I have been donning the role of a consultant and an advisor in the recent past and my advice is for people who are starting a business. My coaching has really been instrumental for those who had experienced big losses in their businesses. The reason that I am able to differentiate the right path to success from the tougher path is attributed to my experience in the field. It is definitely true that failures are the stepping-stones to success and it goes the same in my life too. There are a number of occasions where I have suffered heavy losses in my businesses but I have been able to cope up with them. The recent one came up about a couple of years ago and that was terrible, costing me more that six million dollars. It has certainly been a learning experience for me, more than the loss it created. As I have experienced these failures and worked through them to become successful I am now able to offer my advice to other people who are starting a business.

Dan Cavalli asks: what qualifies me as the expert, and why should you listen to what I have to say?

What makes me different from most other business marketers? There are hundreds of people out there claiming to know all the answers. There are few who can back up their claims. This is my story:

I was in the same boat as you are now. I tried every product and idea I could get my hands on, but I couldn’t make it. Everything I tried was either too hard to follow or too expensive.

The worst part was that I was gullible, because I believed everything I read about getting ahead. I have spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours staring blankly at the computer wondering how long before my business took off. As the days went on, I became even more frustrated. I was losing heart.

As it turned out, this was the situation I found myself in. I was missing the most important skill any business (especially online) must develop which is how to attract, sell to, and keep prospects.

Who did I want to learn from? I wanted to learn from someone who had already done what I wanted to do. I wanted someone who started from nothing and went on to become extremely successful in his particular field. I wanted someone who could teach me how to achieve his results, and I wanted someone who could condense everything he knew into easy to follow steps. These are the masters of marketing. They are the ones to notice, but they are hard to identify.

When I overcame these problems, my whole world instantly changed for the better. My desire to succeed in my own automatic moneymaking business grew, and before long, I was on my way. Over the next few years, I drafted all of these skills into easy-to-understand systems. Eventually I found the courage to stop working for others. I decided to start my own business to see what I could do with my experience and knowledge. I put my system and knowledge to the test.

The rest is history. I started a business from scratch, and within eighteen months, I had built an organization with a turnover of $140 million. A colleague said to me one day, “Anyone with a little luck and know-how can do that if everything falls into their lap.”

I started wondering whether what I had done was a fluke. Was success really achieved by applying my principles and techniques? So I sold that business and started another one. This second business also turned over in excess of $10 million in a short time.

I started my career in the telecommunications industry in November 1994. I have always dreamed big. But I never could have imagined that in less than two years my business venture would turn over millions of dollars a year, employ hundreds of people, and become publicly listed on the Australian Stock Exchange three years later.

How could I have guessed that I would have such an impact on people’s lives and the Australian telecommunications industry in general?