After reading Martin’s amazing post about his reality check on the fact that he might not make enough money online to make a living, I’ve given it some thought. A few weeks ago, I was all excited for him as he was about to launch his first eBook. I wished him good luck and wanted to support his book. I have to raise my hand as guilty because I did almost nothing for him the week he launched his product. I really wanted to support him but I didn’t. Not the way I wanted to anyways…

And this is what I want to talk about today.

There is a reason why he failed with his eBook launch and I made the very same mistake with my own eBook 2 months ago.

This is funny (bizarre) as I was discussing the very same topic with my mother who is about to launch her business too. Hey Mom! (she reads my blog ). We debated this point for a good half hour and yet didn’t come to an agreement. She didn’t agree as you probably won’t either. So I’m either a lunatic or cynic .

I guess that you are really wondering what I’m talking about right now. So what did Martin and I do wrong with our eBooks?

We are passionate (check)

We are motivated (check)

We know what we are talking about (check)

We have an audience and connections with other bloggers (check)

We have a website to launch our product + mailing lists (check)

We researched before launching our product (check)

We thought about it for several hours, wrote a launch plan and setup affiliates (check)

We are offering a great product (check)

At first glance, we have everything on our side to become successful writers. EVERYTHING is checked to become the next online mogul…

So What the F&*/ Went Wrong????

“Vision without execution is hallucination” – Thomas Edison

I know where I failed and when I look at Martin’s product, I know he made the same mistake. I took several hours crafting a great product, several hours reading about how to set it up and more to launch the product. I had a great vision…

But my execution SUCKED!!!

I know all these concepts, I can teach numerous techniques but I am just as lazy as anybody else when it comes down to do it. I just suck! I suck at it because it wasn’t my idea, my technique. Since launching a product is not naturally encoded in my veins (as being overly productive is definitely part of my DNA code), I had to read and assimilate theory before doing it. So I know everything that needs to be known but I’m just too f*%&ing lazy to do it properly.

Instead I dreamed about the day that I opened my laptop and generated 200 sales in the last hour. I would rather dream of the result of my calculations and think of all the money I’ll make if I only convert 3% of my readers.  I dreamed about the life I will have once I can quit my job and become rich by working 4 hours a day on my online company. I would rather dream that I traveled the world with my family and laptop in my backpack while others are creeping around in their 9 to 5 job. I dreamed about all of this with a nice bottle of wine instead of getting back down to basics, putting my dreams in the garbage can and hustling.

You can’t go anywhere without a vision, but if you don’t have a clear and defined process for your execution, you will suck and so did I!

So I would rather buy a dream

The problem is deeper than having people selling the dream and you ending-up wasting money on them. And I’m not going to defend these “Pro-bloggers” as some of them are great wizards of making money online while others are just as creepy as an old alcoholic car salesman. However, there is one thing so true about them; they are selling a dream because this is what you want to buy!

People are lazy.

You are lazy.

I am lazy.

How many times have you started a project and cut corners?

I do it all the time.

It’s too complicated. It’s too long. It is just too boring. This is why I just cut and to get to the final results right away. Because I’m more interested in dreaming than working.

So am I going to buy something that will ask me to work meticulously and be incredibly patient? Man, I would rather buy something that will have me live the good life. But I didn’t read the fine print: The 2 products are probably identical but sold differently. Both require crazy amounts of work before succeeding. And this is why you quit thinking you’ve been sold an impossible dream. Well this is what you wanted, dumbass! I know it because this is what I wanted too!

And some of you may think “that might be true for you Mike, but I know I’m hustling like a dog and I will succeed”.

Reality check: you ain’t working enough… you read it right: YOU AIN’T WORKING ENOUGH!

Or working the right way

Or both of them!

And then you are going to tell me that you are. And we can go on and on about it but I’ll tell you one thing that will shut down any argument you can bring to the table:

Reality check: If you are so good, working so hard and doing everything so right: WHERE IS THE MONEY?

Don’t tell me it’s coming.

Don’t tell me you’re close.

You are darn far away.

If you are not making it NOW, how can you have the guts that you will be making it one day??? Stop drinking your own Koolaid. It’s time to get back to work. The real one.

I’ve failed because I didn’t work properly and I didn’t work enough

I’m not making a living from my online company yet for the VERY SAME REASON

And this will be the case for most of us.

One Last Thing About This Incredible Dream of Living From Your Online Work

Last week, MD made it sound like living from your blog was mission impossible. That only a few gurus can do it and they do it because they tell you how to make money online. We all know that great question about what came first between the chicken and the egg. In my opinion, you should make a difference between your dream and reality. However, reality can become your dream.

If you have read my latest income report, you will notice that I had another month with over $11,000 in income. If I consider all my expenses look at the hours I work on my online business; I made $218/hour. I think this is definitely better than most jobs, right? The funniest part is that I didn’t make a penny from telling someone how to make money online! So the dream is achievable but you need to stop dreaming to make it happen!

Now, it’s not the time to jump up and yell that you will make it. Come on! You know you won’t! I know I won’t… unless I shut my mouth, start thinking and working seriously. I always tell my son that words don’t count… only one’s actions matter.

I bet you were at the FINCON11 or attended another great conference in your life. You might have taken a few notes and went back home smiling because you had a good time. You probably spent a lot of time thinking about the crazy things you will do and how great your life will be in a few months.

I’ll ask you the same question Martin did: what have you done since then? Don’t you think it’s time to take some real action?

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So here we go again for the 3^rd post of this series on how to create a media kit and sell to advertisers.

The first part was about knowing your site

The second part is about building your media kit

This part is about making money without working your ass off!

Who told you that you need to work to make money? Not me . But if you don’t want to work, you had better be smart! If you look at my blog income reports, I’ve made $44,606.34 in 9 months this year for an average of $4,956.26 per month from private advertising (trust me, this average is going up with September’s income report that will be published next week!). So I’m making a little bit more than half of my online income from private advertising while not working more than 10 hours per week on my company. Therefore, I can’t spend much time on dealing with advertisers and following-up with ad renewals (I need to spend some time to write during these 10 hours, right?).

Since managing our advertisers is a very “personal” part of our business (we are talking about giving access to our paypal and company bank accounts), I want to keep control of it. I know that some of you might be exhausted just at the thought of the time required to manage your ads.  This is why I want to share my deepest secrets on how to manage so many ads in so little time .

#1 Create Templates!

The first thing you need to do to save time is to build templates. The first one you need is to “answer email”. Each time I get an advertiser request, I copy/paste the very same answer:

“Hello NAME,

Thank you for your interest in advertising with us. We currently manage several high quality financial websites. Please find enclosed our media kit along with our rate sheet.

We can do special deals if you take more than 3 links.

Best regards,”

It’s quick, simple and it goes directly to the point. Once you have a great media kit built, you don’t need to say much. You need to “automate” your answer so you can save as much time as possible while keeping your potential advertisers interested.

The second template you need is an advertiser manager Excel spreadsheet. I have 2 templates per site:

Template #1

The first template tells me how much I make each month for each ad. I can track all my sources of income and know exactly which one is going up or down and which one is the most important. This has 3 major advantages:

a)      I know where my money comes from and how I can optimize each site.

b)      This is high value information if you ever want to sell your site!

c)       I know how many private ads I’ve sold so far (I tend to limit my sites to a specific numbers of ads).

Template #2

My second template is used to follow-up on each ad. Once a month, I check out this sheet for each site and I know which ads are up for renewal for the month. This tells me how much the advertiser is paying me, what is the code used and also to know if I offered a package deal with other sites (the combo section). This helps me to requests more ads from the same client upon renewal.

This leads me to my 3^rd template: my renewal follow-up email:

“Hey NAME,

There were two ads to renew on DATE on SITE.

Here are the two links:

Link 1:
Anchor:

URL: 

Link 2:
Anchor:

URL:

We would renew for the same terms and price, which is PRICE each link for a 6 month period.

Please let me know your intention as soon as possible.

We also have the following sites you might be interested in advertising on:

SITE

SITE

Thank you and hope you have a great day!”

As you can see, upon each renewal, I’m plugging 2-3 of my sites and offer a package deal. Most advertisers want to renew at a lower rate (since they have been good clients). I don’t do that unless they get more links from our network. It usually works pretty well and I’m able to fill the space of less occupied websites.

#2 Follow-up once a month

As just mentioned, I’m follow up on my renewals only once a month. This means that I’ll have to email some people 30 days in advance and others at the very last minute. I’m okay to let an ad expire on my site and contact the advertiser a few days after rather than exclusively prior to expiring. I do that in the name of efficiency.

If I have an “unpaid” ad on my site for a few days or even a week, it is still better than checking my ad manager weekly and spending 30 minutes to 1 hour per week to send email and check out my stats. I now spend about 1 hour per month sending all my email and I take off the expired links at that time. It usually pays off as some advertisers are real slackers . It gives them the time to answer me back and they are happy since their link was still on. If they renew, I start the expiry date as the renewal date so they don’t get a free ride. If they don’t renew, well, they got at max 3 weeks of free links. It’s not a big issue for me but I save a lot of time managing it this way!

#3 Do them in bulk

This is one thing Adam Smith learned during the industrial age: doing the same specific task over and over again makes you way more productive. This is why I do all my ad follow-ups and ad requests in bulk. I can open my template, copy/paste and send them in one shot. I am way more efficient than if I send an email here and there.

#4 Label everything

I use several gmail accounts for my sites. Each of them has a specific utility. But I label everything. Therefore, it makes my life much easier when it’s time to manage any requests. It also helps me keeping my inbox clean as everything is filed if I need it. A clean inbox is a clear brain. It’s easier to think when you don’t have 56 emails in your mailbox!

Anything else you want to know?

This last part of this series was obviously more directed toward running one or more blogs than a regular business. However, you can use the template tip for anything that includes an email answer or reporting issues. I’m continuing this series with more hindsight specific to my online company in my newsletter (this is not a trick to get you signed up, it’s only that I don’t want to bore people that are not too much into building an online empire ). So if you have any questions, please let me know. So far, here’s what I want to cover in my newsletter:

-          How to manage Pricing

-          I’m giving a media kit and template for free

-          How you can make more money with multiple blogs with limited time

Anything else? I’m all ears!

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Following up on yesterday’s post on how to build a Media Kit, I’m going a little bit deeper with you and will look at the details that any entrepreneur should look at before talking to any potential advertiser/client. Here again, I’m taking my online business as an example but you can definitely apply any of these tips to other businesses or side lines. In fact, you can also apply what you learn here to yourself and prepare to get a better salary raise at work! This is not a “how to build a media kit for blogs” article but more “how to build a promotional kit for anything… including how to sell yourself!”.

Get Proof

The very first thing you want to establish in your media kit is credibility. This can be quite easy to earn if you have some proof to show your advertisers. In the blogging world, here are some questions you can answer upfront in your media kit that will help you gain credibility:

How long have you been blogging?

What is your monthly traffic?

Are you on an up trend in terms of stats?

Are you part of any groups? (like the Yakezie, Seeking Alpha certified, etc.)

What are your RSS readers, twitter followers or Facebook fan stats?

Have you been mentioned on any important blogs, magazines, newspapers or major sites?

You can also put together some stats that will tell your advertisers that you have a good blog (Page Rank by Google or Alexa Rank by Alexa)

If you want to go a little bit deeper and look more professional, you can also add demographics. You can easily get free stats from Alexa, Quantcast and Google Analytics.

As you can see, the first page of your media kit should include your unique selling proposition and some facts to back it up. This increases your chances of having the best advertiser-blog fit. Mind you, sometimes you will get great offers from clients that don’t fit your audience. It’s up to you to accept them or not. Personally, I don’t do sponsored posts for this reason, however, I don’t mind having links or banners since they are in specific sections of my sites.

The same reasoning applies to any other type of business or if you want to market yourself and get a better job (your first page of your resume should include most of what has been discuss in the first page of a media kit!).

Position Yourself

Here’s the good news; if you have followed step #1, you are halfway done with positioning! You know what you have to offer and have facts to back up your sales pitch. Now it’s time to know what you want and don’t want.

You can play the Nascar blogger or you can be very selective with the type and number of ads. As you can see, I’m trying to slowly diminish the number of Ads on TFB (I’ve already taken off Adsense within posts and took off all ads above the fold). This is because I want my readers to:

a)      Read my articles without being distracted by an ad (and worse, clicking on it to leave my page!)

b)      Subscribe to my newsletter or RSS feed

I think it is more valuable to keep my readers for a while instead of making a quick buck off them. Mind you, I don’t manage all my sites this way. Some others are made so I can optimize short term money from them. These are all questions you need to ask yourself in order to position your site and yourself as an author or entrepreneur.

Does it mean that you endorse everything you publish on your blog? This is a well debated topic as there are ethical questions to ask yourself. In my opinion, if you publish private ads in your sidebar, your readers should be smart enough to know that these are not your products and not your companies. Therefore, they should know that this is advertising. However, whatever you write about, you should tell them if it’s paid or not. This is where I draw the ethical line on my sites.

Make Yourself Visible

You want to make money advertising? Well duh, let them know that you exist! As opposed to many other companies, marketing your blog can be pretty cheap. All you need is usually an advertising page along with a contact form. Make sure that both pages are visible and on the top of your site. This is usually where advertisers will look to contact the blogger.

Okay, now is the time for you to laugh at me! If you look at the TFB Advertising page, I can tell you that I see 2 big problems with it:

- It’s very bad (not much info, short and no incentive for advertisers to do business with me)

- It’s very old (I don’t do reviews any more, my PR is 4, my RSS and traffic stats are outdated… man I really need to update this!)

So what’s to learn from a page like this? When it’s been a while that you have been in business, you forget some important stuff. But since you have been there for a while, you still get clients anyways! Lol! I’ll update my page soon!

However, I don’t always do bad things Here’s my The Dividend Guy Blog Advertising page.  This one is very professional and includes packages that advertisers can pick without me talking to them (if they fill in the form, I get the money via Paypal and the link info at the same time). I usually get one request a day from this page. But because I charge a lot, most advertisers drop the ball as they want me to publish their ads for nothing… This is when we get to the last point…

Negotiation or The Art of Making Money!

If you don’t like negotiating, don’t get into business… or have someone do this part for you! However, there are some tricks to overcome time consuming negotiating and get to an agreement much faster: craft your unique selling proposition and have a solid media kit. I can see my ad management evolving into 3 stages over time:

Stage #1: Take everything – the Nascar approach

At first, all I wanted to do is make money out of my blog (I bet you are like me ). I accepted almost any type of advertising (sponsored posts, reviews, banners, links, etc) and at any price (basically anything I could get from the advertiser with a minimum of negotiation). This was great as I was making money but I was losing in quality and opportunities at the same time.

Stage #2: Negotiate every single deal

After a year or so, I realized that I could negotiate better deal with my advertisers by offering them long term deals (I give a rebate for 6 month or 12 month deals) or by offering ad space on more than one blog (the advantage of running a multiple blog business). However, I was negotiating every single deal, going back and forth a few times and trying to earn the most for my efforts every time. While I was making a lot more money than with the Nascar approach, I was spending a lot of time on my email.

Stage #3: Act like a businessman

Now, I don’t spend much time on negotiating or finding advertisers. I actually give them my rate sheet along with my media kit and tell them that if they want a rebate, they just have to take a long term deal or sign for more than 3 links. No negotiation if you only want 1 link on a monthly basis. This saves me a lot of time and I’m making even more money. Serious advertisers will recognize professionalism and appreciate the long history of my blogs. They know that I’ll be around next year to renew their commitment and that the quality of the blog will remain intact. If they think I’m too expensive, then I know it’s not the right client for me. This is true for any business: once you have positioned yourself, don’t bargain away your soul. If you are a Rolex, you can’t get Wal-Mart’s clients (or very few of them!).

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be sharing with you my rate sheet and media kit through my newsletter. I’ll also discuss how to price your blog (with real $ you can make and not some “I ask $100 per month” BS). Anything else you want me to include in this future newsletter article?

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Following up on several of your requests after my blog income report, I decided to create this series to show you how I manage my private advertising on all of my sites. I’m not going to address publishing text links or not, nor how sponsored posts can be perceived by your audience. Nor if writing paid reviews is a cool thing or will they just upset your readers. I’ll leave these debates for others. In this series, I’ll only focus on how to make as much money as possible with your blog. How cool is that?

Quick note:

For those who are not interested in selling private advertisements, don’t worry, what I write on this blog can be applied to any business model. In fact, this will be a great help for any of you who want to build your business (regardless if it’s online or not).  You can also learn from this series if you want to present your side business, a product or service to any clients. The same principles will apply. Plus, I’ll be providing more “technical” stuff to newsletter subscribers to not bore the rest of you on this blog ;-D.

So, if you know that you want to attract private advertisers and make money out of it, here’s what you will learn in this series:

- Make serious money with private advertisers

- Build your media kit that will earn you thousands of dollars

- Save time by managing your links properly

- Run multiple blogs with very low fees (newsletter subscribers only)

- Get the very same media kit template I use (newsletter subscribers only)

So the first step before you sell your first ad space is to know what you have to offer, right? You can’t simply go “all-in” and build a media kit in a hurry. Sorry folks, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

What Are You Offering?

This is a simple question that usually comes with a quick answer. However, the answer is often wrong as we don’t take enough time to consider what our blog/company/service really is. If you don’t agree with the word “wrong” as you think you are “right”, let’s use “a good answer but often not enough to impress your public”. If you had to explain what you are offering in 2 lines, would you be able to do it? Here’s mine for The Financial Blogger:

My blog is about how to work less and make more money

That relates to my tag line “working 4 days a week, making 6 figure income”. This is what I offer on TFB. This is what we call a Unique Selling Proposition. I won’t go into the concept of USP (Corbett Barr already did it better than I can right here) but the point is to tell the world, in 2 lines max, what is so different from your blog/company/service.

Here are some examples that are not too great:

I’m providing great content on blah blah blah (we all think we provide great content and there are tons of blogs writing about so and so).

I’m THE reference in this topic (you are probably not and even if you are, what makes you so unique, maybe I can claim the same thing on my blog and that will make 2 experts in the same niche!).

I tell people how to … save money/live frugal/invest wisely/etc. etc. etc. (there are tons of “how to” blogs… not really original, right?).

So What Makes You Original? (hint, the answer is in the question )

You got it: YOU! You are unique, you are different and you are the writer on your blog, the manager of your company and the inventor of your product. Now, you have to find a way to describe you and what you do in 2 lines… ooops getting more complicated!

I came up with my tag line (working 4 days a week, making 6 figure income) because it combines 2 of my biggest strengths as an individual, as an employee and as an entrepreneur:

1)      I’m damn efficient

2)      I’m good at making more money

In my opinion, this is what I do best and this is why I share my thoughts about these topics on this blog. Most people in the PF blogging world know TFB as “the guy who runs all those PF sites”.  I decided to keep this tag and go toward that direction.

So what defines YOU?

If you want to have something very original to offer, start by defining your strengths and how you transfer them into your blog/company.

Second question: who you want to deal with?

Once you have defined what your blog is, you need to define what your audience is. Not the one you have right now but the one you want to have. There is a fatal truth about any blog or company: you can’t reach everybody. Some people will like you, others will hate you and a wide majority will ignore you (because they just don’t care about what you have to say). What you need to do is to concentrate on people that will like you; this is your real audience.

Your audience will follow you because they like what you do and what you have to say. This is the same thing if you are looking for a niche market for your business: be VERY specific. Know exactly who you want to reach and forget about the rest (they will ignore you anyways ).

I want the TFB audience to be people interested in working hard, being creative, making more money in order to have more free time. Age and sex doesn’t really matter. I’ve realized that most people reading this blog are male, between 25 and 45 which makes sense since I’m a 30 year old dude. However, I also attract older readers and women too. This is because I focus more about what I like as opposed to what I am. If you like working less and making more money at the same time, we already have 2 things in common .

This is the same thing with potential advertisers? Do you want to advertise payday loans? Do you care about the products/services sold by the advertisers? Or are you just like me and think that your readers are smart enough to judge the difference between a good product and a bad one.  You can just publish advertising without endorsing it (this is why I don’t publish sponsored posts and I don’t write reviews anymore; because I offer advertising space, not endorsement possibilities). I’ve created specific sections on my blogs where I offer advertising space. Both the advertiser and the reader know that this is not stuff coming from TFB but stuff that is being advertised. It’s always important to be clear about that too .

What’s next?

Knowing what you want to offer and how you define it is only the first step. Once you have found it, it is important to take action and make sure your site/company reflects the image you want to portray. This is why I changed my header, added my tag line, took off my adsense block within posts and put my newsletter in the “above the fold” section while lowering my advertising sections. More recently (since the beginning of October), I’ve changed the length of my posts (more like 1,000 words now) and I’m trying to write more “useful” stuff for you. I hope it shows and that you like the recent changes on TFB!

Have you looked at your blog recently? Does it reflect what you want? Does it clearly display your message, your Unique Selling Proposition? If not, this is the very first step you need to accomplish before going further.

If you have recently made changes, or are about to do so, let me know. I want to know if your actions create results.

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I don’t know if you have ever had the opportunity to teach something to a colleague, a friend or a bunch of kids but there is some magic happening when you do. When you try to pull together all your knowledge and give it to someone else, you learn something new. While the student often surpassed the teacher, I can tell you that the teacher learns as much as the student during a lesson.

This is what happened this summer when I was coaching my 6 year old son, William and a bunch of his friends at soccer.

The funniest part is that I don’t know much about the sport. In fact, I don’t know squat! When I was young, I was a baseball player… soccer wasn’t developed at all. But I know a few things about team sports and about managing a group of people. While I was teaching my son how to play soccer, he taught me or reinforced beliefs I have about running a company. Here are a few lessons that we both learned this summer :

It’s Fun To Win

The most amazing feeling when you play sports is obviously winning… especially when you have earned it! When I « score » a deal with an advertiser or when I’m able to rank better for a keyword in Google (thx Market Samurai ), it’s like winning a soccer game. You are proud of yourself and feel that you have completed something great on that day!

But Sometimes You Are a Slacker

My son’s soccer team won almost every single Saturday. On the 5^th week, they were 4-0 and were dominating their opponents. This when they started to slack and not always run for the ball. That 5^th week, they lost 5-2 and they learned their lesson: no matter how good you are, if you don’t put in some effort, you’ll eventually slack off and someone else will beat you.

I sometimes slack off at work or while doing my online work. I’ve actually highlighted a few of these mistakes in a recent post.

Be Serious About It  But Don’t Create Pressure

I sometimes get very excited about my son as he was the best player on his team. I see great potential in him and want to develop his abilities. I know that he won’t be a soccer star and play for Manchester United, but I still want him to go as far as he can since he is pretty good. But sometimes I forget that he is only 6 and my wife is there to bring be down to earth. It’s important to be serious when you do something but it’s also important to avoid too much pressure.

I’ve learned that after the Panda update where I lost a lot of my traffic and more recently when I had a bad month. I have a tendency of taking my work very seriously and sometimes freak out when things don’t go the way they are supposed to. This is exactly the moment when work stops being fun and starts becoming work! The same thing apply to sports: it’s fun as long as you have fun and put on some pressure!

It Requires Blind Faith

At the beginning of the season, I was teaching my son some tricks I saw on Youtube. During our practices, I was asking my team to do some exercises and they couldn’t understand where I was going with all of this. I was asking them to follow me and trust me. I was asking them for an act of faith. During the games, passing the ball around was easier and taking away the ball from the other teams was simple. That was all because of the tricks I showed them.

When I started my company, my silent partner asked me for a similar act of faith. He continuously asked me to trust him and keep working. More recently, he asked me to pull out a newsletter for TFB. He asked me to provide exclusive content on top of what I write on this blog. After several months of wondering where I should go with that, I have finally learned how to use my newsletter to engage my readers and it has become a wonderful tool for both my readers and I to communicate. If you wonder what I discuss in there; you simply have to sign up, it’s free!

Efforts Always Pays Off

At the beginning of the year, my son got on the soccer field with too much confidence. He had played over the winter and was by far too strong for the other kids (they made a huge mistake of mixing 5 years old with 6 years old!). So the first 3-4 games, he had difficulties scoring the same amount of goals he used to a few months ago. He was discouraged and didn’t want to put more effort into it as he wasn’t getting immediate results. Then, it was already scheduled that he would go to a 1 week soccer camp the first week of July. When he came back from this camp, he had learned that he needed to put more effort into his game and always push his limits if he wanted to score goals. At the end of the year, there was a tournament. We had 3 games to play on a beautiful Saturday. He not only scored 8 of 13 goals by the team but also made several defensive plays and was passing the ball around to his teammates. During the camp, he learned effort. During the tournament, he learned that efforts pay off!

When I founded my company in 2008, I didn’t know that I would be making a 6 figure income out of it only 2 years later. But I thought that if I was putting in non-stop efforts (and this is THE keyword: NON-STOP), it would pay off. Today, I look at my company and I’m damn proud of what I have achieved. The best thing is that it’s only the beginning ;-D.

Be a Team Player if You Want to Win

As I told you, I don’t know much about soccer. But there is one thing I know; soccer is a team sport. And if you don’t play as a team, you won’t be able to win. This was the only message I wanted to share with my son and his teammates this summer: be a team player and WE will win. So I asked my “scorers” to pass the ball more often, I asked my “shy” players to jump into the offensive play and asked all my team to help each other when they were falling down or losing the ball to the opponent.

The success of my partnership is that we don’t want to be star players: we want to win. Therefore, it doesn’t matter who brings in the money, who works more yesterday who accomplishs the best blog post. All that matters is at the end of the day, the company is better today than it was yesterday.

Unfortunately, we didn’t win the tournament this year. We were pretty close but lost one game. The difference in this game was the coaches. Yup, I got “outcoached” but at a price I wasn’t ready to pay: selling my team spirit for a few more goals. When the other coach realized that we had a strong team, he had decided to keep his best players on the field during the whole game (we have to change our players every 3 minutes since they are too young to play at a “competitive” level). So he benched some 6 year old kids to keep his best players on the field all the time. I could have easily done it with my 2 best players and we would have probably won the game.

But on that day, our team won a lot more than this game. We played as a team, we won and lost as a team. And this was the most important: over the short period of 3 months, we have been able to build a team and care for each other. Both parents and kids were friends at the end and our group was always the last ones to leave the field on the weekend. This is what I will remember from that experience!

I’ve certainly learned a lot coaching these “timbits” over the summer and I’ll certainly come back next summer as I want to learn more from them!

Have you ever had the chance to learn something from your children, friends, family while teaching them something?

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