Renegade Conservatory Guy

I’m in LA at the moment visiting the 4th Underground 24 event - basically a 3 day internet marketing conference.

I was invited by my good friend Barry Dunlop, as he felt I could learn quite a bit about how to succeed online from some of the internet masters. To be honest, a lot of it is way over my head!!!

But, I’m meeting some great people here, such as Dean Hunt, Mason Thomas, and Michael Dunlop, all of whom manage to combine being generally nice people with making money online.

My concern is that I come back to the UK, and my mind goes off on a tangent, which is easy to do. I currently co-run an £8m per year window company in the UK, and earn a decent living. But many of these internet marketeers seem to have vastly better profit margins and business models than my existing traditional manufacturing business. I’m sure there is quite a lot of exaggeration going on, but some of the speakers have managed to impress me with sensible, intelligent online marketing concepts.

For example, Tony Hsieh has managed to build a $1b online shoe business - Zappos.com - by ensuring that the company ethos is simple -

…the very best customer service!

And, today I was blown away by the sensible words from Mike Faith of Headsets.com, who has built a highly successful online business, specialising in selling headsets. His business is in the only specialist retailer of headsets, and suggests the secret of his success is through failure - in otherwords, learning from his mistakes. I was particularly impressed that Mike, a fellow Brit, started his sales initiation in the UK knocking on doors - selling replacement windows!!

Anyway, I’ll be back in the UK on Wednesday with some really good ideas to improve our existing websites for upvc windows, doors and conservatories. The challenge is to not come back with crazy unrelated ideas!