If at first you don’t succeed…follow in the footsteps of someone who has!

Malcolm and Jane are the first to admit that their first attempt at running a business was not a dramatic success.

"We started off with a business partner, running a telephone based service for accountants. But it didn’t work out. We had huge office overheads, loads of people working for us…overheads, headaches…and most weeks we paid the people working for us more than we paid ourselves.

We gradually found ourselves going backwards – instead of the great future we had imagined for ourselves, running our own business – being our ‘own boss’.

I must admit things were getting desperate. Our personal debts increased to over £40,000. We had to sell our house, we moved into rented accommodation and things really started to get me down. I think the turning point for me was when I had to go to the benefits office and apply for assistance just to pay our bills.

We were forced to resort to a property that was in terrible repair and (as we later found out) had been used by illegal immigrants who had slept on mattresses on the floors. Jane and I sat in that mucky house with our two children and just cried. I reckon we’d reached rock bottom and I could see no way out.

What we hadn’t realised was that the business model – the business we had tried to start – was fated from the start. Burdened with overheads and staffing costs – it was never going to make the sort of money we wanted, not even cover just the basics in life – let alone the lifestyle we’d dreamed of.

Then in our search for something better, we stumbled across a guy called Andrew Reynolds who had achieved all that we wanted to achieve – a guy who had set up a business in his spare room at home…with no overheads…with no staff…and was able to make a lot of money despite only working a few hours a day. In fact he’d become a Multi Millionaire doing just that.

We emailed Andrew Reynolds and he told us that he’d had so many people asking him to teach them how he’d made his money – that he had written his ‘system’ down in a simple monthly course that we could study at home, called the Cash On Demand course.

When we got the course, it was like someone had turned on a light bulb. I sat up nearly all night long, reading the Modules as they arrived.

Here was this guy Andrew Reynolds who had done what I’d always dreamed of – and my instinct told me that I could copy what he was doing.

The final ‘kick up the backside’ that we got came when we were invited to a seminar for budding Entrepreneurs, Andrew’s Entrepreneurs Bootcamp – which he was holding to raise money for Great Ormond Street hospital Children’s Charity. That did it for me. I packed the kids off to my Mums and we both headed for the Entrepreneurs Bootcamp – to finally meet up face to face with our new ‘mentor’ Andrew Reynolds.

We both took notebooks and scribbled down ideas as Andrew spoke on stage for about three hours. In fact after two days at the Bootcamp we’d run out of notebook and had to buy another one! There were so many great new ideas we could use. That three day weekend event galvanised us into action. The ideas that Andrew Reynolds came out with were like a breath of fresh air for us. It was like a load had been lifted from my shoulders. Finally I could see how we could make some money.

Just one little Cash On Demand project idea he showed us at that event, was all it took to get us going – and we haven’t looked back since.

One of the things he teaches in his Cash On Demand course is to sell low cost, high profit products to small niche markets of people who are ‘hungry’ for what you have to offer – rather than desperately trying to sell someone something they don’t; want. . We started off selling a simple package of two CD’s – that cost us less than £1 each. Using what he taught us – we sold those two CD’s for around £200. All up – including postage and packing – the package costs us less than £5 to get to the customer – you can work out the profits yourself :- )

We sold well over 300 of them in our first four weeks – bringing in over £74,000. That’s far more money than we used to get in a year between us. We were hooked! This ‘little’ Cash On Demand project eventually brought in £108,833.18!

One other technique Andrew Reynolds taught us was ‘joint venturing’. When we started we had no customers to sell to, and we had no idea what we were doing. So for our second Cash on Demand project we asked Andrew to find us a product to sell – and someone to work with to sell it. So far, just 4 weeks after we started that project we have brought in over £57,000 and we expect that to rise to around £830,000* when we really roll it out.

All through working with someone else on a 50/50 Joint venture basis – selling someone else’s product to someone else’s customers (That was a difficult business concept to get my head around when I started – but Andrew Reynolds Cash On Demand course showed us exactly how to do it – and it worked first time).

Now we live by the sea on the South Coast on a private development of houses– and the change to our lifestyle has been incredible. The sea is literally at the end of our lane. Each morning, I walk along the deserted beach, planning the day’s activities and counting our blessings.