Tina Tower - Million Dollar Micro Business

Through running Scale Up, I found that most of my clients were looking for a way to leverage the knowledge they had in their service-based businesses to be able to help other people and also to create an additional revenue stream. They wanted to be able to create a program like the one they were doing with me, but for their own industry niche. I'm a big believer in giving people what they want. There's an Australian saying: ‘Don't push shit uphill’. Running online programs is all about following the path of least resistance by giving people what they want. If your clients are constantly asking you for something, you may want to think about giving it to them.

Now the business had complete location freedom, Mat and I decided to leave everything we knew and travel around the world for a year, sharing some incredible experiences with our kids while they were still young. We visited 28 countries over the following nine months. It was the best year of my life. I could fill a whole book on our adventures, but that's not why you're here. You're here because you know you have a course inside you. You know you've built up some precious skills and knowledge that you can share with the world. And I'm here to show you how.

When I sat there gazing out at the beautiful blue water off that Thai island, I could not believe that I had just made over $10k in 10 days, with barely any expenses, from doing something so easy and so much fun. To make a $10k profit in a traditional business is hard work. And every $10k thereafter compounds that hard work. In an online course business, you do the hard work once, then get paid for it over and over again. I'm unashamed to say that I love earning a lot of money and intend to earn a lot more, because I know what I can do with it. I have seen the impact your money can have.

On our trip I met a girl in Kenya called Annet. She is a remarkable young woman, and although she comes from a poor subsistence village she has very real dreams of becoming a doctor. When I first met Annet and spoke with her teachers and her family, we knew that the only thing that would hold her back was access to education. We made an arrangement to cover her school tuition to a boarding school so she could learn in a safe environment and have her meals and uniforms provided so she could focus on her studies. I promised her that as long as she maintained an A average I would continue to pay for her education all the way until she became a qualified doctor. That was two years ago, and seeing the success that Annet has experienced and how much she is contributing to her local community, we are now granting 16 more scholarships to other girls in the surrounding areas. That's what drives me.

The day I launched my first online course, I took the time to think about what had happened, comparing it with my previous 10 years in business, then looking ahead at future possibilities. It was the biggest revelation of my life. You can do this, I realised. I want this for you too so you can create your own financial independence, help people with your knowledge and make a positive impact in the world.

A million dollar business sounds great, but I've learned on my business journey that not all businesses are created equal. Most people focus on top-line revenue, the total cash money a business generates in a year. In my own businesses, and my coaching career, I have seen many profit-and-loss statements and far too many businesses that may be making a million dollars in revenue, but it's costing them that much or more to run the business. I've seen business owners express pride in their profits, only to admit that when they divide it by the number of hours they work, they're getting around $12 an hour! People were impressed by my franchise company, even though most of the time I earned no more than $50 000 a year — minimum wage.

A traditional business entails hefty running costs, such as staff, rent, equipment and stock. A digital business's running costs can be reduced to little more than a couple of pieces of software. A healthy profit margin for a traditional business will be around 20 per cent, and that percentage doesn't increase all that much as the business grows. In a digital business, profit may begin at around 40 to 60 per cent and as revenue grows so does the profit margin, because the running costs don't grow alongside the business. It's scalable and leveraged — and, my friends, it's beautiful.

A micro business is usually defined as a business that operates on a very small scale with no more than two employees. Earlier I spoke of people's responses when I said I ran a national franchise. Well, the look on people's faces when you explain you have a digital business offering online courses and memberships is very different. The public perception is often still that it's a little side-hustle run from the kitchen table. Let people assume what they want; all that matters is what's important to you.

If you want to run an impressive-looking traditional business that costs you a bucketload to run and gives you stress and pressure in spades, absolutely go for it. The challenge is fabulous and it can teach you so much that will be valuable later. But if it's more important to you to have a business that can make a massive impact on other people's lives as well as giving you a big financial reward and complete location freedom, then a million dollar micro business could be the next adventure for you.

One of my favourite business quotes is ‘Revenue is for vanity, profit is for sanity’. I would rather run a million dollar business that makes me $400k a year than a $5 million business making $500k to $1 million a year. It's simpler and a whole lot more achievable to aim for both a great business and a great life. Business owners used to dismiss this as ‘too good to be true’; now it's just a different way of running a more leveraged business. Today's technology allows us to do so much more with so much less. Business owners are told constantly that to get ahead they must ‘hustle' and work harder than everyone else. But there's a different way of doing things that I didn't truly understand until I launched that course in Thailand. Running a million dollar micro business certainly takes work, but it's very focused and leveraged, so the business can scale while the business owner retains their freedom.

I want to take a moment here to acknowledge that running a digital business still takes work. It won't work unless you work. More often than I'd like, I meet people who regard online courses as ‘passive income’. By definition, passive income is the product of a set-and-forget investment that more or less effortlessly generates an ongoing profit. Online courses are not passive income, and hearing people sell them as such makes me mad. They also aren't easy. Simple, but not easy.

There's a process to follow to package your expertise into an online program and get your digital business up and running, but, like anything worthwhile, it's going to take much conscious, calculated effort, and you'll need to do things you've never done before. Business is a mind game, and when we approach something for the first time it's often our mental blocks we need to overcome rather than any technical or mechanical challenges. But I've got some great tools that will help you over that pesky hurdle.

Even 10 years ago a digital information business was a relatively complex, and expensive, endeavour. I had a website built for my franchise company less than 10 years ago. I had to get it custom built because the technology to be able to do the things I wanted to do simply wasn't available to us. It was a $50 000 investment. A year after it was built it was already out of date and we needed new software. Now technology can deliver the most wonderful array of options, enabling you to have your idea up and running literally in a day.