I own a business called House Of Rave.com.
It’s a drop shipping business, which means I don’t physically handle the products myself.
PRO’S:
- If I stay on top of things, I only have to do a minimum of an hour or less of work per day (except maybe busy seasons).
- The business makes money when I sleep.
- I’ve slowly built a “moat” around the business which makes it (just a little) harder for newer competitors to compete with me.
- I can say “I own a rave company“
- It’s helped me pay for college, supported me even after college.
- By itself, it pays me enough money to live a pretty cool life, travel whenever I want and still save money.
- This business allows me to abide by the rules I heard from Joe Sugarman, “Anything you can do to eliminate people or paper, do.”
- It provides me a FANTASTIC “testing grounds” for trying out marketing techniques. Like when I read something great in a book, I can easily implement it to HoR with ease since it’s 100% my business.
- It’s always on top of cash flow, meaning I never have much debt (other than about $10,000 – $15,000 revolving debt on an American Express card).
- Because of the above, I get crazy amounts of airline points (in fact I just checked I have half a million airline miles I’ve never used until TODAY when I booked a flight to Vancouver….fo FREE).
CON’S:
- I must do at least SOME work everyday.
- If I get hit by a bus, the business will cease to exist.
- It’s unlikely it will ever get HUUUUGGEEE (without a change in the way things are currently run).
House Of Rave is what Tim Ferriss refers to as a “Muse”…a small business that you can run from anywhere which pays for your lifestyle.
However I’m no fool (well, at least not completely).
I am a middle man. And as technology improves, manufacturers get more sophisticated, and consumers get more educated….I will be phased out with my current model.
I don’t foresee this happening anytime soon, and I do have time, but it will eventually happen. Fortunately I’ve found ways to overcome that for now, but looking at a 5 or 10 year forecast, it will move in that direction. If someone else took over, they could make the business BIG and sustainable in the long run, but it’s never really been a passion of mine. It was one of many side-projects that made enough money not to pull the plug.
I’m really grateful I’ve had House Of Rave all these years. I’ve started a lot of small businesses here and there, but HoR has been around the longest (first live order was placed in 2001).
But there’s a yearning to branch out even further.
I’m getting hungry.