For nine years Jake ran a lively, lucrative downtown wine bar. From movie-themed “Nights of Flights” wine tastings to cash flow-by-month analysis he knew his business inside out. But he got tired of managing people.  He wanted a change. One that would leverage all that he’d learned.  Sound familiar?  So he did a very smart thing. 

He launched a business teaching people how to start a successful wine bar. 

In this shaky economy, you, like Jake and Susan Page, may be thinking of fresh ways to make money from what you know.

If so, you may find Jake’s approach helpful. 

To keep overhead low and to appeal to prospective customers who may be working full-time, he designed a program where they could learn by signing up for a six month service of evening and weekend tele-classes and access to a members-only blog. 

He hired various clients from his wine bar (you learn a lot about people in convivial, casual settings) to:

• Create his members-only blog and taught him how to use it.

• Interviewed him to turn his expertise into a very specific step-by-step program, complete with examples, templates, checklists, real life success stories, points to be covered in each tele-class and inclusion of experts (from accounting to marketing) in blog posts and “in conversation” interviews that were turned into podcasts that his clients could listen to any time.

• Create his by-invitation-only online social network for all graduates of his program.  There they could ask each other for advice, share the cost of promotional designs that were then customized for each wine bar, collective approach vintners for special service or prices or ability to buy rare wines.

 After the first year, Jake hosted quarterly contests for best tips, with prizes provided by vendors who wanted access to his “market’ of wine bar owners. Members could contribute and vote on five best tips each quarter. 

These methods build closeness, value, trust and loyalty among the members of his Wine Bar Network. Bolstering his expertise, their content built equity in his business.

As Jake made the above preparations he offered his longtime manager the opportunity to become a minority owner if she met certain sales and other goals over the next two years. That offer became an element of his teaching program.  It also enabled him to devote time to starting his new business while working with his partner to grow into the new role.

Jake maintained partial ownership of the bar for four reasons. Co-ownership:

•  Kept him credible as a wine bar expert.

•  Provided a lab for trying out new ideas.

•  Kept his name on the bar, as a place for prospective clients to experience the business.

•  He loved keeping his hand in the business.

As you migrate from running your successful business to teaching others how to grow one like yours, go slow to go fast as Jake did. 

Take the time to create your “how to” program, get experts to help you edit and design it, create the online lessons, tele-classes and other tools you’ll need when you start.  Find allies with related experience (from accountants to marketers) who can augment your teaching in ways that highlight theirs and help them grow their business.

Recruit and lead your first group, leave time to hone your methods and tools before you teach the second group.  Then you can savor your start-up, make fewer mistakes and keep your overhead low.   By the way, after six wildly-successful years running his new business Jake took a bigger leap into an entirely new kind of business – and he loves it.  Next month I’ll tell you about it.

Now, how do you recruit your classes of clients?  Read persuasive promotional copy written by the Wizard of Ads, Roy H. Williams that primes people to buy.  Then read the steps he took in that email to turn readers into customers:

1. Open with a story that pulls in the reader.

2. Evoke both mystery (crystal table) and a “this applies to you” feeling.

3. Build interest in the service before attempting to sell it.

4. Positively label the people who buy your service (“stars”)  - and the company they will keep (at “the table”) in the group.

5. Vividly describe the multiplying power of a group, in this case in dollar value.

6. In concrete terms infer that the value of the service is huge.

7. Allude to a high cost for the service, then take them through steps that make them feel that the actual, rather substantial cost is more than worth it.

8.  Reinforce the credibility of the service provider by referring to his relevant book, one that your organization published.  Add a positive book review by the leader the service company.

9. Keep overhead costs extremely low by providing the service virtually, either by phone and/or online.

 10. To cement group loyalty and warm up the group to offer fervent, credible referrals for building future groups, host an in-person gathering of them.  You provide the “content” or program plus the design of the get-together. 

They pay for the costs of attending. You garner fresh prospects from them while they are on a high together. As one person in a gathering suggests a referral it evokes a “me too” instinct among others to also make referrals.

A final note. Be generous.  Offer more value than people expect. Build a community amongst your clients. Provide simple, explicit ways they can improve your service and help each other succeed.  Reward them for that participation. That’s truly a way to make money and to savor your work. 

Tired of self-promotion? Would you like to make work and life easier, more productive and fun – with others? Here’s four ways others accomplish more together than you can on your own – and sometimes forge friendships.

1. Co-create Products, Cause Support and More

• From clothing design to science experiments, the right crowd can get more done together.

• Collaborate online for a cause or faster innovation – and to become more well-known.

• Crowdsource a contest; take it public.

2. Swap and Share

• Enjoy more travel  by house swapping or other shared hospitality.

• Swap books, lightly-used clothes and more.

• Moms share everything from recipes to medical advice.

3. Get More Out of Meetings

• Organize meetings for those who share your interest and perhaps make money.

• Capture the benefits of twittering at conferences.

• Create conference formats that will excite and involve attendees.

• Start a mutual growth, support or mastermind group.

• Share ideas in a fast and fun way for everyone. Try Ignite and Pecha Kucha.

• Make conferences more popular by harnessing the right technology.

4. Attract Customers With the Right Partners and Methods

• Even and especially in a bad economy partnering can be profitable.

• Train others to teach your methods – even sell your stuff.

• Forge an alliance with a bigger business or other organization.

• Recruit an unlikely ally to attract more interest.

Now, what Me2We methods have you used to accomplish more with others?

One morning over his breakfast cereal, life forever changed for a twelve-year old Canadian boy. He flipped through the pages of his morning newspaper to find his favorite cartoons. Instead he was stopped by a headline, “Battled Child Labour, Boy 12 Murdered”. That was back in 1995. Craig Kielburger asked his brother Marc and then others to join him in what’s become a child-to-child “Me to We” movement.

Now they write a column for The Toronto Star. Marc is executive director and co-founder of Free The Children. (He also graduated from Harvard, then became a Rhodes Scholar with a law degree from Oxford University).

Beginning on March 25th you can get an eBook version of the Kielburgers’ book, Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World.

Like Buried Life, four other Canadian youth, Marc and Craig believe that anybody can make a difference in others’ lives – and thus live a more meaningful life. Once you read some of the everyday actions and inspiring stories they collected you may want to re the “blueprint” they offer in their ebook. (Who’s your hero?)

Perhaps they can expand involvement by partnering with Sergio Lub’s pay-if-forward community, favors. Maybe Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire at MIT can involve them in creating the Me to We games to teach children. Yes, sometimes good things do happen to good people.

The unpopularity of top-down management is old news by now. Yet how, exactly, does one create an openly collaborative organization? One that’s based on the power of peer relationships? One that can thrive?

The best Peer2Peer groups are efficient, adaptive and resilient resource-maximizers. That’s why they include “good” and “bad” groups. They are exceedingly good at outmaneuvering their opposition in this flattening world. They include Toyota, Wikipedia, AA, craigslist, Skype – and al Queda.

Yet “flattened” leadership is not a modern notion, notes Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom who believe it enabled the Apaches to evade a much larger Spanish army for 200 years. In their book, The Starfish and the Spider they offer six signs of a starfish, a decentralized group:

1. When attacked, it is more likely to become even more open and decentralized.
2. One can mistake a starfish for a spider.
3. A ‘starfish-style” open system doesn’t have central intelligence, rather intelligence spreads throughout the system.
4. Open systems can easily mutate.
5. A decentralized organization sneaks up on you.
6. As industries become decentralized, overall profits decrease.

To confirm that an organization is a starfish, observe:

1. Is there a person in charge?
2. Are there headquarters?
3. If you thump it on the head, will it die?
4. Is there a clear division of roles?
5. If you take out a unit, is the organization harmed?
6. Is power and knowledge concentrated or distributed?
7. Is the organization flexible or rigid?
8. Can you count the number of employees or participants?
9. Are working groups funded by the organization, or are they self-funding?
10. Do working groups in it communicate directly or through higher-ups?

In the authors’ rather ghoulish metaphor, starfish (representing headless, decentralized groups) can survive when legs are ripped off while spiders can’t. As H. Soza notes, “Many of our problems today are the result of leaders who try to defeat “starfish” entities using “spider” techniques (e.g. shock and awe, surges, lawsuits, hostile takeovers, etc.) We waste energy, treasure and lives because we have been too lazy to truly understand what we are fighting, or the actual opportunity that stands before us.” Some think the book over-simplifies.

While many of the authors’ examples involve large groups, the same principles hold true for any start-up, cell group centered or one-time project team. “We” can succeed when recruited or by recruiting individuals with much less money or contacts today. Yet we need the right mix of talents, an agreed-upon goal and rules of engagement – and a capacity to work with extremely diverse people, it seems.

In this podcast Brafman describes how you can succeed with a starfish group.