Rick Barlow, an old guy making content,
coming at you vertical, self-propelled, with my wits about me and with a perpetual attitude of gratitude.
Why do I think I can build a million dollar online business?
Because I have had some experience building businesses, and I have seen some impressive examples of online success in spite of the ocean of hype.
On my social accounts my bio usually reads:
“Built and sold a business. Produced an indie movie.
Hitchhiked from Carbondale to Macomb.”
Basically, I’m a business guy, an entrepreneur.
Which has nothing to do with hitchhiking.
That’s a separate story from when I was much younger and fascinated with all things Jack Kerouac. (And who hasn’t had a Kerouac phase?)
From an alarmingly early age I have been interested in business, although for a while I thought I wanted to be a high school history teacher. Student teaching cured me of that delusion, liberating me to begin a career in sales and marketing and entrepreneurship.
I’ve started three businesses,
excluding my brief foray into Amway back in the ‘60s when Amway was new. Only one of the three has been successful. One was killed by the Great Recession, before it ever got off the ground. One is still struggling to break out.
In late 1981 with a $25,000 second mortgage on my home and a $500,000 handshake commitment from an institutional investor, I launched a business. Twenty years later, after two “pivots,” I had grown the business to about $23 million in sales, and sold it. Not exactly meteoric. No Elon Musk, for sure. But only 25% of new businesses survive their first 15 years. Few entrepreneurs succeed overnight. Most mix inspiration with tons of persistence and grinding to get to their liquidity event.
My successful venture was not an online business. In 1981, there was no “online.” But computers were involved and databases and direct mail and software. And by 2001 when I sold it, technology was a central element of the company’s market value.
The Last Late Night. The indie movie.
A few years before I sold the business, my son convinced me to help him produce a feature film. Neither of us knew much about producing a movie, but we did it, learning on the fly.
He wrote and directed it. “The Last Late Night.” We took it to film festivals where it was an audience favorite, and earned awards and good reviews. It was great fun, although disappointing, since we never got theatrical distribution for the movie. You can see it now on VOD at Vimeo.com, and we hope to get it up soon on Amazon and iTunes, too.
Producing a movie is a lot like starting a business.
Like all businesses, it has a large creative component, but operates within financial constraints.
I have always loved that about business — the wonderful sense of applying imagination and material resources to create something new and useful and therefore valuable.
That’s enough About Me. The rest will be About Us.