Colette, our 4 year old, has Down Syndrome and we didn’t find out this most important fact until she was nearly five months old. Colette started having seizures straight after I took her for her first round of immunizations, and for many months we had a fairly stressful time as we both found out that her seizures were noted in a small number of Down Syndrome children around the world each year and needed to be sorted and fast – and the other big shock was when her genetic tests came back and confirmed the neurologist’s suspicion that she had Down Syndrome.

I remember we found Andrew as our family doctor at this time, and I would mention my ability to get out and run was non-existent as my world changed and was being rocked around me, and he would subtly mention to ‘keep up the running’.

For the past six months, bar a much needed one week break with David at Hayman Island, I have very intensely been working on a project with another party that required an enormous amount of effort to get up and running and which was yielding no signs at all of any positive results. This was despite David and my huge labour on it and despite spending plenty of dollars on it. With the stress and anxiety around wanting to make this venture fly, I stopped running.

And Andrew noticed.

All the extra effort, hiring people to help, getting David onto the task of creating a totally new content management system, member management system and transactional system ( a huge task and one he solved with an incredibly good back end), creating new content, getting people we knew with great skills involved, shelling out our definition of a fortune in Google adwords – none of this actually mattered a jot. The results didn’t shift interest. People came to the site initially, but they didn’t stay and they didn’t buy anything. In time, they just didn’t come.

Don't give up what's good for you - keep running!

Andrew asked me why I hadn’t been running at the appointment and the light bulb went on. Working extra hard, doing more, angsting about it, pushing hard doesn’t get results if they’re not there to be had.

It’s been eight weeks since I had been running and skipping my time out on my runs had done nothing but make me feel fatter, less energetic, less happy and to actually put on a few kilos around the middle. Nothing huge, but enough to tell me that I’m on the wrong path.

I know I’ve had discussions with the hardest working (after David) entrepreneur I know, Scott Kilmartin from Haul that the one thing as a founder, business owner, entrepreneur you should try not do is give up whatever exercise you do. I believe we all do it, but the lesson in here for me is that giving up on whatever’s good for you doesn’t make you go better, and it doesn’t get the results you seek.

Before the doctor’s appointment yesterday I went for my first run in eight weeks and it made all the difference to how I felt physically and mentally.

It also made it clear to me that I had some big decisions to take.

I’m off for another run this afternoon and hope I can get my fitness back. I had been on track in April to run the Melbourne Marathon in October, but I will have to work really hard just to even be able to complete the half-marathon now. That was one of the goals I wrote down in my New Year plan.

So after a huge sideways lurch, I have a couple of pieces of advice to offer myself for the future. The second I’ll share with you in a day or so, but the first is ‘never, ever give up your running, yoga, walking’ or whatever it is that you do to keep fit and stay well. The hour you do this every day is the best hour you can spend on yourself and you should never let yours or other people’s expectations or business pressures, crowd it out.

Photo: aarmono

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

Our trip though was for R & R and not business thankfully though while we were there I couldn’t help but notice how many things done by the Hayman team and in delivering the Hayman experience, provided some unique insights into concepts that could be deployed in other places and other businesses.

One of these was the notion of offering a ‘peak experience’ to the customer base, not something that everyone will want to do, and the cost of it can be one of the factors that makes it exclusive, but something that can be nevertheless considered a pinnacle experience, a really neat thing to do.

On our day of arrival at Hayman Island, David and I trekked down to the reception to book a couple of adventures, one of these was to be the Chef’s Table and the other a few hours snorkeling on the reef. Chef’s Table wasn’t occurring until the night we were leaving, however there was a similar and even better experience (we were told) on offer called the Fontaine Bench.

At any one time there can be up to 500 guests at Hayman Island, and there are at least that many people again providing the labour and skill that keep things ticking over smoothely. Fontaine Bench is available for two nights a week and it’s only available to two people at a time, something David and I had not understood when we made our booking.

We booked the Tuesday night Fontaine Bench and rather than drone on about the amazing food and wine you can take a look at the menu, constructed just for us on that night, and one which changes as the Sous Chef sees fit, which can be often. The chefs at Hayman like to experiment and innovate, they have fantastic facilities at their disposal and use them to come up with new and unusual dishes.

The Fontaine Bench experience is for two people at a time and you are seated on an elevated bench at a table looking directly into the serving and preparation area of the Fontaine kitchen. La Fontaine is Hayman’s premier fine dining restaurant, where you can buy a hamburger for $150 a pop. We indeed saw a couple of these hamburgers being lovingly prepared by the Sous Chef, Anthony Healy, whose joy and delight in being in charge of the kitchen that night was simply infectious. His ingredient knowledge and ability to share it was also second to none.

Of the 12 courses we had, Anthony was able to talk us through the intricacies and ins and outs of most of them – food prepared to delight and entertain and inspire has a story and it was Anthony’s job to tell us the story of the food. It was such a great reminder to me that those who really love and know and understand what they’re doing are just so outrageously positively infectious.

But the key learning from me from the Fontaine Bench was that it’s good to have a really premium product available in your offering that can be that special one that those who use it wax lyrical about, and help bring other customers to your standard offering.

I really like the notion of having a standard offering and then a premium offering. With just about every type of product there will be a bunch of those who want and appreciate the regular experience and then a small handful who want a little bit more.

David and I spent a few weeks working with Marcus Padley who writes the fabulous stockmarket newsletter Marcus Today a few years ago, working up a renewal campaign to put a bit of spice into his subscription renewals and to remind people that his product offering really was the best of its breed. One thing we introduced after chatting to several renewing subscribers who talked Marcus up to the sky, was the Life Member category. It wasn’t cheap and the idea was more of an experiment to test the actual loyalty of these members, but we set the price at $5000 and waited to see what would happen.

Within two days there was a Life Member enquiry and subsequently sale. Two days after that another one sold, same again two days after that. We finished our stint with Marcus and this campaign, but I gained a really great insight into the mindset of the customer who really loves what you do – they will pay a bit more (or a lot more even) for a higher level of your product and maybe even a closer connection with you.

Crikey also figured this out when the founders were being sued and needed to find substantial funds even after selling their house, to pay their legal fees. They introduced the Life Member category, and lo and behold a raft of people who loved the Crikey newsletter and believed in the founder’s fight, signed up and leant their support. While there was an ideological underpinning here, the Life Members did get some special benefits: a special insider news just for them, and unique access to founder, Stephen Mayne,  that other subscribers didn’t get.

It’s true that your super premium product is unlikely to ever be the core of your business, as in the Fontaine Bench, but it can be the place where you build such strong customer loyalty around your brand that these super customers become your advocates and brand warriors. And even if they don’t they’ll just secretly enjoy their premium status in your customer group, knowing that they’ve paid for the privelege, and hopefully thinking it was worth every cent.

David and Fiona with the highlight of their Fontaine Bench dinner - the Martini Igloos.

So was the highlight of our recent Hayman visit Fontaine Bench? The answer to that question is ‘yes’. What then was the highlight of Fontaine Bench? Well that would have to be the Martini Igloo, pictured. A martini sorbet served in a carved ice sculpture, each one individually made for one service only. Pinnacle, peak, premium, call it what you will, this was one experience I’ll be talking about for a very long time to come.

Photo: David Eedle

David and Fiona write about their first visit to Hayman Island in 2006 in their book Niche Content Millionaire – the story of the startup, growth and sale of their business, Arts Hub.

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

However, we didn’t just want to map out and then tell the Arts Hub story, we wanted to condense the journey into some key lessons for those who wanted to venture into niche publishing. It was our belief then and it still is that one of the great frontiers online that has only partly been exploited is that of niche content.

What we mean by that is that if you can provide content of a high quality in a specialist or niche field for a bunch of people who are interested in or work in that area, then you can create a product that those people will pay for. Many of us understand that it’s important to keep abreast of the trends and challenges in our industry or even in an area that is a hobby for us, and pulling this sort of information together for people has a value.

One of the opening stories in the book David and I subsequently wrote about niche content and the Arts Hub journey, Niche Content Millionaire, was about our treat to ourselves and our children immediately after selling our business. David describes the bliss of being at Hayman Island in the Whitsundays, dropping the elder children to Hernando’s Hideaway (the island’s Kids Club, right next door to the Hayman Island State School – believe me they have a school there!) only to find out that the children needed their runners that day as they were going out on the reef, and that rather than David having to go back and get said runners, a porter was called to do the task. In the life of a harried parent, such service is gold.

In May this year I succumbed to a delectable special offer by email from Jetstar Holidays for a 4 night getaway to Hayman Island and the offer being just too affordable to be believable, I signed us up for it. The only dates we could get were in the third week of August and David and I are just back from our getaway to Hayman Island in the gorgeous Whitsundays. This time our visit was without children.

Hayman Island - has mastered the art of an Australian style of sophisticated service

It’s not often I’ve been known to say that a merchant has improved their service, but I must say that whilst the service we received at Hayman Island in 2006 was faultless and fantastic, this time round David and I agreed, it was even better.

When it comes to elite service, how do you get better? Surely the calibrations of certain kinds of service quality become much thinner, and individual perception and preference starts to have more of a sway?

Well what I noticed about the difference in service at Hayman Island Resort this holiday was that they seem to have perfected the art of an Australian style of great service, that is relaxed and empathetic and in tune with the customer. All our requests were deftly met and with absolutely no resistance, I can not say that that is my usual experience with any kind of service here in Melbourne. And that is not to bag Melbourne establishments.

Now you can say that it is easy to provide good service in a perfect climate when all the guests are relaxed and happy and not in the mood for trouble of any kind. However when you understand the sheer logistics and complexity involved in providing all the bits and pieces Hayman Island does to its customers with absolute ease and mastery, then I think you would be churlish to say that they have it easy.

I mused on this issue of even better than fantastic service on the plane home to Melbourne and decided that behind the scenes, Hayman Island must have one really great staff training program and that there must be some kind of focus around constant improvement, otherwise we would have experienced either the same level of service as in 2006, or not as good service.

And the impressions that this classy Australian style, friendly, warm, attentive but non-interfering service had on me – well I can’t wait to get us back there.

Hayman Island might be one of the older elite resorts in the world but to my mind the service quality there is the best I’ve experienced. In fact there were a number of lessons about business and excellence I took away from our recent visit to Hayman Island and I’ll share a few more of those with you over the next few days – one I want to tease you with is the Martini Igloo – more on that tomorrow!

Photo: Sarah_Ackerman

If you’d like to know more about how we celebrated the sale of our business Arts Hub, read our book Niche Content Millionaire.

PS – the constant references to Hayman Island are due to the writer’s hankering to return there as soon as earthly possible. The Into the Mountain folk, unfortunately have no commercial connection with the resort or its owners.

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

I mean you’re the one at the top of the company leading the charge, everyone looks to you for a decision, and if there’s just you rolling out a big vision, well then, when do you get time to sleep?

For many of us the last couple of years has been about getting through the Global Financial Crisis and keeping our businesses afloat while everything and everyone around us reset their priorities and expectations.

David and I have a couple of new ventures in various stages of start-up. One is away in terms of the product but the next step is a really solid effort on sales and marketing.

The other one is having its technology tweaked and polished, although we have 3 great organizations who have agreed to be beta testers of it, so therefore we really need to hurry up and get it ready and get it into test mode.

David also does most of the work involved with our consulting business Webzing Pty Ltd and is in demand both in Australia and with a couple of technology clients in the U.S., and this is work that we’d like to continue with even when our two startups are underway and earning their keep.

This all leads me to the issue of how does an entrepreneur who is managing early stages of their business cope with the stresses and strains and manage to stay clear and capable of making great decisions and of seeing the opportunities when everyone else around them is too busy not seeing the forest for the trees?

Meditation can give you that holiday in your mind that leaves you feeling refreshed and raring to go.

I must admit that in the past I haven’t necessarily paid enough attention to my health and my overall emotional well-being and there have been many times during the past 15 years in business where I’ve resorted to a glass of wine or an extra coffee when indeed something properly relaxing was required.

When your days have blown out to 15 hours or more on business and you’re wondering where on earth you’re going to get a mental battery recharge from, consider doing something that I’ve taken to over the past couple of years. It’s not a new technology, various forms of this practice have been around for a couple of thousand years, however it is the nearest thing I know to getting an instant ‘holiday in your mind’ when there’s no real break imminent on your horizon.

I’m talking here about the practice of meditation. I’ve committed to giving myself 20 minutes in the morning before I get up every day to do a simple meditation and clear my head so that I can face with tons of energy anything that presents itself to me during the day.

Meditation is a personal preference thing, but the results so far for me are an increased sense of well-being and a greater degree of excitement and engagement in the business projects we’ve undertaken.

There’s no question that being involved in a start-up requires hard work, but it’s also important that you’re doing the right work rather than just working yourself down to a burnt crisp.

If meditation is not for you, then how about taking 20 minutes out of the most hectic part of your day and just putting the headphones on and listening to your favourite music? And not thinking about anything, just listening and enjoying the bliss of listening to music you really love.

I suggest that by giving yourself a holiday in the mind every day, you will be completely refreshed each time you do this and you will have way more energy to tackle your mountain of start-up tasks.

Photo: flickr h.koppdelaney

More interesting for me are those businesses that build on what’s been done in the past, but do it in such a way that they create something quite new. Indeed if you’re breaking new ground you have permission to do things a little more out-of-the-box, the sides of the box have not yet been defined in fact you’re doing the defining as you’re going about things.

While it’s important not to reinvent the wheel, it’s also important to not be too derivative. Technologies and business that build on what’s known but take the opportunity off into a new, hitherto unnoticed direction are those who have the true potential to clean up big in my view.

Dr Terry Cutler in his time as Chairman of Arts Hub, often used to say to me – don’t follow the pack, be the market organiser. Do what you do differently enough that you can enforce a whole new way of looking at things in your market place. Even better, create that marketplace.

Just a little food for thought today. The word innovation is bandied around so often that I fear it sometimes loses its meaning. In my experience, you innovate when you build something new, interesting and useful beyond what is known and expected and accepted as being true.

Innovation can be jiggling old stuff around, but it's more than recycling worn-out concepts

And one more point on innovation. Some friends of the Into the Mountain crew have recently started a new business aggregating the resources and opportunities in the customer service space and they’ve invented a whole new term for what they’re doing. The business is www.clienteerhub.com and hats off to Ray Brown and Matt and Tim McDougall for creating a whole new language and canon around the area of customer service. Redefining something in an existing area in such a way that you unlock it’s real importance and give it the sort of value it should have had in the first place is really, really clever innovation. We wish the clienteerhub team all the best and we’re sure we’ll be talking more about their content and what they’re doing in the near future. For now check out their first clienteerTV interview with Ben Watson, Principal of Enterprise User Experience at Adobe.

Photo: flickr miguelpdl

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

We’ve often mused about other ways of getting a business out of the blocks and have been fortunate enough to have received really great guidance from our mentor, Dr Terry Cutler and also witnessed a real guru in action. This other way I’m talking about may be the greatest shortcut you’ll ever use in business – though it requires total belief in yourself and your product. It’s called starting at the top and working your way down. And in honour of our business colleague who often astounds David and I with his feats in signing up the world’s largest and most gate-kept companies to his online product, I’m going to call this the Matt Smith Effect.

What is the Matt Smith effect? Firstly, introducing Matt Smith. Matt is the founder and President of a very interesting online business that deals with the quality certification of the really big companies around the world. It’s not really a sexy business and you won’t have heard their name and probably won’t care about them even if I told you their name. The company started in Berwick, which is an outer suburb of Melbourne in Australia and is now US-based and has its head office in San Mateo, on the fringes of Silicon Valley.

The Matt Smith Effect. Start at the top and work your way down, not the other way around.

At the very outset Matt Smith had a vision of global domination. That his product (which by the way, David built) would come to be used by every company in the world that needed to comply with safety and quality standards, and who would need a way of showing this compliance. Now that’s certainly every product manufacturer in the first world to begin with and then all those in developing nations who want to ship their product.

Whilst the business has grown and the types of document handling this company manages has expanded to include compliance with US bio-terrorism legislation and lab testing standards, Matt Smith has continued to do what he does best and sell his vision to the decisionmakers at the very top of the biggest companies in the world.

The Matt Smith Effect is all about asking yourself the question – which customer, by getting them on board with the vision, can bring you the largest amount of new customers simply by having them in your loop? And Matt goes and finds out who is the guy/girl who makes the decision on new systems and alliances and works on them and gets the company into the fold. Sometimes they pay for services provided, and other times their role is to receive the services at low or no cost but to influence their suppliers to join the system for the mutual benefit of their compliance documentation being able to be made available to the commissioning company at the speed of a login.

David and I are in the middle of building two new businesses that we hope will turn into fine businesses that will meet the needs of the customer base effectively. However it’s too easy to get bogged down in trying to win over lots of little leads. We’re getting old, we tire easily, we have got to employ faster and better methods to build our customer base.

And so this time round we’re employing the Matt Smith Effect. And yes, on a personal level this is way more risky than going after lots of little sales – you can get serious egg on your face if you get things wrong. It means that we will have to research and come to understand the specific needs of the biggest companies that would be benefited by our products and to find out who is the linchpin/key influencer or actual decisionmaker in that firm and find the way to talk them into getting on board with us. And if we’re successful, we’ll need to deliver day in/day out.

It does mean being firm in our purpose. It does also mean being clear on ourselves, but with a bit of steely effort and good fortune I hope using the Matt Smith Effect also brings us more sales at a faster pace and helps us grow these new businesses quickly. Fast growth breeds excitement, new issues to resolve and validation of your product and often expansion of your product into areas not originally thought of.

Is it time you employed the Matt Smith Effect in your business?

Photo: flickr g-hat

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

Fiona Boyd: Today I’m going to talk to a client David and I have been consulting with in recent times, and we’re catching up with him at a really interesting time for him – that is, just before he launches his first online business. David Broughton has run several offline businesses, in the beauty and the tourism space, and soon he’ll be launching a new online social network for pets and pet lovers, called mypet247.com. Welcome today, David.

David Broughton: Hello Fiona, thank you.

Fiona: Firstly, you’ve got several offline businesses under your belt, what is it that’s got you motivated to try an online business, and then how come an online social network?

David: Okay, with the offline business, as everyone knows, it’s extremely hard to reach a mass audience obviously unless you’re dealing with budgets and a big new idea. And I just saw the idea of being able to reach a large audience and something that I could possibly scale, if it was to happen, it’d be something I’d be interested in.

Fiona: Tell me about the journey so far. What have been the ups and downs for you?

David: Okay… having never ventured into the IT world before, other than a basic website for the business, it’s been very interesting. Offline, I know what I’m touching and feeling. In the virtual world, it’s very hard for me to get a grasp of what’s real and not real, and to know exactly where we’re heading.

Fiona: What is the business that you run now? And what are some of the things you do in the management and decision-making that transfer across to an online model?

David: Okay… at the moment, I’m in the tourist sector, so it’s very bricks and mortar, that’s why the venture into IT is a little bit different for me. In terms of management, I guess it’s still reasonably the same, in the sense that the business always has to make money, or its end goal is to make profit. So in that sense, you can transfer some ideas across. But I’m dealing with a whole new world for me, a whole new concept, so it’s very interesting and exciting.

Fiona: Could you tell me one thing that is new for you – that’s a new skill?

David: Trying to translate the jargon, for a start. Dealing with a lot of people and they’re speaking in a language, technical terms that they assume that I understand. So that’s been good. And just the whole process from start to finish, particularly with a social or community networking website, it’s a lot bigger than a standard two or three page brochure.

Fiona: When you started mypet247, it would have been a side project to your tourism business and I’m just wondering, because you had a main business at the time, what were your expectations for it back then?

David: We started three years ago, and back then, I just hoped that we’d get it finished, and get it up in a short space of time, and that the community would accept it. I didn’t, and I still don’t, have any grand visions, or anything like that. It’s just a day by day… I just wanted to put out a good product that would benefit the people in the pet community.

Fiona: So, if that’s the case, have those expectations changed at all across the three years? Because you’re really deep into it now, launch is imminent, and you’re three years in – have those expectations changed?

David: Yes, I equate – it’s a bit like, back to the bricks and mortar model. I started off building a one-bedroom unit. As it’s turned out, we’re now building a 30-storey apartment building. So the expectations of what I can offer, or what the community website can offer, have obviously grown exponentially. At the start, it was just going to be a place where people come and feel comfortable, on a very basic level, because that was my thinking, then, of what I could do in the development. But, three years on, the idea is still there to provide a nice community feeling, but the services and space is going to be a lot larger for people. So hopefully they accept that.

Fiona: Just tell me about you yourself. Are you a pet lover, or is this just a cynical gap in the market that you’ve identified and you think that you’re going to make a zillion out of it?

David: I have two small dogs who are more part of the family – children, you might even say. So it’s certainly not just a money-making exercise or something like that. The ideas spawned from my dogs, Penny and Mate, so that’s where it really grew and came from. I couldn’t find a space that provided me everything that I would like to access as a pet owner, and therefore I started looking into developing it myself.

Fiona: Lots of people say the best businesses come out of your own need that you’ve identified. Are you hoping that this gets big because a lot of other people have that need?

David: Yeah I do. I think the industry as a whole, the pet industry, and pet ownership is something that’s growing at quite a steady rate, and I feel that I’ve built the space to provide features and facilities that I would want, and also asking and doing research on what other people would like, without the focus or the drive being to put it out there to make money. You’re not going to see heaps of ads, or all this type of thing, all the time in your face. You’re going to see content and features, and any feedback we’re getting from the members, we’ll try our hardest to implement as quickly as possible.

Fiona: So you’re saying it’ll be more content heavy than ad heavy on the mypet site?

David: Correct. Obviously, as with any business, there’ll have to be a certain amount of advertising, but it’s not going to be in your face, it’s not going to be the driver of the site. We feel the success will come from the joy and the repeat business we get from the community, and the sense of logging on, and actually creating activity and a bit of buzz on the site.

Fiona: You’ve run other businesses so I would think that you’ve scoped your competition relatively comprehensively. What differences will, let’s say a member who’s joining mypet247 have compared to say one of your competitors, Dogster, which has been around for quite some time?

David: Sure. The difference that I found that we may be able to provide that some of our competitors don’t, is that our site caters for all pet types. That in itself isn’t unique, there are other sites out there that do that, however, being a dog owner, if we have a member who specifically wants to view only one type of pet type, we have a feature called Pet Choice which we invented, you might say, that allows you to customise the site. So you could select that maybe you just want to view dog and cat content, and essentially the site then just becomes a cat or dog site from your viewpoint. So that was one feature I couldn’t really find a site that allowed me to do that.

Fiona: Can you have all the pet choices? Is that an option?

David: Correct. To start with, just because of, from a programming point of view, we have four main categories; dogs, cats, fish and birds. If you have a pet that falls not in one of those categories, we have other pet types, and once we have a significant amount of members, we will also add those types in as well.

Fiona: Several hundred crocodiles means that crocodiles will get a category…

David: Well let’s hope it may happen, who knows.

Fiona: And, David, I was just wondering, because you did mention that technology is not your background, that you’ve had to manage, basically a really big technology project. Mypet247 is a full social networking website. Tell me a bit about that – that’s a really new skill set, isn’t it? The project management of a big technology project.

David: It certainly is, because you’re starting off at zero base, you might say. I was actually thinking maybe less than zero, if that’s possible. In the sense that it wasn’t my background in terms of study, it’s not a business myself or any of my friends had been in before, I had zero contacts to start with. So, with that, you’re going to run into a few issues and headaches along the way. But I’ve found that even whilst even at the time, some of the brick walls I ran into seemed unclimbable, overall they’ve probably actually helped the process and my learning of the industry. So, would I take back some of those mistakes I may have made? I probably wouldn’t, actually. Because they’ve got me where I am today.

Fiona: All learning has a cost, doesn’t it, to get there?

David: It does.

Fiona: Well, look, your launch is imminent, congratulations on sticking with it for three years and good luck going forward beyond that, David. Thanks for your time today.

David: Thanks, Fiona.

Fiona: And I’ve been speaking to David Broughton, who’s soon to launch his first online venture after doing several offline ventures, and it’s called mypet247, it’s an online social network for pets and pet lovers. Stay tuned, because it’ll launch soon.

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

This does not signify a lack of interest or desire to write about what we understand or come to know in the entrepreneurial business space, but does indicate that David and Fiona have been up to our own ventures again.

In between consulting David and I have been putting our efforts towards a couple of new businesses we’re launching.

In the first instance, we’re doing a joint venture with a reputable and rather noble immigration law firm and in the second we’re jumping into the social media space and twinning our experience and interest in the arts and online, with some of the new channels the social media arena offers up.

I’m not sure what your default is when you’re in serious startup mode, however I am known to work all day in my pyjamas, skip meals, showers, even skip Taggart on 13^th Street on Foxtel. Having just come out of a phase of live-like-a-student as we worked strange hours to get up a new venture, I remind myself that once you’ve got your new thing up and running, you need to go back and sort out everything that’s been on hold while you were doing it and one of those things is our Into the Mountain blog.

If you read our posts you would know that we are fond of online content businesses. We’ve started up and sold two such beasts (Arts Hub, Screen Hub – you can find out more about these in our book Niche Content Millionaire) and have tried our hand at a few other online businesses, but really our interest lies in content businesses.

Our latest is a joint venture as mentioned with one of Australia’s leading immigration law firms, Erskine Rodan and Associates. Led by Partner Christine Rodan, the team at Erskine Rodan spent three years on researching and writing in plain English about all the intricacies and nuances of the Australian visa system and produced a book called Migrating to Australia The Guidebook. When we were doing our little tapdance before we committed to doing an online venture with the Erskine Rodan & Associates team, I asked Christine why she undertook the book venture? It struck me that by putting all the useful information one would need in order to work out how to migrate to Australia in a book, that the firm was giving up on some potential revenue that could be earned by representing the readers who without the knowledge in the book, would likely have been clients.

Book number 2 from the Migration Digest team will be launched in June. It's called Australian Business Skills Migration The Guidebook.

But Christine’s response was salient. Even though in Australia anyone who gives any kind of immigration advice at all must be a registered migration agent, there still seems to be a large amount of people who without with or without credentials, feel free to give advice to people trying to migrate to Australia and those on the receiving end of this advice can end up in terrible situations, at which point they sometimes get referred to Erskine Rodan & Associates. Christine Rodan is committed to making sure that as much as possible, there is access to a quality flow of information about all aspects of the migration process, so that those wishing to come to Australia to live and work can be fully informed, before they take the expensive step of engaging an immigration lawyer or migration agent.

I’ve read and typed up testimonials from hundreds of clients who Christine’s firm has helped over a 35 year period and I can tell you that the work they do is life-changing. The day I spent typing up the testimonials was spent with me teary eyed as I read how Christine and Erskine and individual members of their team had taken people through the immigration process, sometimes the clients situations were harrowing, and stuck with them to get to the result they wanted. For many people, migrating to Australia is a dream that they will work exceptionally hard and do double triple bendbacks to achieve. It is our belief that such people deserve the best quality information available to get their minds around what they’re doing and how to go about achieving that dream.

Hence our new venture is all about the timely dissemination of the latest immigration changes, combined with the definitive starting point for anyone wanting to migrate to Australia – Migrating to Australia The Guidebook. We also see that there is just so much interest in this topic that we’re compiling a monthly digest about all the latest trends and happenings in Australian immigration. This lets me get my  hands on creating a news product again, which is something I miss dearly post-Arts Hub days.

If you’d like to know more about this venture, go take a look at www.migrationdigest.com.au

Okay the cat is now out of the bag with venture one, in coming weeks I hope to let you know what the other entrepreneurial business is, and it’s one that anyone can participate in, so we’d love to ask you to get involved when the time is right.

For now, thanks for your patience and if you know anybody who is drifting around trying to work out how to get the right visa to come and work, live or settle in Australia, do let them know about us at www.migrationdigest.com.au

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

David Broughton expects to push the button and take the mypet247.com site live in the first two weeks of May 2010. You can keep an eye out for it at www.mypet247.com – or talk with David and his team on Twitter and Facebook.

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

On Saturday night I was privileged to witness a wonderful happening that I can only explain as really fabulous sandpit behaviour.

David, myself and our son Conor had just seen our football team, St Kilda Saints achieve a rather decisive win over the opposition for the evening, the North Melbourne Kangaroos. Thirty thousand attendees then streamed out of Etihad Stadium and most turned right over the walkway and down to the platforms at Southern Cross Station to catch the train home.

When the Saints play platform 13 is always full to the brim as it’s the platform that the Sandringham, Frankston and Dandenong lines depart from and the bulk of St Kilda Saints supporters tend to come from the Bayside suburbs, from inner city right through to Frankston (which is the new training home for the St Kilda Football Club).

On this night the platform was jam-packed full of St Kilda supporters, all rather jolly at the outcome of the game, with a few louder than the others (and probably more tanked up, and this is usual), but generally several thousand people jostling about waiting for their train and being a touch rowdy.

A St Kilda supporter revealed his saintly qualities last Saturday.

In the midst of all this, the tiniest elderly woman, determinedly but not hostilely attempted to get to the train as the Dandenong train pulled in. She was at most 4 ft 10 in and it was very clear in her demeanour that she must get on the train. As she was so tiny, she just wasn’t in most people’s field of vision, however I noticed her coming up behind David and gestured for him to move aside and give her some space, which he did. And when her train pulled up, and I anxiously looked over concerned to see how difficult it would be for her to get through the huge crowd and get on her train without misshap, I noticed one of the really huge Saints supporters step up behind the woman and guide her through the crowd and onto the train. It was such a beautiful sight – here was a 7 ft giant, slightly red-faced and looking like he’d had a couple of beers during the evening’s entertainment, however when he saw that someone could do with a little non-intrusive assistance, he switched his rowdy St Kilda supporter hat to the gentleman’s hat and helped out with true grace.

I remarked to David after witnessing this lovely scene that I was so glad I lived in Melbourne, in Australia – that this really is one of the most civil cities in the world. And a St Kilda Saints supporter behind me overheard and nodded and smiled in agreement too.

To the gentle giant St Kilda supporter on platform 13 at Southern Cross station on Saturday night, you epitomize great sandpit playing skills, the world is a better place for the likes of you.

Tomorrow’s blogpost – the ten habits of great sandpit players.

Photo: flickr Jayegirl99

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now