Al Gore discovered me when he invented the Internet

The Home Business (SOHO) revolution:

I actually got my start in SOHO in the 80s. I have been self employed my entire adult life. In the 80s I started an ad agency at the same time the PC / Silicon Valley phenomena began. You can say I cut my teeth during that error on technology.

That company grew to over 30 employees and up to $2 million a month in revenue. It was quite the experience. I had built myself a job, with all the issues, employees, regulations, taxes, lawyers, accountants, etc. I was rarely home or had much time for myself.

Near the end of the 80s, after a long and damaging intellectual property lawsuit (employees stealing my technology), embezzlement (office manager siphoned off millions during the suit), and shortly after the BIG 1989 earthquake the economy started to decline. In 1991 I shut the company down or actually I fired everyone, keep the top 20% of the best clients, set up my loft to work at home. Many of my associates and especially my father in law thought I had lost my mind. The timing could not have been better. This was at the same time the Internet was a promising technology, computers, phone systems, fax machines, etc. had become very cheap to own. It was the beginning of the Small Office Home Office revolution and I was firmly right there at the onslaught.

That move immediately freed me up, increased my bottom line with less headaches and greater service to my remaining clients. It also gave my wife and I the time to start a family. Looking back the greatest gift was, I was able to raise my children on a daily basis and they have prospered from having parents so closely linked to them.

Having your business based from home is not always easy. You need to define work time from family time. Other members of the household need to respect your time and space. If you don't draw the line, especially with kids, your distraction level can quite easily "put you out of business". So first and foremost the family and you need a set of rules and boundaries. I remember reading somewhere during that time Stephen King making a comment about his work and having strict rules to "DO NOT DISTURB" while he worked. I adopted those rules. But I also made time to be engaged with my family morning, noon and night. Working from home allowed us to educate our children with a distant learning school, kind of a halfway brick and mortar school and home schooling. It worked out gloriously.

Another basic in working from home is having good plans, daily routines and an egg timer. It is too easy to get stuck doing something you like, you know the thinking and creativity part, but accounting, filing and other management things must be done as well. I know, after 20 some years at this I am still guilty of this violation. The egg timers helps to move me into taking care of 'business', in a word.

We moved from the San Francisco Bay Area in November 1992 in search of a better quality of life to the Puget Sound area in Washington State. At that time I also shut the ad agency down and only kept a few clients on a consultant basis. I was burned out from the intellectual lawsuit that had gone of for years. Advertising industry if fraught with litigation and I had had enough. It was time for something more creative.

Another issue you must deal with being working from home is having good professional services, accounting and legal and running your business as a corporation. All my corporations are now in Wyoming as am I. I choose Wyoming for no other reason then it is the most business friendly state in the USA.

So from Washington State I opened a design and print business, a business from home with my wife as a partner as we had with the ad agency. It did OK. NOTE: It is not always a good idea to involve your spouse in a business partnership. It caused a lot of anguish as the two of use had totally different opinions on running a business.

Another rule: Build your business with a corporation and unless circumstances are ideal, avoid involving your spouse or other family members. You will save a lot of heart ache and tribulation doing so.

By following this rule, my wife opened her own business and that made the relationship a bit more conducive. Unfortunately we eventually got divorced. Having both businesses clearly separated from each other made the separation a lot easier. Just saying, you don't enter a marriage planning on it failing, but business is business and kept it separate from other family members.

Moving to the small town environment in 1992 from the big city of San Francisco made me focus on doing business in a new way. I no longer had many services and goods at my fingertips. The Internet had been around for a few years already (email, news groups and AOL), but it was at this time the WWW came along available to the general public. My first browser was Mosaic back when HTML was version 1.0.

It was at this time I discovered MLM from a spam I received from Stamford Wallace via my AOL account promoting a real Internet access service called Powernet. I had no idea what MLM was but I was intrigued that this service gave me access to the Internet. The real Internet, not a cockamamie rendition of a bulletin board icon based service with pathetic Internet browsing that AOL was at $2.95 per hour.

After signing up into the program I immediately used the service to get real Internet access. I immediately began learning about HTML, GIF graphics and CGI scripting. I set about using my knowledge to promote the business via direct US mail, display advertising, cable TV advertising, etc. I set a plan into motion and built a huge business within months. I soon discovered the horrid reality of MLM and that is many of these companies have no intention of staying in business but instead are after the scammy goal of making a ton of money then shutting down.

Another rule was developed: Do very deep research into the company. Do not let your greed lead your nose. No matter how sexy or how powerful the fear of loss, look at the company completely sober. Red Flags: Is the company a new startup? Yes? Bad!; Is the domain registration made private so you can not discover who really owns the domain? Yes? Bad!; Is the company all of a sudden experiencing massive growth within a few weeks or months (Use Alexa for this these days)? Yes? Bad!; Are the owners of the company legitimate? Search Google for their backgrounds. Do they have a lot of complaints about them, are they mentioned in a lot of complaint sites? Do they have criminal or legal issues? Yes? Bad!; Are their products over priced for the general market? Yes? Bad!; Is the ratio of customers to distributors percentage shows way more distributors than customers? Yes? Bad!

It was around this time that I decided to build an Internet marketing service to help me and my friends maintain a presence on the Internet, a social sphere of influence, developing leads, SEO, training etc. to help in this MLM marketing. That company has been around now for over 15 years. That company has allowed me to apply my marketing knowledge to a virtual system and build other legitimate MLM companies into long term profit centers.

Lesson: Being self employed and working from home, you must be able to trim your sails and shift direction as the markets change. Being a small company gives you this freedom to act quickly and be nimble.

Being self-employed and working from home is an adventure. Frightening and downright terrifying at times, but for the most part, I thoroughly enjoy the business and wake up everyday excited to get at it.

My children are now grown and I am getting on in my years. I have been actively working and developing on the Internet longer than almost everyone and there are people now working the Internet that were not even born when I started this.

I think the last time I figured out the amount of actual hours I have put into this quest it was something over 50,000 hours. Imagine that!

Today I work from my ranch in Wyoming. Who knows maybe next year I will be working from a sailboat in the South Pacific or my own Villa on an island in the Adriatic sea.

There is no way I could have had this incredible life and the promise of an incredible future still to come if I had settled for a job.

Today I focus on and help others to achieve financial and social freedom on a daily basis from my company Veretekk. Veretekk is my family and I have 1000s of friends in every country in the world with thousands of stories of success surrounding my little company.

It's my calling. What is yours? You can find me at http://veretekk.com.

Thomas Prendergast
CEO
Veretekk.com, Inc.