Greg Swann’s second request: I need a partner.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What? No one is going to send me to the NAR convention? Their loss — and the losses are but beginning.

Meanwhile, I need a partner. I’ve been thinking about this for months, but I don’t know that it’s something I can actually do anything about.

Here’s where I am, at this stage of my life:

I am swarming with ideas that can make boatloads of money.

And:

I am broke — not all the time, but frequently.

Being broke is temporary. The cure for that is just hard work and a little luck.

But the ideas are driving me insane, because I can see how much better things can be done, but I’m not able to accomplish even ten percent of what I can envision.

I need people behind me. And for that I need money behind me. And for that I need a partner, someone who can bring or attract investment capital — and manage it.

This is some of what I have going:

Ascende.me is as sexy as four-day weekend in Vegas, and there’s a lot more real-estate-porn power still to come. I’m building versions of Ascende for Realtors around the country, but I can see ways to turn it into a cash-and-carry money machine.

As Sean Purcell pointed out yesterday, the BloodhoundRealty.com real estate listing praxis is a fearsome competitor. Phoenix is not a great listing market right now — but Phoenix is not the only city on earth.

We’re also building a property management business, which is poised to explode. My rental homes lease fast and stay leased, yielding maximum profits for our landlords. I personally sell a lot of rental properties, which we then manage, and I am ready to start recruiting landlords who already own their rentals. As icing on that cake, I have killer ideas for taking a VOW feed and using it to build a virtual Point-of-Purchase for out-of-state investors.

Away from real estate, SplendorQuest.com is a forest in its seed stage. There is a big marketing business in there — conferences, books, magazines, web sites, etc. It’s a content play, so there is no limit to the profit centers it can throw off.

My Get rich fighting crime post posits hundreds of new businesses, some of them huge businesses, but, in the comments, you can see Brian Brady and me talking about “Heidi,” a hugely efficient new CRM idea that can be built with existing technology.

There is a new video compression algorithm discussed in that post, too, and I can’t think about anything in depth without throwing of tons of product ideas. Here’s one, building annotatable eBooks, but I can go that one better: The technology I’m talking about should be built in at the browser level, so every web page can be annotated by anyone running that browser (or browser plug-in).

Behind everything, I have an enormous amount of web power. I have over 300,000 web pages now, and I’m on pace to hit a million within a couple of years. Each one of those pages searches well, and they’re all interlinked, all pushing each other up in the SERPs. Do any search related to anything I do and see where I stand — and then reflect that I did all of that with just my own efforts.

I can write, I can speak, I can sell, I can come up with innovative business models and I can produce huge quantities of work.

Here’s what I can’t do, not to my own satisfaction: Manage systems and account for funds. I can do both of those proficiently, I suppose, but it’s work I take no joy in, and I know that I am holding myself back by not working with someone who is excellent at the back-office part of running businesses.

In the DISC system, I’m a very high ‘D’ with enough ‘I’ to put on a killer presentation. What I need is a high ‘C’ with enough ‘S’ to keep staffers happy and productive. If you bring money, I love you even better, but if you’re the kind of executive who can build the kind of documentation VCs like, I can get us money.

I’m happy enough to focus on one thing at a time, but I want to build all of these businesses, and then some. What I would really like, in the long run, is to build a start-up incubator, a company that partners with brilliant people to build seed-stage companies, then runs them through the venture capital gauntlet, all the way to IPOs, if possible.

Seven figures? Eight figures? Nine figures? We live in a world where numbers like that are possible. If you’ve got the roots, I’ve got the leaves. Between us, we can build the trunk and branches. One tree at a time, we can build a forest of business opportunities.

Email me. I love what I’m doing now, and I know I can do well enough to live the way I want to live. But I also know I can do a lot more, and I’m looking to forge a relationship that will make me and you and a lot of people very rich in the coming years.