It all happened by accident. I was a mortgage broker struggling with a pitiful wage and one hellish drive to work. Being so disenchanted with the way things were going for me, I decided to look elsewhere to earn a living.

My first thoughts were of going into mail order and I wrote a book called How to Cut Your Mortgage Payments and Save a Small Fortune. However, I never left my job because I never had any capital to invest in marketing my mortgage book.

I did spend some time studying marketing so that I could improve my chances in selling my book. Yet the strange thing is that this newly acquired skill was to prove useful in another endeavour, namely the computing business.

I was quite proficient in using a computer and so I thought to myself “There must be a market out there for computer training. Let’s place an advert in the classified section of my local paper.” I had advertised one year previously and generally got little response. This was due to my lack of marketing knowledge.

How my first $3.58 dollar investment brought a 10,000% return

The advert came out around the 7th of January and only cost me $3.58. It was all I could afford anyway since I was so broke. To my astonishment, I received 3 calls and 3 appointments were made. I was charging $20 per hour, which I thought, was stretching it a bit at the time.

How tripling my investment more than tripled my profits

This first week I earn’t $128 from my measly $3.58. My marketing background indicated to me that I should triple the number of adverts I placed. This I did and my results nearly tripled again. In the third week I decided to triple my advertising again and my results were more than tripling. Why? I started to get a lot of repeat business from my earlier clients.

Snowed under – 70+ hours of work per week in under 6 weeks!

The result of all this was that within 6 weeks I was so snowed under with work that I was starting to raise my prices. It went to $24 per hour but the demand still kept on growing. After several months I was charging $32 to $40 per hour. And then $48 per hour and even $80 per hour! If I knew what the market could bear I would have charged $32 per hour after very little time. Knowledge is everything in this business.

Nearly 5 years later - my new wealth producing mindset

The opportunities I now have are endless. One of the most difficult things I have to do now is decide in which direction I wish to point my business. When you are faced with so many choices you can end up agonising over what to do. I can now see endless ways in which to turn a profit. The question I have to answer is: “Which is the one that will bring me the highest profit for the least possible hassle and effort?”

I’m currently experimenting with creating products to sell off the Internet. It appeals to me because I can create a product, set-up a website and just let the money roll in. One thing I’ve learnt from doing computer consultancy is that whilst the money is excellent, it means I will always have to be there to exchange my time for money.

When I first started, this was fine. But I have moved on now. I want more! Greedy? Maybe. Necessary? Yes! If I didn’t move on, I would just get stale and bored. But when I was where you are now, I was happy as could be. In fact, I just didn’t believe how easy it all was. It was a joke!

Pricing secrets learnt from my first few weeks

One of the biggest mistakes I made when first starting out was not finding out what the competition charged. The result was that I was way underpricing my services and could have earnt a whole lot more for less effort.

Charging $20 per hour did seem a lot for me at the time but I was hopelessly out of touch with reality. Because I was so busy, I did increase my hourly rate but not fast enough. I just didn’t believe people could either afford or want to pay more than my current rate. How wrong I was.

Lets get one thing straight, it is good to charge a low rate to get your feet wet. But don’t do what I did and keep it low for a long time. Bump it up in double quick time as you gain in confidence and experience. Otherwise, you will leave so much money on the table it doesn’t warrant thinking about.