From The Seedy Underworld of Drugs and Prostitution To Entrepreneurial Success: David Sharpe’s Journey with Empower Network (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to get into a granular line of questioning so that we can extract the real story here. When you decided that you wanted to start a company, what did you do first? I imagine you incorporated, but was there any savings? How did you put this business together?

David Sharpe: We started with very little startup funds. We basically had an idea about the company and we put our heads down and went to work. Yes, we incorporated and set up bank accounts and so on and so forth. For the first 90 days since the inception of the idea until the date that we launched that company, we were on phone calls. My business partner for this company lived in Costa Rica. We actually lived in different countries.

Sramana Mitra: Who is your business partner and how did you meet him?

David Sharpe: His name is David Wood and we were in the same industry together. He was somebody who was producing a lot of sales and results. He had been in the industry for a little bit longer than I had been. I came into the industry and started producing as well. We just noticed each other and got on the phone, made a connection, and started a conversation.

During the first 90 days of starting the company, we didn’t get in our own heads trying to think our way into building a company. We just took action. A little bit of that came back to bite us in the butt a couple of years later, because we didn’t prepare as much. If I was to start a company all over again, I would definitely do some things differently. I would prepare more as far as compliance, accounting and legal aspects of the business is concerned

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to focus on how you put one foot before the other in graphic detail. For 90 days, you did what?

David Sharpe: For 90 days, we just created sales materials and created the marketing.

Sramana Mitra: Were they videos?

David Sharpe: They were videos. We deliver all of our content through online membership. All of our sales videos and sales are mainly done on the Internet. We sat down and crafted all of that training and sales materials.

Sramana Mitra: So you had a bunch of sales videos that you created for 90 days, and then you launched this website with these videos. Then you and your co-founder, who was based in Costa Rica whom you knew from the industry, put this material together and launched the website. Correct?

David Sharpe: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: So what happened after 90 days? What did you do at launch?

David Sharpe: At launch, we got about 50 people in a hotel suite. We couldn’t even afford to rent out an event center. We explained the idea of what we were doing to every single person in the room. There’s something special when you launch a company and get people together in a room.

Sramana Mitra: Who are these 40-50 people you’ve got in the room and how did you get them?

David Sharpe: These were our most loyal followers. We had people through our previous marketing efforts who knew about us and what we had done. We were able to get 40-50 people together. These were people who we had previously marketed to and sold products to. We do conference calls leading up to this particular event and said, “You guys need to come down and meet us at Orlando, because we’re going to be revealing and launching an idea, a concept, and a company that we have been working on for the last couple of months.”

This segment is part 3 in the series : From The Seedy Underworld of Drugs and Prostitution To Entrepreneurial Success: David Sharpe's Journey with Empower Network
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