Oh my what a year 2008 has been. Once again I am sitting with Neil and the family at New Year Eve though instead of sitting at our computers typing away we are at the Sydney Harbor watching the fireworks and listening to a great concert to unwind after an incredible packed year. Where do I start?
First and foremost Kelley and I have watched our beautiful treasure Aidan-Kai grow up real fast. At the beginning of the year he was learning to roll over, now he gets up and runs around and laughs and plays and has so much fun. His energy makes Kelley’s eyes tear and has her chasing our little terror all over the house. It is hysterical to watch to see who gets the upper hand. We love rolling around on the ground. The Love Monster is in full swing and we sit and have story time and our new house is full with toys to keep our little genius occupied.
Speaking of new house, we moved to San Diego in May which was perfect timing by the time the adoption paperwork came through. Renee was very gracious and left a lot of furniture for us to take care of. We settled in quickly and have made San Diego our home. There is not much we miss in Newport except for the convenience of some of the shops, our beach and of course my Laguna Beach basketball. That was somewhat overcome with Chris Neilson and playing other games down here and having good quality people to play with on a regular basis.
I went hiking in the mountains again this year and got to do five hikes including two up to the waterfall. Aidan is still too small to join in but I look forward to when he can join us. We had a great time and I went skiing, a couple more times before knuckling down to a solid work schedule. More of that to come. Other than hiking, basketball and a little skiing this year was not much about recreation. Yes I got to stay at more beautiful resorts including with Kelley and Aidan in Hawaii courtesy of Chris Howard and Billionaire Boot Camp. What a boon that turned out to be. I spoke to groups of his in Hawaii, Australia and England and built a growing fan base in each of these countries including large numbers of Lifetime Members. I have made myself an incredible asset to Chris and they value me so highly and yet watch in astonishment at how we are growing and are also so profitable. Good negotiation of course allowed me to keep all the income from enrollments at his events.
Regarding other peoples events, we did get to speak at T. Harv’s Guerilla Business School. It was last moment of course but we have a solid program. We were paid up financially and the students gave great feedback about the programs they have attended back to Peak Potentials. We also did work with Robert Allen during the year that opened a lot of doors as many students began to hear about what we are doing. They were not very excited about the flood of students coming over to do our programs realizing the exceptional value we offered even though we did not deliberately focus on bringing them on. Hypnotic Language Patterns are a beautiful thing, are they not? That’s Right. Andre was able to step up and handle Bill Bartmann’s events and he also started doing promotional nights by himself including flying up to the Bay Area and taking it in turn with me for Introductory evenings up there.
The Certification program has been a massive success. We are really getting some excellent Assistant Trainers coming on board. Dezi completed everything except the final Certification Course and will be doing that early in the coming year. It took a while for her to realize that why reinvent the wheel but after a little bit of coaching (ie hammering) and a couple of months of tough, lonely and isolated speaking events by herself she realized like Andre she has a home here that suits her personality and allows to have a lot of fun in the meantime. Brenda made a huge shift after starting her certification and decided to move to California and her experience in AODII where she was Vesta Laverjon shook her to the core and she has shed a lot of limiting beliefs and is beginning to shine in the programs and working with us full time as she builds her training skills. We have a LOT more future Facilitators coming down the pipeline and having each student commit to 30 days in the training room did wonders for boosting enrollments, coaching and support for the events.
As of September we finally unveiled our coaching program with 20 of the students currently going through Certification now acting as coaches for Frontier Trainings as we scale up the program and keep looking for more. We look after our coaches exceptionally well and in turn our Lifetime Members rave about the effect of coaching on their business and it generates some extra income for the business as well.
One of the big surprises of the year was the artwork that Carlos started. Once he got the system down pat he began producing at an incredible rate of 15 paintings a month. Over the course of the year we now have 180 portraits of famous people. This has garnered a lot of media attention as we package and sell and present them for publicity events. We have also been selling them at our events and they are a high profitability and have now finally made this project self-sustainable which means Carlos will be doing this artwork for years. We have already had the Presidential series picked up by a number of promoters and we are receiving money from that. We had Carlos fly out in October for his 150th painting celebration and he was thrilled to see our environment and see his art in the training rooms.
Lynn Adams continues to excel at what she is doing and her unique brand of painting adds such color to the training room. What started at as a small gift has become a major income earner for her, generating $50,000 extra a year in income doing something she absolutely loves. She also works at all the events as is one of the lead coaches at the event and using her real life business experience provides depth and heart.
Carol Powell is a monster at Closing. Since removing the record keeping of the events and letting her focus on speaking to people she keeps getting better. If we want someone in the Lifetime Member program she gets them to find a way. She found a new apartment earlier in the year, is much happier and loving every minute of this journey. She has been around the world with us a number of times and loves combining her life’s mission with the game we are playing.
Neil is rock solid as always. We sometimes look at each other and wonder how we can be having so much fun and be building the company this way. Every moment we check in with ourselves and pinch ourselves to confirm it is real. Neil handed over truck duties mid year and has taken a senior position managing and coaching other team members on Logistics. He even finally handed over the role of Hee Go Lo occasionally as we expand although we revisit regularly to keep improving our introductory course and the lifeblood of the company.
We traveled a lot this year and Frontier Trainings really is international. While Canada and Malaysia were Ok events, Australia and especially England proved to be BIG winners. Student flocked to see what we were doing and started sharing it like crazy, in fact many of our Play To Win International events were bigger than the events in USA. We set up an even bigger schedule for 2009 now our schedule of great trainers is coming to fruition and our support team is really solid.
Handing over the finances to Maria in May was a great relief. I had others assisting me in data entry but to finally bring in a great Financial Controller (CFO) made a great difference but considering the money the company started generating it was not surprising. Our first million dollar month came in August and from then on it never stopped climbing. With a small solid, repeatable event structure we generate solid commitments, solid cashflow and a growing pool of Lifetime Members.
The software ‘Champions – Frontier Management Software’ finally got handed over in Nov to Matt our new programmer. He is a whiz with vb.net and makes our system sing across the internet. We now have a state-of-the-art software package to run Frontier Trainings and are the envy of the speaking business in the market….and it was done like everything by Frontier frugally and with financial planning.
Our curriculum continues to blossom. Strategic Brilliance lived up to its name. Unlimited Creativity certainly fulfilled its claim to fame. Spirit of Greatness was a smash hit, Championship Team break new levels and the other courses continued to fill out our curriculum to 18 courses and put us in a handful of companies with such a program. We very quickly because a centre of focus for a lot of people. Of course our programs were designed to not need external speakers and others are looking in amazement about where we came from and how we got to be this large and this profitable. Hmm Strategic Planning baby. Step by Step.
Brian and I had a couple more dinners throughout the year and finally released the book in Nov. It was a massive undertaking and finally had it ready to correspond with his schedule and mine. It got to be a bestseller with all the network contacts we made in the Internet world and people wanting to get a piece of what we are doing. Alex Mandossian became fascinated and I became a regular on some of his Teleseminar series and he agreed to do some promotion for me to his database and we returned the favor.
The games continued to get better and better. It is hard to recognize some of the early games compared to where they are now. The AV department has improved to much with the video mixer, instant replay machine, multiple screens and quality mixing. Rick has really excelled and found a home. He has written the music for the fourth album which we are yet to rename but it has some awesome tracks that finally come out including Transcendance, Transformation and Joy.
Between all the media interviews, writing courses, training, meetings and events I get to go into the studio and record. We now have 32 products out. Each course is generating so much intellectual property and each becomes the focus of its own that is hard to keep it all straight. Lucky I have good time and spatial awareness. This products have become a cash cow for the company with many participants buying the products and then signing up for Lifetime Memberships. We just hit our 1000 Lifetime Member on Dec 29th after a whole lot of work from Carol and the 10 person sales team. The systems we implemented for follow up sales and referral collections etc just plain work. The company earned $12 million in the year especially as the Lifetime Membership climbed to $20,000 by the end of the year and the Certification Course offered for the low rate of $12,000 by itself. Our qualification program gave us better business candidates and the company had $3.2 million of cash come in and I was able to pay off most of the investors. I would have liked to paid them all off however I refuse to affect the stability of the company. Some of the investors are a little annoyed but getting 50% of their money and knowing they will get the rest in the first half of 2009 silenced them. The ones who were paid off were ecstatic. Some offered to invest again and I apologized.
The real estate market is still going down. The pundits thought it would be over by now but it is clearly not. Lenders are so tight on lending money they basically destroyed the buyers market plummeting houses even further pushing the US economy into recession. What a beautiful thing. With all the tools we are generating and the cashflow coming in we are six months away from starting our real estate trainings for those students who know what they are doing. At a certain point the market cannot go down much more and now is the time to start acquiring and building the portfolios at rock bottom prices. Sure we will be buying and holding for a while. That is fine with me.
Kelley is really blossoming as a Mom. She relishes the role and just glows.Well it is almost time for the Year to kick over. Looking back it has an incredible time. Kelley and I are doing great and looking at another adoption next year. Company is in excellent condition. Support team is performing excellently and life just looks amazing.
Come 2009….Lets take it to another whole level.
I also mentioned a while about the World Leader Portraits I was accumulating. Since then these portraits have now started going up in the training room. These portraits are exquisite and make such an impact. We are now putting up Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and others up on the wall.
