‘They’re the best and the brightest.  The hip and the happenin’.  The bold and the brave.’

Rich was recently recognized by Utah Valley Business Q magazine as one of the ten coolest entrepreneurs in Utah Valley!  With the incredible amount of entrepreneurs and small business start-ups here in the Valley, this was a really fun recognition to receive.  You go cool cat!

Here is a quick sampling of the article:

‘Rich Christiansen is the definition of entrepreneur.  The tried-and-true businessman has founded 28 companies – eight of which had been multimillion dollar successes.  He even co-wrote a go-to guide for entrepreneurs called “Bootstrap Business” and founded an uber-successful company (CastleWave) simply to test the principles in the book.  We know, right?’

Check out the full question & answer article in the Winter 2009 issue of BusinessQ: http://utahvalleybusinessq.com/winter2009/cover.html.

Congrats, Rich!

• No fresh underwear
• No toothbrush
• No comb
• No medicines
• No dress clothes
• No shoes
• No sales material
• No gifts for our clients
• Nada … Nothing

Rich has a busy couple of days. We know that a number of you will be attending or watching these events, but here is the 1-2-3 punch this week.

1. Tomorrow night Wed Oct 21 at 9:30PM MST Rich will be highlighted on the TV program Latter Day Profiles. This will air on BYUTV channel 21. This was recorded when Rich presented at the BYU Idaho Entrepreneurs Conference.

2. On Friday Oct 23rd, Rich will be giving the keynote address at the CEO Conference in Chicago Ill. on Entrepreneurship.

3. Saturday and Sunday Rich will be presenting at Book Publishing 2.0 Conference in Calvary Canada. These are always fun and entertaining events. I love to watch Rich and Mark Effinger verbally spar.

If you are at any of these events make sure you introduce yourself to Rich and say hello. He loves to hear from you.

Get building that business. No more excuses.

Rich explains why building a business gave him more control over his destiny. 

Control Your Destiny

I started my career thinking that a corporate job would provide both security and financial stability. As I was climbing the corporate ladder at Novell, I was convinced that I would pay off my home and retire with the stock options this burgeoning company offered me. By the time I left, those options were worthless.

I did learn a lot of lessons on someone else’s dime, but I also made a lot of other people rich. One year, I received an end-of-the-year bonus of $10,000. I thought this was a lot of money until I learned that my boss had received a $1-million bonus—off of my work!

I found the same thing to be true with others I knew. One friend opened the Latin American market for his company, growing that market from $0 to $50 million in four short years. His reward? A four percent raise!

I also witnessed, over and over again, that corporations simply have no loyalty to their employees—only to their shareholders. I came to realize that as an employee, the idea of security in companies large and small is a myth! It took several years, but I finally discovered that the best path to taking control of my financial and personal future was to create my own businesses.

Today, no one can lay me off. I receive the direct rewards of my own success. I also get to decide how much risk I want to take. In the past I had to be ready to fly across the country or the world at a moment’s notice. Now I decide when and where I travel. I used to have nine vacation days a year. Now I determine when and where I work.

Do I work any less? Definitely not—in fact, I probably work more. But I control my work instead of having my work control me. As a result, I have the ability to enjoy the more meaningful and important things in my life—and to do it on my terms.

Bootstrapped! goes beyond simply telling a person how to start a business; indeed, it promotes the values of achieving balance, reaching for purposes higher than amassing wealth, and investing time and resources into those parts of a person’s life that matter the most.

That does it for the introduction!  We’ll drive straight into Chapter 1: Grit next week!

Once Rich decided it was time to get a life, he moved ahead with dogged determination.  He continues his story below…..

Build a Business

Since completing my MBA, I have founded or co-founded 27 businesses. Each of these ventures was bootstrapped with less than $10,000 of initial capital. Nine have been outright failures. Seven have been moderately successful, four are in process, and seven have become multimillion dollar businesses.

Countless times, while launching these companies, I have wished for a reference book or mentor to help me avoid the big mistakes. Fellow entrepreneurs were happy and willing to help with advice, but none could completely articulate the factors that had led to their success. In my search for the right reference guide, I found numerous, well-written books that were either bulging with theory or focused on high-end businesses with startup budgets of over a million dollars, but nothing credible for the person with a dream, unbridled ambition, and only a few thousand dollars.

Most people who aspire to start their own enterprises cannot cobble together the millions such books suggest are needed to launch a business. Understanding that, and drawing from my own experiences of bootstrapping businesses, I outline with Bootstrapped! how it is that a person can take $5,000 and build it into a multimillion dollar business.

When my partner and coauthor, Ron Porter, and I first started writing this book, we decided to create a company as a test case to prove the principles we are setting forth. We each came to the table with $2,500 and started Everest Web SEO, a company built around search engine optimization. Within the first few months, we had won deals with S&K Menswear, Warner Music Group, Franklin Covey, Shop At Home, and The New York Times. During these early months, we generated over $70,000 in total sales, with net profit margins of approximately 85 percent. Six months into the business, we merged with a New York online marketing firm, Interactive Acquisition, forming a new company, CastleWave, LLC. At the end of seven months, our monthly revenue was at $70,000 a month, with a $40,000-per-month net profit. At the time of making this book available, we just completed the first year of business. We now have sixteen employees. As of October 2008 CastleWave is generating approximately $110,000 of revenue per month at over 65 percent net margin. All indicators point to this business growing at an accelerated level.

Bootstrapped! combines the art form that is found in any entrepreneurial venture with practical, step-by-step guidelines that a person can—and really must—follow in building a successful enterprise with a minimal amount of capital. We share real-life examples, followed by extracting the steps you must be mindful of in building a business. The book is at once, engaging, entertaining, and motivating, even as it leads a person through proven formulas that lead to success.

You can see why people are getting excited about this book!  We’ll finish the introduction to the book next time, as Rich wraps up his opening thoughts on controlling your destiny. 

I’ve mentioned before that Rich is a serial entrepreneur, having started almost 30 companies in his life, but haven’t really told the story of how he got started – originally.  Rich opens the book by describing the life experiences that led him to entrepreneurship, or in his words, how he ‘got a life’….

Get a Life!

At the age of five, my workday started in the early twilight hours of the evening. I would drag my parents’ faded garden hose out and let the cold mountain water loose on the front lawn. A thorough soaking was all I needed to procure my product. I then crawled across the saturated lawn, pulling reluctant night crawlers from their earthy habitat.

My marketing manager, Mom, helped me paint a huge yellow sign depicting the happiest, juiciest worm imaginable. A large red arrow worthy of any Las Vegas casino pointed potential customers to our house. As advertising demands required, I hauled the sign down to the canyon road in the morning and propped it up against an old cottonwood tree in an effort to attract the attention of anglers on their way to favorite fishing holes.

I don’t recall which aspect of the venture was more invigorating: digging out worms or collecting the 50 cents for a dozen night crawlers. Regardless, before my sixth birthday I had swallowed the bait of being my own boss—hook, line, and sinker.

At the age of 32 I found myself working as the General Manager of USA Operations for Mitsubishi Electric, PC division. My MBA and my BS in Electronic Engineering Technology were behind me. Working my way up several corporate ladders, I experienced big wins with Novell, Mitsubishi Electric, and About.com.

Along the way I discovered my natural aptitude for leading teams, particularly while kicking off new and innovative technology products. These successes filled me with a sense of accomplishment, and I valued the knowledge gained from the experiences. However, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the politics and red tape and felt held back by the rigid, unresponsive nature of big corporations in general. At a fundamental level, I craved facing the market forces eyeball to eyeball.

Even amid my success in the corporate world, I eventually came to see that corporate life had begun to demand more than it offered. I knew a decision had to be made. I knew that it was time to return to my roots. That it was time to get a life!

And that’s just what he did – we’ll pick back up with Rich’s experiences in building businesses in the next blog!

Happy holidays! Thanks to everyone who’s voted on a title for the book. We’ve had an overwhelming response and are excited to post the results and official title soon! In the meantime, please feel free to continue to vote. As we finish out 2008, I’ll wrap up Rich and Ron’s story to-date then start blogging sections from the book the first week in January.

Looking back over even the past few months, I can’t believe how far we’ve come – in the business and with the book. We already have five New York Times best-selling authors endorsing the book and word of what we are doing is spreading. CastleWave is continuing to grow and increase momentum as well.

After the merger with the New York office that officially changed the company name to CastleWave, everybody kept working hard to keep the customers happy. One fun example of this – once, one large client challenged Rich: “I bet you one bagel you can’t get these words for $.35” (referring to search engine optimization keywords). Rich proceeded to not only get the words, but earn first $100 then all the way up to $15,000 revenue/day for that client. Let’s hope that was one tasty bagel!

Such attention to clients is part of the principle of acting big and behaving small. You want to show that you are established, secure, and stable so that your customers trust you, but at the same time maintain a personal connection with customers and awareness of their needs that earns their repeated business. The rewards for doing business like that will be a lot greater than just one bagel!

Starting next week we’ll kick of blogging the sections of the book , so stay tuned for that!

Be kind to your team members on the way up because you will see them again on the way back down.

I interrupt Sharon’s regularly scheduled blog to inject a quote from my mentor Dr. Peter Horne. I guess I get the right to do that every once in a while.

In preparation for sending the book manuscript to the publisher, the past several weeks I have been contacting the individuals that I have quoted in the book. I wanted to make sure I got it right. This has generated a number of really fun conversations and trips down memory lane.

One of these conversations was with my mentor Dr. Peter Horne. Dr. Horne has a refined British accent, lives in Dartmouth England, and his IQ is so high it does not register on the richter scale. As a side note, Dr. Horne is the only non Japanese person to ever sit on the board of Mitsubishi Electric. However, the thing that most draws me to Peter is his ability to hit the nail on the head with simple, spot on practical advice.

As we discussed a few of his life philosophies (several of which made it into the book), I was reminded of the following statement that Dr. Horne would frequently make.

Be nice to your team members on the way up because you will see them again on the way down.

Ugggggggg …. I failed to put that one in the book, so this post will have to be a second best for now.

What brilliant advice from a very wise man. I know one thing for sure if you spend any time in the entrepreneurship world, you are going to go up and you will certainly go down as well.

We could all do with a bit more of being kind and thoughtful to those around us. Indeed odds are we will see them in a different setting next time around the merry go round.

Let me start by introducing myself.  My name is Sharon Larsen and I first became associated with Rich Christiansen and Ron Porter a little over three years ago when I started working for Rich.  I had just finished my bachelor’s degree in International Politics and was looking for a meaningful job opportunity where I could get my feet wet.  Without really knowing what I was getting into, I accepted the job as an account manager with Rich and completely changed my life’s trajectory.  The next several months were a whirlwind of highs, lows, and everything in between that is associated with working in a small business.  After about 15 months, Rich decided to sell/close the 3-4 businesses we were running and take a break (more on this story later) and I had the opportunity to try something new.  My experiences with the businesses and Rich’s encouragement led me to pursue an MBA in finance.  I’m now in my second year of school and will be graduating in April.  I recently joined Rich and Ron’s team again; it’s a new business with new faces in the office, but the same passion and drive for success that drew me in three years ago. 

During the time that I was in school and away from the office, Rich and Ron began writing a book documenting the precise process they follow to create a new business, something Rich has done about 27 times.  As they wrote, Ron challenged the principles in the book and insisted they start a business to prove it.  The resulting company, CastleWave, made over $1 million in its first year of business and is continuing to grow.  The book is recently completed and will soon be going to press.  Over the next few weeks until the book comes out, I’ll be blogging the story behind the book because it’s so fascinating and I think you’ll enjoy it.  If you’ve had a chance to watch the video that’s posted on the website, you know a little about the book and the basic story behind it.  If you haven’t, I would encourage you to watch it – it’s a captivating story!

 While my involvement in this story started three years ago, the roots of the venture go back much further than that.  Rich had strong entrepreneurial tendencies even in college but, as he puts it, didn’t think that he had the nerve, background, or funding to start his own company.  After getting an executive MBA, Rich discovered that he had an aptitude for business even though his background was in engineering.  Rich and Ron first became acquainted while they were both working for Novell and then solidified their relationship when they served together in ecclesiastical positions for their church.  They become such an effective team that they could basically read each other’s minds and finish each other’s thoughts.  Even while I was first working for Rich, he and Ron had a side-business going that they later sold for a modest profit.  Little did they imagine, I assume, the partnership that would evolve in the future…