind group and Michael shared his incredible results from blogging. Once again, one of those ideas that really doesn’t make much capital but can yield some incredible byproducts and revenue. Michael has 2 blogs he actively runs and has become quite a crusader in the Young Entrepreneur space himself with Retireat21.com, IncomeDiary.com and WebDesignDev.com among others.

I really enjoy spending time with Michael and seeing how he’s developing as an entrepreneur. He’s been able to land some pretty cool interviews including Craig Newmark (from Craig’s List) and Gary Vaynerchuk among dozens of other young entrepreneurs and success stories. Michael and I are talking about holding a pre-day at the next live Underground® devoted to young entrepreneurs. The idea would be to bring in these real online whiz kids to share what they’re doing and then maybe do a “Dragon’s Den” style session where others share their ideas and let the Maverick Business Adventures® brainstorm and make them better.

I haven’t decided yet if this is the direction we’ll go – so drop me a comment and let me know what you think.