My name is Andrew Reynolds. I’m the guy that’s been writing to you once a month with the Cash On Demand course. I’d like to welcome you to Wembley and to the Bootcamp, and to what I hope is going to be the most exciting and useful and profitable three days of your life.
Before we get started, I’ve got a few things I’d like to cover. I just want to talk about mental attitude for a second, before we even think about making any money.
I want to get a few things straight. I’ve had loads and loads of emails — like 400 emails a day when we were setting this thing up. Typically there were an awful lot of what I can only describe as negative vibes coming across.
I had a guy, sent me an email and he said, “I wish I had all the advantages that you had; then I could have made some money.” In other words; “It’s okay for you to tell us about this stuff, but I haven’t got X, Y and Z. I can’t do this stuff because… I wish I’d had all the advantages you’ve had, and then I could have made some money.”
And that kind of made me a bit angry, actually. Because nothing could actually be further from the truth. When I started my business about eight years ago, I didn’t have a customer database. I didn’t have any product to sell. I didn’t have any knowledge about how to run this business. I learned the stuff. “I wish I’d had all the advantages you had. Then I could have made some money.” That’s crap.
I started off life…. my parents weren’t particularly rich. People think, when you think about the Cash On Demand Course, that I’ve made several million pounds, you assume that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. My parents didn’t have any money when they got together, and I was brought up living in a caravan. That’s how I started off life. I didn’t start off with a silver spoon. I’ve learned all this stuff, and I’ve put into action in the last eight years, and it’s made me a multi-millionaire. But I started off with very, very humble beginnings.
All through my childhood, we had no money. I went to a primary school on the local council estate. I failed just about everything; I failed my 11-plus. I went to the local secondary modern school which had a terrible reputation. I failed geography, I failed history, I failed physics, I failed chemistry. I failed everything. I managed to pass woodwork and drawing.
So I’m not some guy that’s been off to university and got some university degree or something. I failed everything. And it would be very easy for me to have sent emails to all the guys that taught me, saying, “Oh, well. It’s all right for you. But, you know. I can’t do this stuff because I’ve got all these things in the past,” you know? I came up from nothing, and that’s where I deserve to be. I deserve to be somewhere down there somewhere. You know?
When I was growing up, my parents had absolutely no money. The reason is because my dad — and this is going to sound a bit strange when we’re talking in a business seminar — but the reason was because my dad started a business of his own. And we were broke for most of my childhood. My dad started a business. For those that remember the 60s and the 50s, you’ll maybe know about paraffin. Do you remember, in the old days before central heating, we used to have paraffin heaters in the house? My dad used to deliver paraffin. And he was as proud as anything because he had his name on the side of his van. He had his own business. And he progressed.
He actually opened a hardware store in Winchester. And I remember in the Hampshire Chronicle, which is the paper in Winchester, there was a big heading, and it said, “We have arrived.” Because my dad really thought he had arrived because he had his name over the door on a shop on a business of his own. What he didn’t know, bless him, was that the business model of retail is completely screwed from the outset. So if you start off with the wrong business model, you have absolutely no chance of making any money. That’s why we went through a life of bouncing along the poverty line, because there’s no money in retail.
The business model is fundamentally flawed. I mean, if you look at the business model of running a hardware shop. I mean, he started this on a shoestring. The average hardware shop, believe it or not, stocks 16,000 items. Imagine a business where you’ve got to put 16,000 items into stock in the hope that a customer’s going to come in and want to spend a tenner on something. It’s the absolute opposite of the Cash On Demand model I’ll be teaching you…
This is all relevant. I want to show you all this stuff first so we can contrast it with the business that we’re talking about this weekend.
16,000 items! Walls and walls and walls of screws and bolts and nuts of all different shapes and sizes and brass finish and counter-sunk tops and all sorts of weird stuff. Tools of every description. And of course you can’t just have one spanner in stock; you have to buy like ten from the supplier. 16,000 different items of stock. Imagine the amount of money you’ve got tied up in that.
At nine o’clock in the morning, my dad would walk over from the house. He’d put the “Open” sign out; he’d go and sweep the step, and he’d go down and have a cup of tea. In fact, my dad always used to drink a lot of tea.. But he would sit down behind his counter first thing in the morning, with the “Open” sign out. And then he’d wait for the customers to come in.
Imagine: maybe by ten o’clock, the first customer walks in the door. He says, “I’d like to buy a packet of screws.” “Okay, what size screws would you like?” “Well, I’d like some inch-and-a-half screws, please.” “Okay, well, would you like brass ones or would you like steel ones? Would you like the counter-sunk head or…?” So you go through this whole buying process, trying to take ten quid off somebody. You get the ten quid, the guy leaves the shop, you sit down and you wait for the next customer to come in.
He had to sit there six days a week, waiting for his customers to decide to come in and purchase from him. Which is the absolute opposite of what we’re going to teach you over the next three days. His customers ran his life. His customers told him when he could get some money. This weekend I’m going to show you a totally different business model.
Why — why would you want to open a business where you’re going to go and sit behind your counter for… I mean, dad spent 25 years in his shop; sat behind his counter, looking out the same window, waiting for customers to come in — why would you want to do that? I mean, subject to any different religious beliefs in the room, you only get the one life. Why would you want to spend 25 years of it stuck behind a counter, looking out the one pane of glass to see if a customer’s passing by? When the business that we’re talking about this weekend – the Cash On Demand business – you can literally run from anywhere. My business consists of one laptop computer, and I take it wherever I’m going in the world.