I have been operating as a one-man Internet Marketer for most of the time.

Truth be told, I made most of my online fortune in my earlier years and in the past two years I chilled out and took more time off the computer. Even more so after I accomplished my first big dream of buying our own house in Johor and two cars. (I started with absolutely nothing to my name just a few years before.)

Then in November last year, Khai Ng approached me with an idea which I did not feel comfortable about at first: to start our own team.

Now I am the kind of guy who enjoys his own freedom to be wherever I want, and whoever I want to be with. I HATE office environments. I HATE the traffic. And I HATE anything that resembles a 9-to-5 to me.

Anyways I told Khai, “We’ll see how it goes.” So we launched the next 2 Products together that would decide whether we are going with the plan. Or we might as well forget about it.

First Try – PLR Encyclopedia

It was nearing end of the year so we wanted to push something out really quick without creating a new product altogether. So we packaged all of our best Private Label Rights digital products we have created in our combined career and we gave it the title it deserved: PLR Encyclopedia.

Due to the sheer volume of the PLR products (250 of them in all) and that it would total to 1.1 TB after unzipping all of them, we offered to ship the USB hard drive to our customer’s doorstep.

Our first official project together that would decide it - PLR Encyclopedia.

This was our first time selling and shipping a physical product, and for a couple of marketers too pampered by the convenience of selling downloadable products, this proved to be a challenge initially. In spite of the hiccups we faced at first, we managed to sell slightly more than $22,000 in sales worth of this product we put together in a week and a half.

Not bad for a no-money-down plan, and that we sold this exclusively to our own mailing list! Even though we would put a portion of the sales into the cost of buying and shipping the USB hard drives later.

Second Try – PLR Franchising

While that was good, I wasn’t totally convinced if we were ready for something so big. Then Khai came up with the next crazy idea: PLR Franchising.

While named so, we were selling the Internet Business Cloning Rights to our existing brand of Products PLRGold and Inspiration DNA. This meant retiring the brands we had been working on all these years in favor of starting a new one.

It was another test to get me out of the comfort zone. And to be really frank, I wasn’t sure at all if this was a brilliant idea to begin with. But I always convince myself that there’s nothing to lose so we went ahead and opened this deal to our subscribers only a few days before Christmas.

No one bought our licensing opportunity on our first mailout. I was quick to be disappointed. Then it was followed by a lot of intensed negotiations with subscribers who were really interested. This went on for a week and to date, we successfully closed clients totalling up to nearly $37,000!

So in the span of two months, these ‘no-money-down’ projects alone brought us in around $59,000+ in revenue!

With that, Khai and I went on with the next big plan . . .

Third Step – We Started Hiring People

For me, this was one of the scariest yet most defining moments that would change the way I do business forever.

I have heard plenty of horror stories about Internet Marketers getting too ambitious; they start to have their own office with full-time employees thinking that their previous success warrants it. Many of them usually wind up closing the office a year or two later – or downsize – when they realize how much of a liability it really is just to impress their friends and clients who will never walk into their premise.

I did not want to waste my time there. At the same time, I acknowledge the limitations of a one-man entrepreneur. It really is time to have a dedicated team. But who?

At the same time, I maintain that we all work from home, and meetings be banned unless necessary (did I tell you I HATE meetings too?)

So I tried my luck posting for positions of Internship on my Facebook. I was happy to see a number of applications coming in. Not a torrent of them but enough to get started. I wanted to be sure I was working with people who are passionate about Internet Marketing and not just looking for a conventional job.

Thus come 30th January, we started with 4 people.

What 'the office' looks like... nobody else comes here to work.

While the majority of us are Malaysians, there are people from the US and Australia. I was stubborn to maintain a work-from-home lifestyle, which eventually vindicated my beliefs that now turn into a work from home revolution!

Khai and I weren’t really sure how to go about with this – we just know that we want to create the leading Private Label Rights brand and universe in the Internet Marketing arena. But we were confident we could handle whatever obstacles that would be thrown into our direction.

Things were slow at first. There were road bumps along the way. And not everything went as planned. But in the short span of time we achieved some notable success:

• We launched our first product on JVZoo called Swipe File Chamber. It ranked #8 Top Seller of the week and was the only middle ticket product in the market place!
• We also spawned a new monthly membership site called Wealth Print Monthly, modeled after my proven membership site PLRGold: Monthly. Positioned as a One-Time Offer to our front-end products most of the time, we got in close to 100 recurring members in slightly more than a month.

• We have increased the monthly salary of 2 of our team members. Quite fast considering it was only less than 2 months at that time but we were impressed with their work and we want to keep committed people with us for a long time to come.
• We have also expanded to currently 9 people – all working from the comforts of their homes or wherever they take their computer to!
• In a flurry of products launched on JVZoo – while not everyone was a bestseller – we got 2 more to the Top 10 in March (one even got Pick of the Day!)

We also successfully secured an investor to invest 100,000 MYR into our growing online business! While we could use our own money to fund our operations, it was time to think BIG if we want to play in major league and leverage on OPM (Other People’s Money). But hey this is not ‘free money’ okay… we have a responsibility to our investor too. A BIG ONE.All in all, it’s been a crazy 3 months since the time we started to think in terms of ‘WE’ rather than ‘me myself and I’. And I felt a huge paradigm shift in the way I think and behave towards my own business now.

It wasn’t easy writing all these down because I was (and still am) totally new, warming up to the prospects of starting a team to accomplish our bigger goals while championing our work-from-home mission. And I was in the process of actively learning I was afraid my ideas today would be entirely different tomorrow.

I think only good and better things can happen from here. As I am writing this, we have given ourselves a new company name as well (to be revealed later). For the people with us in our team, I also aspire to raise them as marketers who can think and be creative as well and with that we want to be able to accomodate and realize their ideas when it merits.

Hope you picked up some golden gems from this post – it certainly was for Khai and myself, and the rest of our team when we started!