Exclusive Interview With Jeremy Gislason
Of SureFireWealth.com

Part 2 of 6

It was in the spring and a friend promised to promote it for me as I worked with him at ISORegister when he had just got started online. He promoted it and I think he made around $5,000 to $6,000 in commissions just like that in about a week, and that was just the most amazing thing I had ever seen for me at the time: the fact that I could do this online, that somebody could push a button, send an email and make $10,000 in sales in a week is just amazing to me... I was flabbergasted.

I am thinking to myself, "I just made $6,000 in a week!" I paid him 50% so he was making $6,000 and I was making $6,000. That's almost what I was making a month in my other business. I think we were doing around $8,000 to $10,000 per month.

I was thinking "Holy cow! How many joint venture partners can I get to do this?" And then just did the maths...

This was just one guy - "If I could get ten people to partner with me and do this every week it's going to be insane!"

So that is what I did, I just hunted for joint venture partners the entire year I launched and the site exploded. The site went from zero members in January 2005 to approximately 20,000, or maybe 25,000, at the end of the year.

And the site did around $100,000 in sales for the year. No, I would say over $100,000 in sales and over 20,000 members. This was basically in my first year online, doing it myself.

It wasn't my first year online doing stuff but it was my first year online where I took control - I had the mindset and I had the skills behind me. I had the experience of failing for three years behind me and I had a lot of relationships built up from the past two to three years behind me, so I was able to do this.

Now, some people looked at that and said, "Who is this new guy who just started and now he is making $100,000 per year?!"

Well, everybody who is listening to this - it is not quite this simple. Some people will jump on it and make $100,000 but most likely any people who you see who are so called new marketers and new successful entrepreneurs have most likely a very long history behind them of experience, trying things, most of them have most probably failed a few times at some point.

If you look at the track record - most of the entrepreneurs have failed several times and I failed a lot the first couple of years that I was online but when it finally worked all I had to do was to do it again and again and now that site four years later has done around half a million in sales, has paid a lot of commissions out to affiliates and there are over 70,000 members in there. I just keep building the site to make it better and better and to make it a better service to people, and it works.

Of course we have lots of other sites that we have had over the years too because you don't want to just have all your eggs in one basket - you do want to branch out. Some products are not going to be successful, some sites are not going to be as successful as you hoped them to be, but if you release ten products one or two should make it.

Maybe half of them will be mediocre, maybe a couple will fail, and maybe one or two will be a big hit. That is basically where I am now in 2009. We now have 3 companies in SureFireWealth Inc, and MemberSpeed Inc which I am partnered on with Simon Hodgkinson who is also from the UK, and Power House Technology which is an IP (Intellectual Property) holding company which I also partner with Simon on.

We have over 20 membership sites now under those companies and I guess if you add up all the memberships - somewhere around 150,000 or more members.

We are doing very good but we continue to develop. It's never ending - we always keep striving to make the customers happy, create better products... online technology is moving at such a rapid rate it's crazy. Five or six years ago it wasn't quite so fast but nowadays it's just nuts... you have to keep up with the latest tools and things.

It's always a learning experience and I am always reading something. Almost every night or afternoon I try to read a little bit, thirty minutes to an hour each day... something related to motivation... something related that is going to help us grow the business and help myself.

I am always trying to meet with people and establish relationships and create new products and it's a lot of fun. I must say we did close the English business school down about two years ago because the online business basically overtook it.

When me and Simon did Marketing Main Event 3 in 2007, it was crazy for me because here I was teaching English and then launching Marketing Main Event 3 at the same time. I don't think I got more than five hours of sleep per night for two months.

We did $1.7 million in a week in the summer of 2007, in June. And I will always remember that week because to break a million dollars in a year for any business is fantastic. But to break a million dollars in a week - we were just blown away.

I am not saying that's so great as I know people who have done two, three, four million... even ten million in a day... anything is possible is what I am trying to say.

I knew at that point that anything was possible and that was the time when I made the decision, I just knew in my head that Marketing Main Event 3 was going to be a huge success and that was just the mindset I had. I just knew, I just visualized in my head that we were going to do over a million dollars, six months before we did it.

And my wife and I made the decision to close the school down and go full time online. Because I wanted to wait until it wasn't just hit or miss: make $10,000 this week and zero the next week, which is a mistake some people make.

I have seen lots of newly successful people, successful one day and then gone the next. Because they launched the book, made $50,000 dollars and they quit their job and they didn't have anything after that to build on.

I guess I could relate that to MC Hammer who was a pop star in the late 80's. He had one big hit, got millions and millions of dollars and basically blew it all and then he went bankrupt.

I didn't want to make those mistakes. I wanted to make sure we had a stable income that would be at least double or triple per month more than what we were doing with the school before I decided to close it down.

If we were making $10,000 a month with our school I wanted to make sure we were doing $30,000 consistently or more online before we made the decision to shut it down because it's not a small decision.

We had that school for ten years. Some of those students had been our students for ten years and we had built really close relationships with them and they needed me to improve their English and they really liked coming to class every week, and once you close that down there is no going back.

You can't just close the business down and then reopen it six months later and just say, "Everyone come back, I was just kidding!" Once it closes down it is final. We sent letters to all our students. We told them six to eight months ahead of time what we were doing.

We gave them an option to go find a new school or continue on with us. About 80% to 90% of them stayed with us until the day we closed.

It was a very emotional week when we closed down, a lot of hugs, a lot of goodbyes, things like that, but at the same time I knew that we were making a step in our lives to go to the next level. That 10 years of our life was one stage of our life that we did and now it is time for the next stage. Life is about stages, about advancing... improving yourself.

So that was in the summer of 2007 - August was the final month of the school. And that was after Marketing Main Event 3 had ended and we had enough money so on that side of things so we basically knew we would be okay.

We live in the US now. We moved to the US last year. We have two houses in the US. We have a condo in Japan that we let my mother in law use when we are gone and we built a house for my dad here in the US so he has a new place to live.

And we have a nice place ourselves in the countryside where it is nice and peaceful and quiet. And I can't say that I ever miss commuting myself because I don't. I never want to do it again.

My life is full of freedom right now. I wake up in the morning - I take my kids to school. After that I can do whatever I want. I can go and get a coffee or something in Starbucks or I can go and do some quick shopping if my wife needs something, or I can go take a walk if I want to go to the park, or I can come home and start online... or go feed the birds, feed the dogs and the cats and walk around and say it's a beautiful day.

And then I will go to work for a few hours - go make some money, do something that will try and improve our business. Then in the afternoon I will go pick up the kids, play a game, or go get some dinner, watch some movies or go read a book.

Basically what I am saying is I can do whatever I want every day of my life and I would never change that. Of course, I now have tons of responsibilities. I can't just slack off in terms of work but we now have plenty of people in place so that all I have to do is send an email to someone and say please get this done or hey we need this done.

We have so many people doing things for us that nowadays my unofficial title is money maker but my official title is growing the company as a president and I just need to keep on expanding the business and all I need to think about is cash flow - that is all I need to think about, how to increase cash flow. For a company this is very important because if you don't have cash flow then very soon you won't have a company. So that is where I am now and I couldn't be happier.

LA - That's great

JG - Sorry Louis, I talked a lot there.

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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