It was over 2 years ago that we first packed up our bags and our business and headed for Panama. We’d given ourselves 6 months prior to that to get our business ship-shape for a life on the road and naively thought we’d done everything we could to prepare it…
“Oh I’ve been running the business for a while, I’m an ex-management consultant – I’m super organised and good at planning…what could possibly go wrong?” were the kind of gung-ho thoughts running through my mind at the time. Yeah, right!
It’s not like there were many big things that went wrong exactly, but we encountered a number of challenges that we simply hadn’t expected and therefore not planned for. If we were to start all over again, there are numerous things we’d have done differently, but that’s just life and we’ve fortunately learned our lessons along the way.
As you’ll hopefully know by now, we recently finished the creation of and “soft launched” the “Build A Location Independent Business” course.
Due to the minor hiccup of an unplanned baby on the way, the 6 months I’d given myself to create and launch the course turned into a much shorter 2 month window – which basically meant that instead of planning a proper launch like you’re meant to for products like this, I was far too busy focusing on actually creating the damn course in between the morning sickness and hours of unproductive pregnancy lethargy!
In a way, it’s worked out for the best. I’m one of those people who gets totally turned off by the big sales pitch (probably because I’ve fallen for a few in the past) – and when I’ve half-heartedly tried it myself for our business something just feels wrong and totally “not me” about the whole approach.
So what to do? And how to officially launch the course?
I recently had a consult with Dave Navarro (aka The Launch Coach) about how best to launch the course. It rocked – and best of all we came up with a plan that didn’t feel sleazy, works well for where we are currently with all the location independent projects and I’m hoping will help sell the course to the people who could really use it.
So this is a long-winded way of announcing the release of the LIBRA - the Location Independent Business Readiness Assessment – and the non-salesman in me wants you to know that yes, the release of the LIBRA is part of the official “launch” of the course and yes, if you want to look at it in a totally transparent way, the ultimate purpose of it is basically to sell more copies of the course.
Phew, got that out of the way!
But as you’ll hopefully see when you look at the LIBRA, it is a valuable tool in its own right. It was designed to be that way because I know that (a) not everyone will be able to afford the course and (b) not everyone will feel they need the course before they’ve done the assessments.
So what is the LIBRA?
It’s basically a 6-part assessment with a number of questions in each part relating to specific aspects of your business – enabling you to assess how well your business measures up in each area. It’s a bit like a scorecard with the ultimate aim of helping you determine whether your business is road-worthy.
Like the course, the LIBRA is aimed at people who want to be able to run their business from anywhere.
But the truth is, it’s actually suitable for anyone running a micro, freelance or small business (and even bigger ones than that) – due to the fact that the strategies, methodologies and resources included in the course take some of the best aspects from the world of big business (which is professionally where I’ve come from) and adapt them specifically for smaller businesses.
One of the fundamental goals of the course is to help you build a “proper” business - one that’s built on solid foundations and one that’s not going to fold the minute you encounter some minor obstacles (like say a total lack of internet on location or maybe a global recession).
Whether you intend to buy the course or not just yet I’d encourage you to take the LIBRA anyway – at the very least it’ll help you identify any major gaps in your business which need addressing whether you plan to take your business on the road or not.
You’ll get all 6 parts of the LIBRA when you join the list below (which as you probably already know, you can unsubscribe from at any time – and this is a different list from our priority updates list in the sidebar)…
