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Today I want to share a very important lesson with you. I’m going to tell you a true story so that it will save you loads of time and money.

Pay close attention!

When I bought my very first domain I didn’t want to spend the yearly $10 price. I was scared. I was even more apprehensive about getting web-hosting which was an additional $8 per month.

For months I went along, working on my online projects and spending money on only the bare essentials and nothing more because I thought I was saving…but it actually cost me a lot of time and money.






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I tried to figure out shortcuts and spent hours, days and weeks coding websites myself and trying out replicas of tools and services for a fraction of the price. The result was poor quality, a huge waste of time and incredible frustration!

Having the proper tools, services and equipment can make all the difference between being Joe Average and never getting your business of the ground versus being incredibly successful.

Good tools often cost money, but not always as much as you think. Actually, I learned that the cost is pretty irrelevant as long as the tool makes a great return on investment. Even if you have to go out and spend $20 000 on tools and equipment, as long as those tools end up making you those $20 000 and more back, then it is totally worth it.

By not spending money on the proper tools and services for your business, you are withholding yourself from a lot of profit and you are wasting a lot of your precious time.

When I started this blog 2 years ago I considered the website and blog thing a hobby and nothing serious. I had no idea that I would want to do it full-time and thus was very reluctant to spend a lot of money on it.

Now that I am taking it seriously and working close to full-time on my sites and blogs, I really regret not having done things properly from the start.

What I mean is that I should have spent money on the right tools, equipment and services to be able to optimize my business, time and efforts.

I should have spent money on a proper theme, hired a designer to customize my site, bought an email auto-responder service like Aweber, purchased useful plugins like Popup Domination to increase visitor conversions, hired a virtual assistant to help me with building links etc. (These are all essential tools that I now recommend to every blogger.)

I have slowly gotten around to doing all those things (after 2 years of blogging), and together they all add up to such a substantial boost in growth and income.

Naturally my expenses are up to a couple of hundred dollars a month now, but the money is going into the business and I’m not spending it on strippers and booze.

I’m investing it into my business by making sure I have the right tools, services and equipment to ensure optimal growth.

The concept of putting money into your business before you earn it seems strange to many business owners. Many business owners like to milk their business for all of its profits without investing in proper equipment. That is a recipe for stagnant growth and slow degradation of the business for sure.

When I was working in my dad’s supermarket, we spent a small fortune on tools and equipment. We bought fridges, shelving, the best cleaning equipment, kitchen tools, bakery equipment and so on and so forth.

It took a while to make the money back that we spent on the equipment (and we didn’t get much profits in our own pocket), but during that time our business ran incredibly well as a result of the equipment we had purchased.

The best way to look at it when you spend a lot of money on tools, equipment and services to help your business grow is that you are investing the money, not spending it. The more you invest (when done smartly) the higher your return and the greater your profit will be in the future.

When you start out and you don’t have anyone with experience (i.e. a mentor) to tell you this, then it can take you a very long time for you to figure it out through trial and error. During that time it takes you to figure it out for yourself, you waste a lot of precious time and potential for enormous growth and profits.

Evertt Bogue wrote a cool article about starting and growing an online income.

Everyone has dreams of making thousands of dollars a month from the internet, but the truth is that it starts with your first sale. That can be anywhere from a dollar to a few hundred dollars, but that is how you start.

Then, once you have your first sale, you start working towards getting your next one. You keep adding and working on your things until you are making sales every single day, and eventually you make enough money to quit your day job.

The growth of your business can be much faster if you invest in the right tools, equipment, services and education.

Don’t be scared to spend money on a mentor or on coaching programs from the best people in your industry. Spend money on the right tools for the job. Hire assistants if you have to and outsource work that costs you a lot of time, time that you can rather spend on growing the business.

The only downside is that you don’t get immediate gratification. You don’t get to spend the initial money you earned on luxuries and vacations. That initial profit goes back into your business to make it grow and to (hopefully) turn it into a business that can bring you financial freedom for many years to come, possibly even for the rest of your life.

I’m not telling you how to run your business, I’m just giving you some ideas that work (from my own experience).

Would you rather spend that online income of $1000 a month on luxuries and vacations now, or would you rather invest it into your business (tools, equipment and services) and potentially grow your business into making $10 000 or $100 000 profit a month in the coming months and years? Think about it!

As an additional example I can tell you that I have a friend who started 6 months ago knowing absolutely nothing about building websites or marketing. He invested close to $10 000 in courses, mentors and training to learn how to make money online, and he is currently netting over $3k a month from his online projects already. That is how powerful having the right education, tools and services can be.

So if I were called on to a TV show and was asked to give one single piece of important advice to people who run a business, this would be it:

Take all your initial profits (except whatever minimum you need to live off) and invest it back into your business by purchasing proper tools, services and equipment to leverage and automate as much as possible. The more you automate and leverage, the more you can expand, the more you can produce and the more people you can service.