Matt Giovanisci spent his teenage years working in a pool store and learning all about swimming pool maintenance and care. He also rocked out in a band, made videos, and taught himself how to design and code websites. Then he got an idea: "Maybe I should create a website about pool care." Four years went by before a friend told him to get on with it already!

Matt finally built that website, www.SwimUniversity.com, but it went through a few iterations before he figured out his formula for success. The formula was ultimately pretty simple: Provide quality content, and make it entertaining!

Now this website earns him more than he was making full time in a corporate job at the pool company and he has spent NO TIME at all on the website so far in 2014...it is entirely passive income. He is now spending his time with a partner building a successful and highly entertaining website (www.ListenMoneyMatters.com) and daily podcast about personal finance.

In our interview, Matt talks about:

• What he did wrong in building Swim University, and how he turned it around
• How he monetizes Swim University, a website loaded with free helpful content
• Why having fun is critically important in building a business
• How he incorporates passions from his life into his business to make it better

Matt can be found through both websites at www.SwimUniversity.com or www.ListenMoneyMatters.com

Please subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or Stitcher and leave a review there, too.

John Lee Dumas loved listening to podcasts. He could download to his phone exactly what he wanted to listen to and then listen to them while he was on the go. He could pause them when he wanted, and then resume playing later without having missed a thing. The only problem was that there were not enough podcasts available to satisfy his appetite.  He'd quickly run out of shows and have to wait for something new to become available. This drove him nuts!

John decided to solve the problem himself. He quit his job and created a daily (7 days per week) business podcast, the exact frequency and content that he himself wanted to hear! Others told him this was crazy, that no one needed a daily show, and that it would be near impossible to maintain that pace.  

John has long since proved them wrong! The EntrepreneurOnFire podcast was launched in June 2012, won Best in iTunes 2013, and so far has been downloaded over 7.6 million times. It sure seems that a lot of other people shared John's pain and love his content!

In our interview, John talks about:

• The key to staying on top in iTunes
• Why getting a business mentor early on was so important to helping him be successful
• How mastermind groups are a great resource for every entrepreneur
• Why he believes perseverance is so important for every entrepreneur looking for business success
• How his clients help him find his next great product ideas

John can be found on his website at www.EntrepreneurOnFire.com

Please subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or Stitcher and leave a review there, too. 

Mike Michalowicz is one guy every entrepreneur should listen to. Mike started three multi-million dollar businesses, one of which he sold to a co-founder and another of which was sold after only a few years to a Fortune 500 company. In addition, he has started and/or advised many startup businesses.

It's not all been roses, though. Mike has experienced some pretty heart wrenching business failures, too, which he discusses in the interview. The important thing is that he learned from all his experiences, both the good and the bad, and he's bounced back stronger than ever.

Now an author, Mike is following his passion. He has written three books on entrepreneurship which address the natural sequence an entrepreneur goes through when building their business.

• His first book, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur: The tell-it-like-it-is guide to cleaning up in business, even if you are at the end of your roll, has 450 5-star reviews on Amazon and is considered a cult classic on Entrepreneurship. It walks us through the steps to finding our business idea and getting started.
• His second book, The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field, is about how to grow your customer list and sales by weeding out the losers and nurturing the winners. By following these principles, you can have a much better business in all respects.
• His latest book, Profit First: A Simple System to Transform Any Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine., lays out a more effective way for entrepreneurs to make sure their business is profitable from the first sale onwards, and explains why the approach most business owners use is flawed.

In our interview, Mike talks about:

• Why having too much money available when starting a business can lead to bad decisions and losses
• Why the business "pivot" can lead an entrepreneur into a business he or she may grow to hate, even when sales are booming
• What we can learn from pumpkin farmers to grow our businesses faster, increase profits, and make ourselves much happier in the process
• How his "pay yourself first" concept leads to finding creative solutions and (almost) guaranteed profitability
• How your best clients can help you find a wealth of new clients (and sales) just like them

Mike can be found on his website at www.MikeMichalowicz.com

I highly recommend you check out his many FREE, VALUABLE downloadable resources here.

Please subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or Stitcher and leave a review there, too. Thanks you, I appreciate it, and I appreciate you!

When Jim Wang graduated from college and started working as a software developer, he discovered that he needed to learn about personal finance. He needed to learn about 401k plans, saving and investing, insurance, renting and buying homes, and countless others things that most people don't yet know at that age. Jim decided that since he was learning this stuff anyway, he might as well record it on a blog. Thus was born the Bargaineering website.

Since he had a full time day job, Jim worked on the site in his spare time. This was not a business to him (at first), it was just him writing about what he was learning as he did research on various topics. Imagine his surprise when traffic to the website started rapidly climbing!

Seeing an opportunity, Jim then started adding elements to the website that would allow him to monetize (make money off of) this traffic. Before long, Jim was earning significantly more money from his website than from his full time job. The punchline: About five years after starting the blog, Jim sold it to Bankrate, Inc. for $3 million cash plus the potential to earn another $500,000 if certain growth and earnings targets were achieved after the sale. Not bad for writing a blog about a topic he initially knew little about!

Jim talks about:

• Building a business when you are not yet an expert in that topic
• How he promoted the blog by reaching out to other bloggers in his niche
• The blog post that earned him the most money
• Why readers could connect with him because he did NOT try to pose like an expert
• His new website and podcast, MicroBlogger, where he teaches what he learned building the Bargaineering business

John's passion as a boy was imitating the voices and characters that he heard on the radio and on tv, and he fell in love with radio.  As an adult, however, he graduated from college and became a lobbyist.  This was a long way from his passion. After several years, he started attending night school to get the training needed to get a job at a local radio station.

Fast forward several years, John achieved his goal of doing voiceover and production work at a radio station in Boston, and he's been doing it ever since.  If the story ended there, it would be inspirational.  But there is more.

Recognizing that jobs cannot be counted on to be permanent, John then worked to build a business on the side. With this business, John serves a variety of other businesses using his vocal and production skills.  The two sets of work (his job plus his company) keep him fulfilled doing work that he enjoys and provide him a diversified income stream.  That's a fantastic situation!

Listen to this episode and think about ways that you, too, could do something similar.

John talks about:

• Finding a way to get from a job that he disliked to the job of his dreams
• The importance of diversifying your income streams
• Treating your job as if your employer is only one of several clients
• Finding clients and minimizing competition by going where his competitors were not
• Doing a booth at trade shows to find new clients, and how to pick which shows to attend

When Andrew Ferebee realized shortly after college that the corporate career path that he was on did not fulfill him, he started looking for alternatives. His passions were entrepreneurship and self improvement. When he did some research, he discovered that there were no good self-improvement websites for young men. And BAM, there was his future!

Andrew would create a website and community for young men who were interested in exploring topics related to personal development, fulfillment, and achieving greatness on their own terms. Thus was born the Knowledge For Men podcast and website (www.knowledgeformen.com).

Andrew talks about:

• Creating a business around your passion
• Becoming the go-to resource on a topic when you are not an expert in that topic
• Bringing fresh ideas into your business by talking to experts outside your business
• How writing from the heart is much more attractive to readers than generic content
• The importance to the entrepreneur of understanding that starting a business comes with both highs and lows

Allen Murabayashi, Chairman and Co-Founder of PhotoShelter, is a great example of what can happen when you take action and start building a business.

When Allen was fresh out of college, he joined a small staff of four software developers playing around with internet business ideas in the side office of a employment recruiting firm.  Those efforts became HotJobs, which Yahoo bought in 2002 for $445 million.

A few years later, Allen and a few friends got together for dinner and decided to start a company to help professional photographers showcase and sell their work.  That company is PhotoShelter.

With two big successes under his belt, Allen has a lot of great advice to offer to new entrepreneurs and to existing businesses.

Andy Biggs had a very traditional corporate career.  He earned an accounting degree in college, followed by consulting  jobs and work at a Silicon Valley startup.  But by the time the 2008 recession hit, he had gradually lost his passion for this kind of work.

It was then that Andy and his wife packed everything up and took a long trip to Africa where he climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro.  It was a tough climb with lots of time to think.  When he came off the mountain, Andy had set his eye on a new career.  He had decided to become a photographer and launch an African photo safari business.  What a great decision that turned out to be!

In this interview:

• Andy talks about the importance of identifying and understanding your target customer.
• He says it's important to have a good understanding of the competition so you can position your business well.
• Andy talks about how he is gradually changing his product offerings to allow him to travel less while maintaining his income.
• Andy has never spent money on advertising.
• He discusses the emotional difficulty of walking away from his first career, one he spent a long time building.
• Andy says launching his business was a terrific decision and he has never regretted it!

When Debra Angilletta became a mother a few years ago, she chose to walk away from a great corporate career at a Wall Street firm.  No new job to go to, no entrepreneurial business already established.  She just quit, did some self assessment work, and then mapped out how she would build a home-based business that took advantage of her aptitudes and interests.  

Now, a few years later, she has a 6-figure income business (www.anewviewllc.com) and is working far less than before, all from the comfort of home.

In this interview:

• Deb tells us that we know more than we think we know, and it's probably enough to start a business.  
• She advises us to pick a niche and not try to sell to too broad of a market.  
• She emphasizes why time management is so critical.  
• She tells us that business is just a system, and that if we know how the system works, we too can build a successful business.
• And she summarizes all of this by explaining her Five Cornerstones approach to building a company.

One Thing Required is a podcast celebrating entrepreneurship.  I interview entrepreneurs, authors and experts to learn as much as I can from them about starting and growing businesses.  My goal: To help my audience and me get out of our own way and launch successful businesses better and faster than if we tried to figure it all out on our own.

In this episode, meet me (Will Lee), your host.  I'll tell you a little about my business career and why I am qualified to interview entrepreneurs about how they started their businesses.  And I'll tell you a little about what I enjoy most in life.

Once you know me a little better, I will share why I am doing this podcast and what I hope to learn, with you, from our guests.  If you aren't inspired and educated by every show, if you don't feel more confident that you too can launch your own business, then I'm doing something wrong.  Tell me and I'll fix it!

Ultimately, this show is for you, my audience.  Let me know what you want to learn, and I will do my best to provide it.