Exclusive Interview With Jeremy Gislason
Of SureFireWealth.com

Part 1 of 6

Louis Allport - Hi, I'm Louis Allport and today I am speaking with Jeremy Gislason of SureFireWealth Inc, SureFireWealth.com. Hi Jeremy.

Jeremy Gislason - Hey, how's it going Louis?

LA - Good thanks, thanks very much for being on the call.

JG - Yep, sure anytime.

LA - If we can dive straight in, can you talk a little about your background and of particular interest the history of your publishing business SureFireWealth?

JG - Yeah, sure. Well, for those that don't know our website or know who we are, I guess you could go to SureFireWealth.com and click on the About Us and read our bio, but basically I've been in business probably my whole life.

I grew up in an entrepreneurial family where my farther had his own business, so even growing up as a kid I kind of figured that was the way to do it - have your own business. So I never really thought about going to work for somebody else, working a 9 to 5 or getting a salary type of job. I just really wasn't interested in doing that even from a young age.

I did a lot of traveling when I was younger and ended up in Japan and stayed over there about 16-17 years. I have a wife and three kids and over there I did have to a get a job for a while as it's hard going in a foreign country to start your own business just like that.

So I did work over there for a couple of years and then I basically started on my own after that. I considered the two or three years I was working as training to get experience in what I would later do with my own business over there.

My wife and I opened up a private language school in Japan where we taught English as a second language to children, adults, businessmen, anybody who needed to improve their English. I did that for about ten years on my own, and about two or three years before I went on my own.

The thing is when we started my wife was pregnant, she had just quit her job and I had quit my job and we already had a kid too. She was pregnant with our second child and neither of us had a job, a source of income, and we just gave it a go and said its just do or die. We are going to make this work or we are going to starve.

So we basically went and started from nothing. We did all kinds of stuff to get students. We put fliers in mail boxes, ads in newspapers, word of mouth, talking to friends, anything we could do to get our name out there we did... posting up things in supermarket bulletin boards... this was back in 1997, this was before we had all the wonderful things we now have on the web.

At the time, we didn't own a computer - the Internet was only just getting started. We were using word processors. So we had to do everything off line. So we had to do old school stuff - fliers, talking to people, bulletin boards... you name it we did it.

The thing is we had the drive to succeed - I knew we were going to succeed... that was my mindset. I didn't even think about failure. We went from zero students to three or four right away. And then within a month we had about thirty or forty students and that was enough to pay a few bills and that made me feel that we could do this and gave me more confidence.

We just carried on going at it and within three to four months we basically had about 80-90 students. That was enough to cover all of our bills and all of our expenses and basically live and by the end of the year we were up to about 100 to 150. We didn't stop we just kept on going and at our peak we had over 200 students and we had part time teachers helping out and I really enjoyed it.

I really enjoyed working with people. It was fun to work with the kids especially. It was so different - at one hour I might teach a baby class... another hour a kindergarten class... the next hour it might be high school students.

In the evening, I might teach some businessmen after work. It was a lot of fun and I learnt a lot myself in the process. As we progressed we kept on learning about business and of course eventually in 1999 we got computers and got online.

But the downside was you were trading your time for money. And you only have so much time in the day to deal with the trade. You can't ask for more time and yes, I tried using leverage - I tried hiring other teachers to take some of my classes. But what happened was either the students didn't like the teachers and wanted only me or the teachers didn't work out and quit after six months.

So it was constantly trying to find the teachers to take their place and eventually I just said forget it and I will do it myself as I thought I can do it better than they can and all the kids love me. That was my mindset back then and it worked.

But I was burning myself out. I was teaching from nine o'clock in the morning to nine or ten o'clock at night sometimes. While I really enjoyed it I realized that I couldn't do this forever. "Am I going to do this when I am 45-50 years old? I'm not going to have the energy, the stamina - it's just not going to work. I'm never going to see my family. I have got to do something here..."

While we were doing great, mentally, it was starting to take its toll on me. So around three to four years after we started doing this... I might also mention that Japan was in a deep recession at the time so we managed to really grow our business during the Japanese recession because we had a real niche market and we had good service, but I just knew we had to do something else to supplement our income.

In 1999 or 2000, I read a book called "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki. My wife bought it for me and said she heard it was a good book and wanted me to read it. And it just blew me away, it just made so much sense. It was about passive income, ways of owning your own business and thinking like an entrepreneur.

It just made so much sense that I immediately knew that I had to do something to start making passive income to supplement the income from our school where I was basically trading my time for money. By the way, trading your time for money, a lot of people do this every day, it doesn't matter if you are a doctor or a lawyer, it doesn't matter if you are making a million dollars a year as a high paid surgeon you are still trading your time for money.

So I thought "I want to do something where the money keeps coming no matter what. It doesn't matter if I am on holiday, or sick in hospital or a weekend or even if I am sleeping".

I know I wanted something where the money just kept on coming. That's passive income. So I did a lot of research, kept on reading and learning, just soaked in everything I could about business.

I started thinking maybe I could invest in some real estate so started looking at properties in Japan. But basically over there, the land is worth a lot but the buildings are worth nothing so typically after 20 to 30 years they pull them down. So you're investing in the value of the land basically and over there it doesn't really increase a lot such as in other countries like the US... because of the depreciation of the dollar and inflation and everything else, and soaring costs - the value of your house basically doubles every ten years. Not sure what it is in the UK, but it's kind of crazy over here in the US. Here in the US, you can buy a house, particularly 10 years ago and basically flip it for double what you paid for it after just a couple of years.

So these are things that Robert Kiyosaki talks about too. So, I looked into real estate and I weighed the pros and cons and I thought "It is a lot of investment..." You have to have a lot of bank loans tied up and the market goes up and down. You can have rental income and that is the way to go but you have lots of other things to consider.

I did consider it and then I considered investing in the stock market but then you really don't have control over your income when you are just giving money to your broker or somebody with the hope that they make you 10% return. And the returns are typically lower unless you can get into a good business on the ground floor as a private investor or as an angel investor then that is where the real money is. I did weigh it up and then thought I don't think I would be interested in that myself.

Then a friend of mine introduced me to an online business sort of deal back in 2001 - 2002. It was basically a scam. It was one of those things that if I saw it now I wouldn't even bother with it for 2 seconds. But at the time, I knew nothing.

We had just got our new computer and we were on dial up and I remember waiting for five minutes while it connected. I started checking it out and it was one of those things where you get a membership to a site and then you get an affiliate link and then you promote their site, that kind of stuff. Basically I tried everything as I had never tried anything before online and so I thought the best way to learn is to just try.

So I tried everything I could in terms of advertising, making money online, reading books, trying out software, anything I could get my hands on, opportunities... whatever.

My wife had a lot of faith in me - I give her credit for that, she really stuck by me! The first couple of years it wasn't pretty... I think I lost around $20,000 to $30,000 in my online experimentation stage and I hadn't made a dime basically.

What I was doing was taking a couple of thousand each month from my school business after paying all my bills etc. and instead of just spending it frivolously I took a couple of thousand each month... whatever I needed... and invested it into my online learning experience and it is really what I would recommend anyone to do who is just trying to get started here.

That's what I would recommend anyone to do, don't quit your day job but to start something else on the side and instead of going out every weekend and blowing a couple of hundred bucks, take that $500 that you would normally blow on a ski trip or weekend away and try to do something to start a business.

That's what I did. And it took a while but finally it worked out and I finally started to see the light. And I figured out things that were a scam. I figured out that you need to have your own list, things like building your mailing list. I figured out that having your own product was the important thing, and really helping customers out with your product.

I started putting two and two together and eventually ended up as a company advisor for a company called ISORegister Inc. I worked behind the scenes a lot with programmers and marketing trying to get joint ventures going for a couple of years.

I built up a lot of relationships during that time. So when I went on my own, back in 2004, beginning of 2005, when I launched SureFireWealth.com I knew a lot of people in the online industry. So when I decided to launch it I basically sent all my contacts a note that said 'I am doing this and that and got my own site going and wondered if you would be interested in taking a look at it?...'

And most of them said Yes and I showed it to them and I said, "If you want me to do you a special offer for your list, I will make a deal with you. I will let you offer a free paid silver membership, which normally costs $97 (at the time it was $97 per year, now it is about $147 per year)."

I made some joint venture deals. I said, "Only you can do this because you are a joint venture partner". I told them I didn't let everybody do this, only certain people who I approved.

And it worked - because it was a private offer my joint venture partners liked it. It was something they could offer that was kind of exclusive at the time because nobody else was offering it. Anybody who went directly to the site would have to pay $97. But through their private affiliate link they got it free, so they got a one-year free paid membership.

So what I was doing here, and some people at the time thought I was crazy giving up so much potential income, instead of trying to make the direct sale at $97 I was giving up that sale. Why was I giving up that sale? I was giving it up for the 'back end'.

Because I had a system in place and I had been testing it. I had first tested direct selling myself through lists I had built up and through advertising. It wasn't working so good, you could send a ton of traffic and people wouldn't buy, as it's a direct sales offer. They needed some kind of incentive.

But by giving them a free membership it's a no-brainer for them to try it out. It's a free gift - it's not just a fake gift. Not like when some people say, "You have free private pass to my new software, valued at 5 million dollars. Here's the link - it's free..." But if anyone goes to that link it's free anyway. So it's not really exclusive.

So I tried to make it really exclusive. That was the key - making it private for your partners so they were happy, their subscribers and members were happy... they got a great deal and what happened was we had some amazing conversions - people signing up for the free paid Silver membership who were upgrading to the Gold level because as soon as they signed up they got a message saying, "Thank You for signing up for the Silver membership - but wait - before you enter the member area we have a special deal for you where you can upgrade to Gold right now."

For $497 (back then it was $297) I showed them all the benefits and why they should upgrade and I gave them a no-brainer price. It was 60% to 70% off the regular price and what I found was anywhere from 5% to 10% of people who took the gift offer upgraded to Gold. So I immediately knew that I had something that worked. And I was real happy about that.

Remember - I am just doing it on the side. So I had my other business going and this was just something I was doing at midnight when I wasn't teaching or in early mornings or during my lunch breaks.

And it was a lot of fun and I remembered that I had built up so many relationships that pretty much everyone that I knew, they all had their own mailing lists - except me - I had a real small list.

But I knew guys who had 50,000 to 100,000 on their mailing list - we had a good relationship so they were very willing to offer that, especially after they saw it converting and I remember it really took off a few months after I had launched in 2005.

Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 1

Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 2

Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 3

Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 4

Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 5

Jeremy Gislason Interview: Transcript Part 6

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