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How I’m Writing a Book on Business Philosophies to Further Enhance the FreeeUp Brand

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Have you ever wanted to write and publish a book? You know, be an author that thousands read and gain knowledge from? This has always been a dream of mine and for the greater part of my life, I have always believed that it would come true in one way or another. With 10 years of being an entrepreneur in the bank, my business partner, Nathan Hirsch, and I have decided to put together our ideas and write a book on business philosophies that can further enhance the FreeeUp brand that we have meticulously been building over the past 18 months or so.

To give you a little bit more of a background, I have been writing creatively for the past 10 years as well, but it was only in the Fall of 2015 that I started to publish my works to the public through this site (ConnorGillivan.com). Since doing that, I have received great feedback from readers and online publications giving me the opportunity to contribute to big sites like WebRetailer.com, The Huffington Post, and Influencive.com.

With the expansion of my reputation and published pieces online, it has allowed me to build a number of great relationships and establish myself as a legitimate writer for the business world. This has very much been the plan all along and it has been an amazing journey to reach the point where I am now confident enough to be working on my first book that I will be self-publishing and starting to sell by the end of March of 2017.

The Premise of the Book on Business Philosophies

As I said above, this book will be a combination of the business philosophies that my business partner, Nathan Hirsch, and I hold near and dear to our entrepreneurial hearts. We first met while attending Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut and built our first eCommerce business selling thousands of products like iphone case, fashion dress, bags  on Amazon to over $20 million in sales in little over 3 years. Soon after seeing an opportunity to help other eCommerce business owners capitalize on the use of remote workforces, we started FreeeUp.com together and have successfully built it into an online hiring platform servicing over 1,000 online business owners around the world.

Through the 7 years that we have worked together, we have developed an unbreakable relationship built upon core business philosophies that we both strongly believe in, preach to our team, and use to make decisions within our businesses. Being on the same page in terms of core business beliefs is tantamount to co-founders and business partners being able to work together over the long run and it is something that makes Nate and I stand out as we are tackling new business ventures.

I always had a feeling that we would collaborate on a book one day together, but it happened a lot sooner than expected when Nate came to me with the idea in mid 2016. He mentioned that he had been spending time thinking about the core business philosophies that were driving our decisions and that he wanted me to take the ideas combined with my own and turn it into a book that we could start selling to our FreeeUp community as well as others online looking for books about running online businesses.

There was no convincing necessary. I was 100% in and knew that it would be a breakthrough for not only my writing career, but also for the quality content that would be associated with the FreeeUp brand. As a main focus of my role with FreeeUp, building and maintaining the FreeeUp brand image had become a HUGE focus. I wanted us to be consistent. I wanted us to be perceived as experts in the industry. And most importantly, I wanted us to be a brand where business owners felt comfortable approaching for help with online hiring. Outside of having an amazing and hands-on customer service system, our value-adding content would be the avenue to reaching that goal as a company brand.

As we embark on this monumental journey for the FreeeUp brand, I wanted to provide you with a sneak peak to 5 of the topics that I’ll be covering within the book when it is published in March of 2017. The entire book will be structured around a similar fashion: (1) Define the business philosophy and offer advice to the reader (2) Provide a personal anecdote from our entrepreneurial journey that puts the philosophy into perspective for the reader.

A Sneak Peak into Our New Book on Business Philosophies

Topic 1: Minimize risk when starting a business

In this section of the book, I’ll write about our business philosophies surrounding how to start up a new business. There are two core options that I’ll cover (bootstrapping vs investors) and I’ll explain how Nate and I have stuck to minimizing risk through bootstrapping since we’ve started being entrepreneurs.

To give you an idea of how we’ve practiced the philosophy of minimizing risk, I’ll walk you through the story of how we started our first two businesses, Portlight and FreeeUp.

Topic 2: Be open to change when growing a business

You’ll learn about how we are always open to change as we initially start businesses and attempt to grow them into what we initially envision. The biggest aspect of this philosophy is keeping your eyes open for different routes and opportunities that can take you to where you want to be. Many entrepreneurs get stuck up on one particular route to their end goal. We have experienced the downfalls of that strategy and now are always open to new ways to work through our strategic plans.

Topic 3: Value your time

Every business owner and entrepreneur must value their own time and they must do it every day that they wake up to tackle their next business problem. As the owner of the business, we argue that your time should be spent solely on leading and working on new expansion projects for the company. You should not be handling repetitive tasks or trying to specialize in an area that is not your strength. The best business owners value their time and find others who can help them achieve their business goals. We are strong proponents of hiring experts who can surround your role as the growth leader of the company.

Topic 4: Trial and error approach

For the most part, the first business idea that you have will not be the one that turns your company into a million dollar business. You have to test ideas, iterate, push forward with the best, and shut down the ones that are not working. This is a mindset that we practice with every day that we wake up and tackle the new issues that have landed on our desk. In line with the popular Lean Startup methodology, we are always coming up with new ideas, building MVPs, testing them in the market, taking customer feedback, and iterating. You must be able to do that as a business owner to really innovate and see your company surpass competition.

Topic 5: Don’t make anyone on your team irreplaceable

Why wouldn’t you want someone that is irreplaceable? It creates too much dependency on one person. The best businesses have an amazing team of A players, but if one decided to leave, they could easily be replaced so that the business does not take any steps backwards. When we hire new team members (which we do often), we always make sure that proper training guides are built into the role and that we understand what the individual is doing so that they never become irreplaceable. Make someone irreplaceable and your leverage as the business owner drastically goes down.

Get Involved

With the publication of this new book only a couple of months away, I ask that you share this article with your social media communities to further spread the word.

Keep an eye out for more updates on the release of our new book as we get closer to the end of March 2017. Thanks for your support as always.

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About Connor Gillivan

In the past 10 years, I’ve started 7 businesses & built two to $10M+ in annual revenue, teams of 30+ & an exit in 2019. Today, I run SEO & growth for my 4 B2B companies while teaching millions how to make SEO simple.

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