About Us
We’ve been teachers all our adult lives. Ruth taught elementary school and worked with special needs children. Richard taught high school history and psychology for 15 years before starting Cape Ann Academy, a small private school for middle school students. The Academy was a lot of fun but it used up all our savings including any retirement money.
When the school closed, Richard got a job in the semiconductor industry as a training manager, thanks to a friend who was Director of Customer Service. During these eight years, Richard learned a lot about training; surprisingly, “teaching” and “training” are different, even they both require similar skills. After a “lay-off” in 1992, Richard leveraged his education and training background by starting a consulting business that focused on helping other high tech companies improve their training.
We turned to home businesses. Ruth began distributing nutrition products for a network marketing company using traditional “tell all your friends and family” methods, with moderate success. While it took Richard a while to hop on the wellness wagon, he began to help Ruth after her first few years. To this day, we both remain passionate about the quality and value of those products. But, as so often happens with network marketing, when you “run out” of friends and family, and some customers stop buying, what then? We found that “traditional network marketing” was not working for us.
Meanwhile, Richard continued to develop his training and performance consulting business, conducting “train-the-trainer” workshops around the world for semiconductor equipment suppliers. The upside was the chance for us to travel together across America and around Europe and other great places. The downside was the cyclical nature of the semiconductor equipment business. The down cycles seriously impacted Richard’s business after 2001. So, as we began our sixth decade of life, our two main home-based businesses were fading, in trouble, and running up debt.
During that time, we looked for business solutions. We read a book called The 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing by Ann Seig and her followup book, The Renegade Network Marketer. The information rang true for us but the practical implementation was not so clear, and we set it aside.
Then the recession, which began (officially) in 2007, hit with fury in the summer of 2008, cutting our IRA retirement money in half, and further diminishing Richard’s training business. Fortunately, in late 2008, we discovered some training resources that clarified a lot that Ann Sieg had written about, providing the practical side to both internet marketing and network marketing online.
A Niche! As we applied the information we were learning, we became absolutely amazed at the power of working with others. As we studied what the gurus were doing, we realized that every successful online marketer has collaborated with other marketers again and again. We began to create videos and write articles about this phenomenon, and they were well received. So we have dug deeper and experimented more. And here is the reality:
Once the essentials are in place, collaboration can help accelerate your internet marketing success.
Our business is to help accelerate the growth of your business by ensuring you have the essentials and that you are leveraging the “collaboration advantage” whenever possible. More? -
- Visit Our Home Business Information Center. (See the orange links –menu– at upper right.)
- Subscribe to Our Home Business Collaboration and Growth Tips Newsletter, and receive several bonus helps.
- Coaching and Consulting. Learn More.
- Telephone, Skype, and Email address: Look at the top left of this page under our photograph!
- Send us a message right now.
Why accelerate the growth of your business? Because business is only the means to a greater end. So let’s get to it! Like enjoying our families- Our three adult daughters have given us seven wonderful grandchildren. However, two of the families live in western Canada, quite far from our home just north of Boston! Traveling to see them is on our minds a lot! The third family lives close at hand, providing us with many local adventures.
Ruth and Richard on Trip to Utah
We both like traveling. But Ruth is especially good at researching the details of a trip, finding the bargains, the special places to see, and the background information. She’s a great tour guide! Favorite destinations include, among others, Yellowstone National Park, Utah canyons and arches, Yosemite, Venice, many treasured spots in the Alps, the English “Lake District,” the White Mountains, and more …
We both enjoy trains for reasons of convenience, scenery, and nostalgia. Since trains are largely inconvenient in the US (thanks to poor US policy decisions) we settle for nostalgia here and convenience in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere.
Ruth is a fan of puzzles. We both like a good table or card game. Richard is a fan of mystery books.
This is the beauty of being an entrepreneur. You get to choose your own path.
Wishing you the best,
I’m Richard, for both us.
