The ULTIMATE Plan for Online Business Well Hello Freedom Seekers! Summary In my first episode you will meet two guys named Spencer and Darcy. For the first few weeks at least, I will be working as a business coach with Spencer and Darcy to help get their business off the ground. The idea is that they build a profitable online business and you get to learn along with us. As you will see, Spencer and Darcy are two regular guys who work corporate day jobs but have big dreams and a big idea. Unfortunately they also find themselves in a bit of a rut chasm. When I first met Spencer for example he told me that he was trying to learn coding from scratch! In This Episode You Will Learn; Meet Spencer, Darcy and me Quinn How to get your business moving in the right direction How to ensure you are doing the right things at the right time In future episodes you will see that The Project Plan works really well! Resources and Links Project Plan for Spencer and Darcy’s business (completed) Project Plan Template (Blank for your business to copy and make your own!) 1:05 We meet Spencer 13:35 We meet Darcy 22:00 I Introduce The Project Plan Thanks to Jon from Authority Website Income who reminded me of the power of using project planning in your business. I Need Your Help Please leave your review on iTunes! I guarantee I will buy you a beer (or wine or fancy coffee) next time I see you. If you don’t want to leave your real name in iTunes, but you still want that beer or coffee just email me. OK I know this sounds like a bribe – Thats because it is! Going to iTunes takes a minute or two so it is a little effort and I appreciate that. Thank you so much for listening! Cheers, Quinn Transcript Quinn: So hello and welcome to the first episode of Building a Cubicle-Free Business. Where I help uncover what it takes to build an online business so you can be financially-independent, make a dent in the world, and build a lifestyle of your choice. My name is Quinn and today I have with me two really special guys who I’ll be working with each week to help build their businesses from the early stages to a profitable one. And each week we’re going to tackle a subject important to them and the idea is that anybody listening or watching this recording can gain something really valuable each week that you can use to build your own business. Our main goal, really, is to make you guys some money. So let’s stuck in. And so today, yeah, I really want to just introduce Spencer and Darcy and get to know them a little bit more, for you to get to know me a little bit more as well. What will be pretty fun, I think, is to learn a little about your business and discuss what some of the challenges are that you’re currently dealing with so that I’m sure they’re quite common for a lot of people and it’ll be fun to tackling and start making things moving. So this is a pretty funny story how we actually met in the first place. Spencer: Yeah I think it was when we were on a trip to Portland. We didn’t even know we were from the same city and we were at the World Domination Summit which sounds like it’s a bunch of people trying to organize some sort of coalition to take over the world. It’s really kind of a business conference mixed in with a lot of different elements. It’s just a conference that kind of brings together a bunch of people with that same mindset of wanting to start or pursue starting a responsible business that’s going to make them some sort of profit in the long-term. But it’s also going to give back to whatever community that they consider themselves part of. Quinn: So like social entrepreneurship. Spencer: Exactly. But it kind of had its own vibe. It was a really unique conference and there was a ton of people from Toronto and found out that Quinn just lived down the street from where I was living. So we got talking and he recognized immediately that there was a fit and then I got excited about doing this whole podcast thing and so that’s here we are. Quinn: Yeah it’s funny because I was looking for somebody like yourself to work with. Somebody that was driven that I knew needed just a little bit of a hand but was obviously going to succeed. So I was chatting to him and like, “Yeah so where are you from? “Canada.” “Oh you’re in Canada, I’m in Canada, too.” Spencer: I was like “No way.” Quinn: Toronto, I’m from Toronto. Yeah we walked out the same coffee shop and… Yeah it’s awesome. These guys, you’ve known each other for a while now? Spencer: About five years. Darcy: Yeah about five years ago, we both went to the same secondary and there’s an organization previously known as Scythe. It’s a global non-profit initiative that students take on. It’s now known as Enactus. And the dean approached me about starting, founding one of the chapters there, and in the process of that Spencer was actually one of the first, if not the first, member to join the organization. And we worked together there and been friends ever since. Quinn: Yeah right on. And you guys both from Toronto and did you grow up here? Spencer: We’re actually both from Kingston and so Darcy moved out here a couple of years ago. Darcy: Yeah he kind of wanted to pursue his career path but it was—there’s not really very many career paths in Kingston because there’s only like a hundred thousand people there. Quinn: You can help operate the jail into the education system. That’s about it, isn’t it or… Spencer: Yeah there’s huge government jobs in Kingston but there’s not much in some of the other industries. Darcy: Especially in technology which is like where I’d been headed. Even though my education is in marketing, I’ve just been driven towards technology the whole way through. I mean I was making websites to pay my way through school. And just finding out that making websites is actually something that I like which was not really the initial goal. And I’ve always wanted to live in the city. I mean it provides a lot of amazing things, and well since I was like eight years old, I decided that Toronto was where I was going to first move in to. Spencer: That being said, Kingston is a nice city though. It’s gorgeous and it’s something that you definitely want to keep going back to and keep visiting because it’s one of the most beautiful cities I’ve been to. Darcy: Absolutely. Spencer: In terms of the career path, that I’m on right now, had to be the big city. Since Darcy and I knew each other, we got in contact. This brainchild’s actually just very very new. We’ve only really been talking about this business for, I guess maybe, a few months. Quinn: That’s funny because I thought there was a little bit more involved in that which is it’s great. Spencer: No it’s actually very very new. I had some courses that I was taking at St. Lawrence College. They’re always trying to kind of bring in some newer ways of delivering content. And one of the things they were doing is they were bringing in the software that allowed students to run this virtual business against their peers in the same class. And it kind of turned the lesson into a game and you really became motivated to succeed and to kind of beat out your competition which was your other peers. So it was a really good environment but what I noticed really quickly was that, all this software was built on what looked like old 90’s era platforms. There was a lot of time spent figuring out what you needed to tell the software to do to get it to execute your strategy rather than figuring out what your strategy needed to do and then just quickly putting it in the software. I recognized that early on and then I went and joined a team that went and competed in Colona which was the same kind of thing, different software. And I started to see this trend happening. It was good software. It taught a good lesson and it was really interactive. But I knew that there was more. And I knew that there was, you know, it wasn’t really that far away IT create something really really great. I was telling Darcy about this and I was saying, you know I know that there’s a way to create a better product out here. And then he immediately–. Quinn: So Darcy’s starting to be part of the picture pretty early on. Spencer: Yeah he was pretty early on. I just had kind of an idea in my head of like this is what it has to be doing and Darcy was like, “Well I think I know what you mean” and he kind of really had the visual aspect and the interactivity aspect happening and he’s like “Well but I don’t know what it needs to do on the back-end.” And I was like, “Oh I think it needs to do this” and we just kind of bounced off each other that way and that was the beginning of this thing. And I think that was maybe just past April or somewhere around then. Quinn: I mean I think this is a really important point because—well certainly in my first business, it was a need that I could foresee that I was part of that I then turned that into a business. And I think a lot of businesses that succeed come from that. You can build businesses where you’re not in it but a lot of people, they find the opportunity just from their daily lives like and run with it. Spencer: Yeah absolutely. Quinn: And that was one of the things when I was just talking to you in the early—when I first met you guys is like, “Well you know what? There’s a required like you know what the pain points are. You know that there could be a better solution. That smells like money to me.” Spencer: We’re hoping. Quinn: Absolutely. From speaking to you a little bit more and what we’ll discuss here. And also I want to point out I find it interesting you guys are quite business savvy and also technically savvy in some respects. But you’re also from our conversations, I know that there’s some areas where we’re going to need t
