Working with a lot of people in a lot of different industries, a few years ago my focus was shifted towards the music business while working with Ryan Leslie on a project of his.

In doing so, talking to him and looking at what he’s doing I came to realise that being independent in business takes longer… But results in owning more of your sh*t.

What I mean? 

Owning something could make the difference when your business is on the line. Let’s create a theory here: you start a website, buy a domain and order hosting from a hosting company like GoDaddy. You pay them to deliver a product and you become their customer and you’ll be depending on their services. They own the server, they are the registrar (fancy word for domain registration company ;)).

You run your business as normal, but one month you’re short in money to pay your hosting bill. 

Wouldn’t it be better at that moment to have your own your servers and be your own registrar rather then using another company’s resources?

It would wouldn’t it?

Am I saying that everyone should go out, start their own hosting company and thus “owning” more of their business? No.

This works for me and Sharon, and let me remind you: everything works. Not everything works for YOU.

We’re in the service business. We create tools and softwares that we need to run our own business from our little home near The Hague. No fancy cars, no fancy clothes, no extra rooms. About 75% of our home is dedicated to our business like full-size desks with 27’ iMacs, seating area to receive guests, a (very small) kitchen where we cook and a tiny bedroom that barely fits the bed we sleep in.

It’s all we need. Can we get a bigger house? Sure. But we don’t want to just yet, it’s sowing season ;).

Point of my post is, that in the end it’s better to have as much control as possible and if you want control, you’ll have to literally own the process. You’ll succeed where others fail and will make more money along the way…

The value of this post: How can you do what we do?

Another theory: you’re looking into sending bulk emails but have no clue who’s good, what works and what doesn’t and you don’t want to find out either: you’d rather manage it yourself.

Here’s what we did: we started our own email system. Our own opt in forms. Our own lists on our own servers. Our own autoresponder system that does EXACTLY what WE want it to do for our business. We spent hours and hours setting everything up, getting it ready to rumble and making sure we’d achieve the best results possible for our email marketing.

While working on other projects, we figured out customers needed the same software we needed… So we sold it to them for a monthly fee months ago… AND THEY ARE STILL PAYING EACH MONTH TO RECEIVE OUR EMAIL SERVICE.

So trust us when we say: It’s worth it owning your sh*t.