As much hype, excitement and money that is being made from e-commerce and online business we have to remember that we are still only in the first real decade of doing business virtually – over the internet.
In fact, more the majority of people, the last two years is the window within which they really began to take e-commerce sites seriously.
So, for those of us who have been doing business on the internet for nearly a decade now, at the very forefront of e-commerce activity, we can lose track of the immense potential that stands in front of us.
That’s why lesson like we learn from leaders like Gary Vaynerchuck (see video below) are so valuable.
In this video, he talks candidly about his amazing last couple of years building up WineLibraryTV, his own brand and Vaynermedia to a >$2M business on the internet from nothing.
In the meantime he has become a massively popular figure, top selling author and celebrity of sorts hitting all the major talk shows.
Most important, in the last half of the video he talks about the process of being one of the earliest truly online entrepreneurs…
1. Phase 1 – Building the Brand
He mentions building up his personal brand as perhaps a mistake, though I would argue that building your own brand is likely NOT a mistake, just phase 1 of building your business, identifying and attracting your market and getting to know your customers intimately – the challenge of course is how you step back, systematize your new business and scale it to much higher reaches
2. Phase 2 – Launching a Service Business
From the word go you see opportunities to scale your business larger and offer personalized, group or 1:1 services that tackle the top tier of your customer base. This is very attractive since you capture top dollar, get to work with some of the most exciting and biggest names in your market and further brand yourself and your business as the market dominators in your niche — but again, you are not fully scaling your business, in effect changing time for dollars…so then you must move to step 3
3. Phase 3 – Systematization
For a guy like Gary , learning to turn his brand, skill, knowledge and ability to solve customer problems into a scalable, systematized set of products and services that can expand by a factor of 20-30X is critical. In reality most entrepreneurs never get this part of the business and either kill themselves trying to scale their business, sell out or go out in a fiery ball because they just couldn’t get this last step right
All-in-all, this is THE online business growth system that must be followed to make it big on the internet. We have seen it in our own businesses and thanks to guys like Gary sharing their stories, we can also learn from the path he is forming so we can all learn and carve our own online entrepreneur path.
Here is the video — certainly worth the watch…let us know what you learned by leaving a comment…
