Are You a Part-Timer, Lifestyle Entrepreneur or Company Builder?
By Anna Johnson on June 29th, 2010Which kind of Internet entrepreneur are you? Are you a part-timer? A lifestyle entrepreneur? Or a company builder?
Knowing which kind of Internet marketer you are is useful in helping you make decisions about such matters as:
- What goal(s) and expectations to set yourself;
- What kind of Internet marketing business to build;
- How many resources e.g. time and money to allocate to Internet marketing;
- What skills to learn and develop; and
- Whether and how to grow your business.
Let’s look at how you might approach your Internet marketing business depending on the type of Internet marketer you are…
1. Part-timer
As a part-timer, your goal is to make some extra income each week or month. You like the fun of Internet marketing – finding and exploiting money-making opportunities – but are not interested in being a full-time Internet marketer or in building a substantial business.
If you have a particular interest (e.g. sport, craft, games, cooking, etc) – you may be inclined to develop your own information or other products and sell them online, or you might run an affiliate website where you sell merchants’ products that fall within this niche.
Alternatively, you might run an eBay business, engage in cost-per-acquisition / cost-per-action (CPA) marketing, website flipping, or domain name investment (a.k.a. Domaining – i.e. finding, buying and monetizing domain names), or get involved in these or any number of other online business opportunities.
Whatever the case, you don’t have a lot of time nor money to devote to Internet marketing so are looking for opportunities that, whilst don’t need to make you a fortune, enable you to hit the ground running relatively quickly. In other words, you don’t want the requirements of a huge learning (or experience) curve, time commitment or capital outlay in order to make a few bucks online.
Similarly, while you’re happy to develop some tactical skills, you are not looking for an expansive Internet marketing education to make money online. Rather, you’re interested in mastering the few skills necessary to make you a little side money.
While you wouldn’t necessary rule out evolving your part-time business into a full-time gig e.g. a lifestyle business this is not your goal right now. As such, you don’t specifically invest resources, energy or attention into growing your business.
2. Lifestyle entrepreneur
An Internet marketer who qualifies as a ‘lifestyle entrepreneur’ is either running a full-time business or aspiring to be full-time. In this case, you are passionate and serious about building an Internet marketing business that earns you whatever income it takes to support your desired lifestyle – 5, 6, 7 figures or beyond – with the proviso that your income will be limited by the size of your business.
While you may want to build significant wealth, you’re not willing to work so hard or make such sacrifices to your desired lifestyle as may be necessary to exceed a certain amount of money. To this end, you don’t intend to build a huge company with lots of employees. (Sure, owning a huge company could be viewed as a type of lifestyle, but ‘lifestyle entrepreneur’ is usually associated with someone who wants a business that supports a rich and rewarding NON-business lifestyle e.g. travel, leisure, hobbies, family, etc.)
As a lifestyle entrepreneur, you will be looking to automate, outsource, leverage and optimize your business as much as possible, thereby freeing up your time for your non-business pursuits.
Whatever choice of Internet business you choose – it could range from developing and selling products and services online, to affiliate marketing, to all sorts of other kinds of Internet marketing – it probably won’t involve providing time consuming services, extensive customer support or anything that puts you ‘on call’. This is simply because businesses like these usually require you to work more and/or employ staff, detracting from your ideal lifestyle.
When it comes to investing time, money or other resources into your Internet marketing business, as a lifestyle entrepreneur, you’ll probably aim to minimize all three, but will still put in whatever it takes to build the kind of lifestyle business you want. While this may require working around the clock for a period of time, you know that eventually you’ll have the work-life balance you want.
For example, if you’re an experienced CPA marketer who drives traffic to offers via pay-per-click advertising, you’ll invest time and money in courses that teach you the latest CPA marketing strategies and tactics. You may also spend thousands of dollars on PPC campaigns each month, week or day. This is all fine with you, however, because you enjoy CPA marketing, it’s highly profitable for you, and you’ve structured your activities so that eventually you’ll have a system that gives you enough time away from the computer.
Similarly, although your plan isn’t to build a huge staff, as a lifestyle entrepreneur, you’ll certainly hire staff, freelancers or contractors to perform non-strategic work, or any other kind of work that frees you up for more of the fun (work or non-work) stuff.
As an Internet marketer dedicated to building a full-time Internet marketing business you will make significant investments in your education and the tools required to build your business. You are not looking to make a quick buck; you are looking to build a cash cow and you’ll do what it takes to build it.
In relation to growing your business, you’ll draw the line at whatever size causes you to compromise your desired lifestyle. To this end you’ll probably choose to go into a business, and into markets or niches, where you can establish a profitable business without facing the choice of ‘grow or die’.
You’ll also limit the growth of your business by deliberately avoiding the kinds of strategic moves growing businesses typically embrace, such as: developing ever more products; entering new markets; raising capital; hiring (more) staff; buying other businesses… and anything else that leaves you saying, “I’m not having fun anymore…”
3. Company builder
A company builder’s goal is to build a substantial enterprise… okay, empire. In the early days of your business, this means laying the foundations for a company that will grow quickly and substantially in a large market, or in one or more niches or markets, with no self-imposed limit on growth.
As a company builder, you may – like a lifestyle entrepreneur – focus on one or more niches or even micro-niches, but you won’t stop there. Your objective is to build an ever-growing ‘system’ that continually accommodates more and more niches or micro-niches rather than to choose a few that bring in a certain amount of income, or accommodate a certain non-work lifestyle.
To this end, while a company builder and a lifestyle entrepreneur may look similar at first, at some point you will, as a company builder, evolve from scrappy entrepreneur to business owner to chief executive officer (CEO).
As scrappy entrepreneur, you may start out doing everything in your business – from copywriting, to handling customer service, to book-keeping – then, as business owner, you will increasingly outsource or manage people to do all but the more strategic tasks. Eventually, as CEO of a growing corporation, your role will no longer be to do ‘the work’ but will be more about hiring and helping great people to do it.
What kinds of markets or niches will you enter as a company building Internet marketer?
Well, to build a company with no necessary limit on growth, you’ll typically seek to solve big problems. In general, the bigger the problem you solve, the more money you’ll make. Rather than go after narrowly defined niches, you may go for broadly defined markets.
Alternatively, you might still target niches as opposed to mass markets (especially if you have limited resources). As indicated above, however, you won’t stop at just a few niches – you’ll keep on adding more and more niches to your business ‘portfolio’ and thereby grow the overall market you serve.
In relation to investing in your business, you’ll likely put it all on the line. You’ll bootstrap, beg, borrow (but hopefully not steal!) to get your business going and growing. You’ll also devote whatever time it takes to build your business. If that means working 16 hours a day and sacrificing your social life, so be it. As a company builder, your business will probably only come after family and health in your list of priorities.
Similarly, you’ll invest time and money in developing the skills and know-how, and building the professional network, needed to make your business successful.
Because you’re aiming to build a large company, the most important skills you can develop are leadership and management skills. As your company grows, it will become much more important for you to have the skills to hire, lead and manage great people who have the specific financial, marketing, operations and other functional skills your company needs, than to have those functional skills yourself.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t develop Internet marketing skills. You’ll need these in spades when you’re just starting out. Since you’re building your own company rather than inheriting someone else’s (as you would if you worked your way up the corporate ladder) you need the skills and resources necessary to start and grow a business from scratch. So you’ll definitely need a solid grasp of Internet marketing. But because your goal is to build a great company, you’ll be inclined to enlist others to fill specific functional roles – including marketing – as soon as possible.
So, now that you’ve read about these three types of Internet marketer… which kind of Internet marketer are you? Or are you an Internet marketer in transition? There’s no right or wrong type to be, but it is helpful to ‘know thyself’.
By having a better understanding of yourself – your preferences and goals – you can set yourself expectations and make decisions that support you, rather than push you in a direction you ultimately don’t want to take.
