If you are having so much success, why risk competition by sharing your ideas?

That’s a great question I hear often. Hidden in the question is a very flawed premiss – but I’ll get to that at the end of this article.

Let’s start here instead with an even better question first.

"Hey Jim, How has your team consistently been winning at online business for about 13+ years now while teaching thousands of others to do the same?"

Here’s how:

I’ve surrounded myself with other successful, creative online entrepreneurs for years and together we have developed an entirely new business model that no one else is using to crank out one HUGE winning concept after another. Let’s call our system the "gauntlet".

As proof of the incredible effectiveness of our "gauntlet" system, consider our track record of "big wins" (courses, books, sites & events) that are devoured by our huge and rapidly expanding community of successful online entrepreneurs – it’s a hard fact to argue against. We haven’t pushed out a "losing idea" in years (over a decade) and there are countless successful biz builders in our community. Those are the facts.

Here’s another fact:

We measure our success in the SUCCESS STORIES of our community.

What’s the gauntlet you might ask?

It’s simply this:

Any new biz idea, tool, course, strategy or service must pass the "smell test" to even get in the door. A lot of stuff stinks from about a mile away – we don’t even consider the garbage (hint: big shiny hype launches are 99.9% garbage).

The 5% of the ideas that don’t smell funky from miles away make it to round two. In round two we look for PROOF that the concept is working CONSISTENTLY for many others. A few success stories won’t cut it. We need hard stats from trusted sources. Few ideas pass that stage and often patience is required to even gather the facts.

Next we test it ourselves. I have nearly 70 people on my advisory board who test, read, try to break, and shoot down just about every idea we see in the online business space.

Those rare gems that make it through the grinder now face the toughest test yet. I use the idea/service/tool myself and unless it WORKS FOR ME, it goes in the TRASH.

That’s how we produce big win after win around here. We have exactly zero "big hitter / big email list owner" affiliates hyping our stuff. We can’t get the attention of most "big dogs" in the industry because we don’t charge enough to get their attention – they like the 50% / $2,000 commissions of the big hype launches far too much to be interested in our stuff that rarely costs more than a couple hundred dollars and offers measly commissions to affiliates.

So why not just keep all these great ideas to myself? Here’s my list of reasons:

1) It’s quite profitable educating people on ideas that they want to know more about. Ask any university how they stay in business. They do so (in some small part at least) by teaching ideas. That’s what we do too but we provide an insane ROI or give you your money back – try getting that form a university! I’m not ashamed one bit to make a raging profit serving exuberantly grateful clients who wonder why we don’t charge 10X more than we do. It’s quite fun and rewarding!

2) If the goal was to simply "keep this to ourselves and make as much money as we can in our little corner of the world", then you are correct we probably wouldn’t share our ideas, but that’s not the big picture goal. We are in the process of building the world’s largest community of profitable online entrepreneurs that has ever been virtually assembled (and yes, having such a community will be quite lucrative and powerful for us – and I’m OK with that.)

3) You’ll have to trust me on this one, because none of us can truly read the heart of another, but this is my mission: I’m called and compelled to help entrepreneurs. Even as a kid I’d look out the car window as we drove past "out of business" stores and restaurants and I wondered about the risk taker behind the failed venture. I wondered if their family was OK and if they had lost everything. I wondered if they held on "too long" and regretted even starting the biz. I imagined them telling their distraught employees the bad news as the cash ran dry. I prayed for them. You see, I love entrepreneurs and I love equipping and encouraging them with SPECIFIC business models and instruction. Our biz builders are a vital part of the GLUE that hold our culture together. That’s my calling and my MINISTRY. I take it quite seriously.

…and that’s my answer to your question.

I promised I’d point out the flawed premiss in the opening question – so here goes:

Hidden in the premiss of your question is the assumption that by sharing my "secrets" I’m somehow destroying my own business or killing the idea, but time and time again we’ve seen it play out that SHARING these supposed "secrets" propels us to greater success and IMPROVES the idea (giving us a NEW product to launch!)

We actually teach this strategy and it works quite well for numerous clients. You go from being a "success story" to an "authority figure" when you share your winning strategies and allow your audience to work on it and often improve it!

FACT: There are virtually no remaining business secrets any longer – the truth comes out SO FAST now thanks to the Internet. I’ve made a personal choice to share as openly as possible about my businesses and each time I share we launch to new levels of success! All ideas can be improved, and we benefit from the creative improvements of our community each time we share an idea with them.

Example: While I may not tell you EXACTLY what widget to go buy and sell, I’ll tell you how we decide what widgets to buy and sell and ask you to help improve the process along with the rest of our community. The end result is improved processes for all of us.

Still skeptical? That’s OK. Stick around awhile. Hang out with our community. We’ll win you over – we aren’t in a hurry and neither should you be.