I’m participating in a ClickFunnels One Funnel Away 30 day Challenge and one of the tasks is to write and publish my origin story. The whole story would fill a book or two so what comes next is a heavily condensed version, with a particular eye on what’s most relevant to what’s involved in the challenge and why.
35 years ago I entered the worlds of finance and computing and I’ve been involved with both ever since. While I became a finance professional and have spent the last 30 years working at a senior level in a wide variety of businesses in several very different sectors, the common thread all along has been problem solving. In computing, I chose the super user road rather than programming and took great delight in mastering the various applications I used on a daily basis. In 2003 I set up my own consulting company and have done that part-time ever since, except for a 4 year period when I worked at it full time.
My career has brought me to work in Pakistan for 2 years, Saudi Arabia for a little over a year and now in Qatar for the past 7 years.
I trained as an accountant with KPMG and qualified in 1991. I added a Master’s degree in Operations Management in 2006 and am presently finishing a PhD in Quality and Performance Improvement, with a particular focus on Lean Six Sigma.
I have worked with and for businesses of every kind and size imaginable, from tiny one person operations to multi-billion dollar a year corporations employing thousands of people. And I believe the one thing that most clearly differentiates successful from unsuccessful businesses is the ability to systemize operations.
When I worked as an auditor, one of the first tasks was to evaluate and decide whether the audit would be a systems audit where we would test the reliability of the systems of internal control on which the business relied or a substantive audit where we test the transactions recorded in the books and records of the business. Small business audits were usually substantive audits because even where there were good systems of internal control, these relied on the director and wouldn’t pass segregation of duties tests. Nevertheless, I noticed that the most successful small businesses did indeed have good systems.
In my many years working with clients to help grow their businesses, I observed that most of them struggled with and couldn’t implement the necessary systems in their businesses. They were what Michael E Gerber describes as “technicians”. While they knew the nuts and bolts of the actual products & services they were selling, they knew very little about the business side of running a business. To make it worse, most of them didn’t really want to learn. In reality, while they believed they had a business, what they actually had was a J-O-B from which they got no time off, were paid last and couldn’t sell.
When I got involved in internet marketing, I noticed these same issues coming up over and over again. The more I interacted with people online, the more I realised they lacked an understanding of the business side of running a business. This meant they were very unlikely to develop the systems needed to run their internet marketing like a business and make a profit. Worse, if by chance they some did make money, it would be highly likely they couldn’t replicate it.
That’s why I decided to create a simple, step-by-step system that anyone, even a total beginner, can follow to design and implement the essential systems every business owner needs to start, build, grow and manage a profitable online business.
I’m putting the finishing touches to it right now. The next stage is pre-launch testing. If you’d like the opportunity to be one of my testers, please comment below and I’ll contact you.