Kordahi Dorry - Wealth Diaries - An Entrepreneurs World

So, how do you find this balance if youre looking for that perfect opportunity?

Believe it or not, it starts with self-reflection, not by going to the next latest greatest seminar or reading the latest greatest how-to book. Find out what is most important to you and what you value most. You will naturally have an interest in what you value and so you are already starting with an advantage.

If you are truly interested in something, it wont take a lot of insight or effort to accurately evaluate what is being offered in the market and how you can offer something that is both valuable and unique. If you are truly interested in it, you probably already have a well-formed opinion or idea about it, and a burning curiosity. Both traits will help you start with an advantage most start-ups wont have. For example, a major factor that made our partnership work (where so many fail) is that we all have a common love of business starting them, growing them and selling them. Each of us is interested in the business process and has had the fortunate experience of running several businesses at a fairly young age because most ended up spectacular failures. We just got up and tried something different. Creating successful businesses and helping others do the same is an activity we find inspiring. To put this into perspective, there is absolutely no doubt that each one of us, whether individually or together, will own and be involved in many more businesses in the future.

When the idea to start QuantumLinx was up for discussion, it just made total sense to us. We were excited and certain about it in a way you dont get about a lot of ideas because it could not have been more in line with our interests.

Being business owners ourselves and intensely interested in business, we know how tough it can be to get new clients, especially when you need them most. We knew intimately the frustration of wasting marketing dollars and consulting dollars year after year. Why? Because we had been there and done that we knew what our customers were experiencing because wed experienced it ourselves. From our experience we knew one of the fastest ways to create more business growth and wealth was to discover powerful systems to get a steady stream of clients through the door.

The key factor was that we had a deep interest in what we eventually sold. If you have a deep interest, more than likely, quite a number of the seven or so billion people on the planet will have an interest too this is enough of a market to make you rich.

We knew that if we could develop a cost-effective marketing system that would get increasingly profitable over time for our clients, offered it in the lowest risk way, it would have to be a hit. In short, we basically created a product that we ourselves would have a deep interest to buy if we were sitting on the other side. We created a product, determined how much we would be willing to pay for it and figured out a way to deliver it for one third of that figure. In our minds, business owners would have been crazy not to take this up and it is still the way we feel now.

To top it all off, we each saw this model as a fantastic way to get an education in the growth of thousands of businesses, across hundreds of industries and get a wealth of real world exposure and experience. As an added bonus, the network of business contacts and relationships we have built up across hundreds of businesses has just been fantastic.

Again, we were focused on organising our business so that it would be both profitable and aligned to our dreams, goals and interests. The key, again, is to get involved in what you are interested in.

When we finally developed the product, it was easy to see it was going to be a winner (after all, wed buy it!). It ticked our most important boxes; not only did we come up with something highly valuable to businesses, but also we would be doing something that we all loved and enjoyed. The focus was, and continues to be, serving the interests of our clients first and focusing on profits second. It is a winning formula that has made us a success and helps us continue our rapid growth.

This leads us to probably the biggest mistake we see most start-ups make they focus on their profits first and the customer second. They sell what they want to sell, not what people want to buy at a price that people would want to buy it. What you sell has to be of interest to you but it also must give tremendous value to your customer. There is a science to converting and linking what you want to sell into what people want to buy, but most never seem to figure this out.

As expected, when we launched QuantumLinx, it was an instant hit. How much of a hit? In just over four years, we have serviced over 744 businesses directly across more than 300 industries in five countries. Where it really gets exciting is that we continue to generate tens of millions of dollars for our customers in real dollar revenue every year. This figure continues to grow with every passing year. The value we provide for our customers is not very hard to see. This is why we had so much certainty in our ability to make this a success.

Further, through partners overseas, we have indirectly (through contributed resources and advice) serviced over 2,944 businesses. We are making a real impact and helping our clients to double, triple and, in one case, increase their yearly revenue by over seven times.

Best of all, it feels damn good to deliver such great value. It may sound unbelievable but the best reward we get as partners is to hear of the significant impact we have had directly on the success of our clients businesses and how this has affected their lives personally. It just makes your day when you receive these calls or read one of these heartfelt emails. We just dont change businesses, we change peoples lives. Weve received countless success stories on how our work has increased the profits and value of our clients businesses and how that has translated into a better life for their family.

What we do is very meaningful to us.

So, if you are in the process of designing your product or service, or even just looking to improve it, wed recommend going through the same rigorous test we went through. Ask yourself whether given everything else that is available in the marketplace, you could innovate your product so that you would be your own most avid customer if it were you that was sitting on the other side of the sale. If the business youre proposing did exist and you were nothing more than a customer of the business, would you honestly recommend this to your family members, the same way you would recommend your favourite restaurant, coffee shop or movie? This is a good benchmark and test. You need to really believe in what you do. Not hope, but to really believe.

Obviously there are about a hundred other things you need to do to ensure that you have a fool proof successful business, but using this really high benchmark is a great way to start.

How did you start up QuantumLinx?

(As told by Ash Aryal)

Our story is a real Cinderella story. Keep in mind, all three of us had spectacular failures leading up to QuantumLinx, but QuantumLinx proved to just work from the moment the three partners joined forces and opened shop.

Prior to starting QuantumLinx, Anish and I were teaching tertiary level courses in finance, economics, statistics and accounting in organisations associated with some of the most prestigious universities in Australia. Up to that point, both Anish and I had some experience in business success, but a lot more experience in business failure.

Unfortunately for our employers, we were more interested in the practical side of what we were teaching. We were particularly interested in the growing influence of the internet on business. It didnt take a lot of insight to see that businesses would become so dependent on the internet that they could no longer ignore it (as many chose to as late as 2007).