Anthony Morrison started his first business in 2005 when he was just 21 years old to help save his family from financial disaster. His career has taken off like wildfire since then. He has started 10 successful companies and has authored two books: The Hidden Millionaire: 12 Principles for Uncovering the Entrepreneur in You, and Advertising Profits From Home: Simple Money-Making Strategies You Can Use Right From Your Home. Today, the jet-setting Anthony Morrison takes some time off to sit with us and share some of the secrets of his success.
TAMMY LAWMAN: Can you take us through the process of what you went through a little bit and tell us about the first business you started online?
ANTHONY MORRISON: The main thing I did was I just used a commonsense approach. One of the things I've always taught people is to go back to what you know and what you're good at. There's always an opportunity around pretty much anything to make money, but it's much easier for you to build a profitable business around something you know, like, and are constantly involved with than it is to look and say, "What things make people the most money?" and then go chasing the money.
If you do that, you're going into industries, markets, and businesses that you don't understand. You're going into things you have no knowledge about. That's going to make it very hard for you to be profitable. For me, I looked at, "What are my hobbies? What are things that I understand? What are things that I do?" One of the things that I had done since I was 15 years old was I had a Ford Mustang, and I modified it.
I was always buying parts, accessories, and things for my Ford Mustang. I thought, "If I buy parts, accessories, and all this stuff for my car, so do a lot of other people." This was an industry that I knew really well because I was the customer calling up all these companies and buying all these parts for years. I decided to start a business selling those parts online because I knew where the customer base was, because I was the customer base for five years.
It was pretty easy to start up because I had plenty of knowledge. I knew tons of stuff about this. I knew the different parts, manufacturers, and things that sold the best. What's great about the Internet is that when I called these companies to get set up as a distributor of their parts, they had no clue how old I was. If I had walked into their store and said, "I want to sell your parts. Let me set up as a distributor," at 20 years old, they probably would have laughed at me.
Because it was done through email and over the phone, and I was selling online, they didn't have a clue that I was a 20-year-old kid, so they took me just as seriously as they would have taken anyone else who came to the door. It allowed me the opportunity to start selling the parts. Since I was the customer, I knew who all the customers were, and it gave me an inside track into how to sell the parts, where to market the parts, and how to build the business.
I took a business where you're literally just selling Mustang parts-one specific car in one specific niche-and in my first month doing it, I think I made $3,000 or $4,000, and I had really no clue what I was doing in business. I just kind of knew what to sell and where to sell it. As I kept going with this and realized that it was a viable business, what I did was I used my experience from being a customer to figure out how to make that business grow at a faster rate and how to make it compete with all the people who have been in the industry for so long.
What I realized was that most people get off work at 5:00 every day. There are different time zones, so different people are getting off work at different time intervals throughout the day. When you're selling Mustang parts, normally it's an impulse buy. If somebody wants to spend $2,000 on a set of wheels, you want them to be able to buy the wheels when they want to buy them, not when you're open.
A lot of these companies that sold these parts closed down at 5:00 or 6:00. You have people on the east coast who were closing at 5:00, and that's the middle of the day on the west coast. The person who plans on ordering the parts for their car when they get off work, if they pick up the phone and dial the number, they get a voicemail. They get it day after day because they're at work when you're closing.
What I did was I had a marketing strategy that would allow me to grab customers and keep them. I opened up a 24 hour a day, seven days a week order line because I knew that while people could order online, they were not necessarily comfortable ordering online unless they could get somebody on the phone. I opened up a 24-hour line, and my business exploded.
We went from $3,000 or $4,000 a month up to $250,000 to $300,000 a month in sales almost overnight. It was because I was catering to the customer instead of trying to make the customer cater to me. I think that's something that was really important and one of the big reasons why I had so much success with it.
TAMMY LAWMAN: You bring up a lot of really good points there. First of all, you talked about how you use what you know and go back to things that you enjoy doing because that not only gives you a vested interest in this business from the perspective that you want to make money, but it gives you a vested interest because it's something you enjoy doing.
Then you were talking about how to really reach your prospects. It sounds like a lot of your success stems from the fact that because you had been a customer, you were putting yourself in your customer's shoes and saying, "How can I service this person better? How can I make my products more available to them?" Those are really smart things to do.
ANTHONY MORRISON: As a business owner, the thing that's so important, and I think so many people miss this, is that you set your own parameters. You set your time of business, price points, and marketing strategies. You set all your stuff. Most of the time, you set that based around you, when you want to work, how much profit you want to make on a product, and where you want to market it. That's completely the wrong way to do it.
You should be setting it around your customer, when they want to order it, how much they want to pay for it, and where they want to find it because in reality, if you don't have the customers, you have no business. You have to cater your business to your customer. That's what I did. I didn't want to answer the phone at 2:30 in the morning, but I did. I picked up the phone at 2:30 in the morning, and I picked up a customer in Australia who ended up being one of my biggest clients.
He's ordered thousands of dollars of parts from me every single month from Australia. That's simply because he saw me and thought, "I can call this company any time." When they're waking up, everybody else is asleep here. It basically allowed me to establish a relationship. One of the things that's really important in retail is being able to establish a good relationship with the customer.
If they see that you're willing to help them and answer the phone at 2:30 in the morning when no one else will, they'll be willing to come back. They're going to be willing to keep their business with you and refer other people to you. To do the volume I was doing, my marketing expense for an entire month was $75 on average. Eventually, I branched out, and I tried ads in magazines. That cost me $3,000 a month, and I never made any money from it.
It was more or less me being able to see an ad for my company in a magazine that I'd been reading for 10 years, which was cool. Other than that, I stopped after three months. It was pointless. I was spending $75 a month, I was reaching the customers I wanted to reach, and they were sending me tons and tons of business, because I'd put in the extra effort to be able to cater to them instead of making them try to run out on their lunch break and call me to order a part.
They had the confidence and the ability to realize, "I can call him whenever and get this stuff." It made a lot of sense to me, and it helped me build my business. You can always do that to build your business from the ground up. Once you get to where you want to be, you have a couple of options. You could hire somebody to answer the phone for you because now your business has exploded, and you can afford it.
You could cut back on some of that. Once you've built the business and the customer base, the people are going to continue to come back. It was something that allowed me to build my business and compete with the really big businesses and the people who had been in business for 15 years. I was now able to compete with them after being in business for four months.
TAMMY LAWMAN: You did that just by adjusting and doing some things that you didn't necessarily want to do but you knew would be beneficial for your customers. That's awesome.
ANTHONY MORRISON: Business isn't always easy, right? It's not like you only do what you want to do. You do what you need to do and what you have to do. That's the difference between being a business owner and being an employee. Employees do what they want to do and what they need to do. They do what you tell them to do. As a business owner, you have options.
You can do what you want to do, or you can do what you need to do to make your business successful. A lot of times, being successful means doing something that maybe you don't really want to do, but you need to. As long as you recognize that going into it, then it allows you the opportunity to grow and succeed at a much faster pace.
TAMMY LAWMAN: You talk about having a $75 a month budget. Where did you spend most of your time? What kind of marketing did you put your efforts into?
ANTHONY MORRISON: What I did for my advertising was I wanted to limit my exposure and risk. I didn't want to advertise in places that I knew people who didn't have Mustangs were going to be because then I knew I was going to be wasting my money. I was going to be spending a lot of money to reach people who really had no clue what I was selling. I turned back to what I knew because I was a customer of this industry.
I was involved in this industry, and I liked it. What I did was I went to the message boards online where people were chatting all the time about certain things. They were ones that were specific to Mustangs. There were three specific message boards, and each
of them had over 100,000 members. When I looked at that, I thought, "There are 300,000 people here that I can market to." The message boards charged about $30 to $40 a month to be able to post advertisements.
I didn't buy the standard little banner ad that you see people run. What I did was I actually got on the message boards, and I communicated with the people on the message boards. I would make a post that said, "We have the chrome wheels for $995." Then when people would make posts back and communicate with me, I would talk to them right there on the message board.
I built up a reputation on all three of those message boards as being the best place to buy these parts, having the best prices, and certainly having the best hours and support because they could reach me at any time. That spread. It literally cost me $75 a month. The only people I was advertising to were people who were Mustang fanatics. Rather than doing a lot of this advertising that you see a lot of people do, I focused it on my niche in my industry.
I made sure that the only people who saw my ad were the people who wanted to see my ad. It cost me $75. I was able to build up a huge business that did millions of dollars a year in revenue based on a $75 a month advertising budget.
TAMMY LAWMAN: It sounds like you were doing a lot of what's involved with social media marketing today. You were going directly to your consumer or end-user and establishing a relationship with them.
ANTHONY MORRISON: Right. Obviously, when I started this, Facebook was around, but it wasn't what it is now. It wasn't used as a marketing tool, and they didn't even have advertising platforms built in. It was just a place to communicate with people with like interests. It still is. Mustang message boards or message boards in general are like mini-Facebooks for people in certain niches. Now we can utilize Facebook to do the same thing.
As long as you're reaching out to your customers and communicating, establishing a relationship, and building up your image, name, and brand in your customer's mind, you're going to continue to keep that customer. That's what's really important. It's really important for people to realize that I've put in time. I was on the phone at 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning. I was on the message boards every second that I had, and I was building my brand, name, and business.
All of that obviously paid off very well. For me as a business owner, I had a decision to make. Do I want to spend a little bit of time, make this business a hobby to make some extra money, or do I want to put in a lot of time, effort, and energy and make this business a real business and not just a hobby? I opted to make it a real business because there was a necessity for the income and money it could generate.
That business was very successful, and it allowed me at 20 years old to be able to support a family of five people. I put three people through college, paid for my parents' house, and really completely took care of an entire family. I did that on a business that I started based on a hobby and spent $75 a month promoting.
Want even more tips and tricks? This article was just a small portion of an hour-long interview. And this interview was just ONE of 24 top interviews conducted by Ric Thompson for Internet Marketing TNT. If you'd like to get your hands on ALL 24 interviews, simply click here and check outInternet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.
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