eBusiness Institute

Kath and Rob Rushford speak at eBusiness Institute digital marketing conference

Champions Graduates now making $7,000 A WEEK!

Plus a potential BIG Multi-million dollar website

When it comes to business, Rob and Kathie like to play big! They know exactly what they want, and they take action to make it happen.

When they first started with our training program, they didn’t know anything about building or optimizing websites. All they knew is that there had to be a better way to generate traffic for their businesses. They had the interest, but they needed a clear way to let people know what it was about.

And it’s all paid off – within their first year of training with the eBusiness Institute, they were able to generate over $100,000 in profit from their websites. And for one of their more active websites, they are now making over $7,000 A WEEK. Well done Rob and Kathie!

CLICK ON THE VIDEO BELOW to see Matt and Liz Speak speak to Rob and Kath about their $7000 A Week website

Liz Raad: Welcome again to our student success stories and today we have two very special people. I’d like to introduce Rob and Kathie. Hi guys. How are you going?

Rob: Morning, Matt and Liz.

Kathie: Hi, Matt and Liz.

Liz: Wonderful to have you. Great to speak to you because you have got an exciting story and we can’t wait to share it.

Let’s start out, though. I want to go right back to the beginning because Rob, you didn’t even know you were going to come to our workshop originally, did you?

Rob: No, I was invited by Kathie. She was a very new friend at the time and I attended because I wanted to see how SEO might help my businesses.

I had a number of operating businesses with websites that added nothing to their National presence. And so if I had an objective, it was to have the phone ringing from Perth, the phone ringing from Darwin or Queensland to say, “Hey, I’d like to hear more about your services,” and most of them are service-oriented business. If I could have achieved that out of the website, I would have been delighted… Out of your seminar, I would have been delighted.

Matt: What we want to talk about today is what’s happened in your lives in the last 12 months, what you’ve been able to do with it, and Rob, like the two of you, total beginners, and now look at the sites you’ve got, the incomes that you’re generating off these websites, it’s really opened up your world.

Rob: I’d just started dating Kathie at the time..

Kathie: We’re married now!

Kath n Rob Rushford share their website success at the eBusiness Institute 3 Day Summit
Kath and Rob share their website success at the eBusiness Institute 3 Day Summit

Rob: I know, we do things pretty quickly! But she renovated my core website, so that was her training. She was able to do that in an environment where there was no harm to be done.

It turned out she created some really exciting and beautiful-looking websites, and the SEO that we learnt during the eBusiness Institute course was real and palpable and started to draw those clients in that I was looking for. So that was a nice start.

Matt: And you’re happy to talk about the sort of revenues that that website’s done for you?

Rob: Yes.

Before I knew it, we were ranking on the first page of Google for this particular business…

Kathie: Rob’s got a number of businesses and one of the businesses we started off with, it was a nothing business. So of course it takes a while for the SEO to kick in.

So I followed Matt’s rules to a T. Even when I didn’t really understand it, I still said, “Okay, well, there has to be something in here and one day it will just make sense to me.”

And before I knew it, we were ranking on the first page of Google for this particular business. Yeah, it just got better from there.

“We’ve had weeks where we’ve generated more than $7,000 in a week [from the website]”

Rob: So for me that means actual phone calls into my business from the website. So I’m a bit more pragmatic than ranking on the front page of Google. So it transpired into a business that’s really become a big cash unit for us. We’ve had weeks where we’ve generated more than $7,000 in a week from a business that was plodding along making $600, $700. It was something that was attached to a corporate advisory business I had.

So it was very much a second-tier business and Kathie’s now bought half of that business. So we bought out my existing partner in it. It’s now a family asset and it looks good, it ranks well, it has a very loyal customer base.

If you look at the KPIs that you teach in your digital training course as to things that you need to do to come up with a capable website, we’ve tried to follow those lessons. And of course being pragmatic, that’s translated into a nice financial asset for us, which has been good.

Kath and Rob Rushford WINNERS of the eBusiness Institute Graduates Of The Year!
Kath and Rob – WINNERS of the eBusiness Institute Graduates Of The Year!

Matt: You guys must be so proud of yourselves. You’re getting now $7,000 weeks. And like you said, Rob, you used to just plod along, making $600 here and there.

Rob: Yes, it was just set up to help people to get their money to pay for other things.

Kathie: We’re at the stage now that I’ve actually had to employ two part-time people.

Rob: Who were clients.

Kathie: And so they work with me and my son who gets a lot of time off, he wants to come in and work with me. We did some projection figures, all right, the other day and I believe, Rob and I both believe, within the next 12 months, this business will be generating about a million dollars a year.

Matt: Wow.

Rob: Your discussion, on the graph and what it takes to make big money online.

Matt Raad drawing compound effect graph
Matt Raad drawing compound effect graph

I kept looking at the graph (… I like things to happen quickly), but when the graph happened, I thought, “My God,” and it has a little couple of little hiccups and you go, “Oh, that’s $2,000 I didn’t have yesterday.” And then it’s $3,000, and you go, and then it’ll just be a bit quiet, and you go, because the graph is still just getting its momentum and you go, “Hmph,” and the fact is that we did that, she did that, we did that and it’s for good.

Matt: That’s perfect and also the other thing that we’re really big on teaching, is that a website becomes an asset that is saleable at some point and I believe there’s that option here with you guys.

Rob & Kath Have Already Been Approached About Selling the website for big money in under 12 months!

Kathie: I had a phone call from a gentleman who happened to be the owner of the opposition. So basically there are three big companies, us included, in this market area. So the opposition rang us and they said, “Oh, can you tell us who does your SEO?” And I said, “Oh, I did it,” and they said, “Would you be interested in doing our SEO?” And I looked at Rob and I would have been quite okay with it but Rob looked at me and said, “No way.”

Rob: That was my exact words, I just said, “No thanks.”

Kathie: So with that, they continued to pursue us and they want to buy us out, but all of a sudden about the same time, (and it was after your bootcamp), it just started going boom. And that’s when I thought, “No way.”

And when you do the math on it, it would be crazy to sell at this time. And I actually love doing it. I really love working that business because I feel like I’m helping people.

Knew nothing about how to build a website when they started with us!

Kath and Rob Rushford accepting student of the year award off Matt and Liz Raad eBusiness Institute
Very deserving winners of the eBusiness Institute Graduates Of The Year!

Liz: And so, thinking about when you started out, were you technical at all? Did you know anything about this marketplace?

Kathie: I didn’t know anything about building a website at all, and I can remember when I did the first website … We all feed off each other within the Champions group. So you’ve always got that support there. I wasn’t very technical at all.

Rob: Yes, that’s an important question because if you take it outside of our story and you look at the Champions group generally, the collegiate nature of the Champions is amazing. And that’s a word that’s thrown around in corporate environments, I would say collegiate environment, but it’s just a tough environment out there.

In your digital investor community of Champions, it’s an incredibly generous and well-spirited, a nice group of people. They’re also highly intelligent and like to do stuff. So we’ve just had the greatest fun and experience because it feels like you are… you’re working, you’re doing stuff you haven’t done before.

It’s a little bit “Mm, that’s difficult,” and then you get on the phone, you have the support with your video lessons. It’s a really good environment for us to do. In 12 months on the Champions program, we’ve been so busy and I’m normally busy, but we’ve done 25 of our own websites during that period of time which is insane.

Matt: Wow, well done.

Rob: We have now got web developers overseas that are helping us. We have other people from within your Champions community who help us and we’re pretty focused and targeted with what sort of results we’re trying to get. So it’s really an interesting aspect as to what we were able to achieve out of the Champions community and the eBusiness lessons that have taken us to where we are right now, which is quite, it’s pretty remarkable.

Matt: That’s fantastic.

Laughter and learning at Digital Training Bootcamp
Lots of laughs and learning’s at Champions Bootcamp!

Kathie: Kids will often say to me, “I don’t know what I want to do,” when they finish school. And I can remember when I was about 45, saying to them, “I don’t know what I want to do. I’ve never found out. I know now when I came across this [making money online, building my own website businesses], I said to Rob, “This is it,” this is what I should’ve been doing years ago. But I didn’t know then. I can remember thinking about it a few years ago, but I didn’t know how to go about it.

And I suppose for me, I was in a very fortunate position that I used to work for a company that has a magazine model online. So I was doing the travel section in that so I could see the potential because I was actually selling advertising space for the magazine and I could see the potential of how much money you can make with a banner ad, a quarter-page ad, etc. And all these ads really cost you nothing in the digital environment to set up a new webpage. And now we’re just raking it in.

Made $100,000 in their first year online!

Liz: So yes, right from the beginning you guys have had an amazing mindset and I think that’s a big part of why you are here. You’ve almost cracked $100,000 in the first year, which is just incredible.

Kathie: Well actually I think we did crack over $100,000 because we didn’t include another web business. This was a business that we’ve actually closed down because we found it a bit stressful. We were getting so much traffic through that website, and that website made a lot of money for us as well in terms of leads.

Liz: And so, and the other one that we should mention as well, is the really exciting one!

Matt: This is potentially the massive, big one. Are you happy to share, Rob, where it’s developed?

Liz: And why the website was important? So why having the digital skills was so important for that deal.

Their New BIG Deal worth potentially $Millions!

Rob: You’ve had a lot of people in your group who are middle-aged and creeping above that, and so I come from a really strong corporate background and you get to a stage where you think that you may know almost everything but you might not.

And I was developing another traditional bricks and mortar business. It’s taken a small change at the time that we went to one of your events. And if you look at the input that you give procedurally (not just content-wise), you guys are a unique resource for people like me.

Rob and Kathie website success story at the eBusiness Institute Digital Profits Summit!
Where it all started – at the eBusiness Institute Digital Profits Summit!

And I’ve been to many, many courses where I paid lots and lots of money and come out of it with less knowledge, motivation, and tools than I have out of the courses that I’ve done with you.

Then, at a Champions boot camp you were going through the structural and strategic approach for selling websites to people. And it was at the level that was in a high enough level to actually help me. And I spent those boot camp days writing my business plan while she was learning to plan for websites.

But your teachings are so robust and they’re really helpful. And I’ve been very fortunate over my journey. I’ve sat down with Neil Armstrong at IBM. I sat down with some really great people who helped motivate and give me direction. And when I walked out of your boot camp, I had designed a really great resource for my family, for all my business partners’ families and for their children and their children. And I showed you afterwards, Matt-

Matt: You did.

Rob: -because you just don’t know what’s happening after when people are holding a pen, do you? Because they’re writing down some really important things and the lessons that you gave us during that boot camp are applicable at a range of levels.

Website that lead to $Million Deal put together after Boot Camp Challenge!

Rob:                 So we developed that website. I wrote it after the challenge that you gave all us Champions that weekend and I’m sure it’s a fine website. But you wouldn’t have expected it to have been worth over millions of dollars, at the time that I was plugging it in there and getting it back to you in that time.

But it’s signed in, it’s sold, and we’re producing and that’s a really good Testament to the style of things that people can get out of your course. It can take you anywhere. But the website paradigm is a really valid situation, it’s been great for us. It’s been fun, really good fun.

Kathie:              Yeah. I mean if nothing else, any business, right? It’s an internet world. So every business should have a website because it’s the first thing that people ask you is, “Have you got a website?”

Matt: Great website.

Kathie: Yes. And the people that we were dealing with were very difficult but we had to, because I own the property, we’ve got to lease it from them. So we’ve got to be on the same page. And honestly, the things that you had in that particular segment of your course, right? Rob basically took all those points, put it in his website presentation, and restructured it around to what he had to say in this environment and he used that as the basis of getting it across the line.

Rob: So Matt, what problem are you here to solve? That’s what you’ve always said. So when you’re doing your website, what is the problem you’re here to solve? So I went and told them, “Let’s try and find out what the problem is you’re trying to solve.”

Having A Live Website Gave Huge Credibility to A Big Multi-Million Dollar Deal

Kathie: And the other thing that was really exciting was once we had the website up, and it was basically just a very skeleton sort of website at first, but we had been live on the internet. So all of a sudden, they can see themselves, “Hey, these people are actually real, they’re not just talking to us”. “They really want to make this happen.” So it really gave us a huge credibility.

Liz: Yes, fantastic.

Matt: And that’s the power of a good website. You guys, I’ve got to say, that the website was perfect for the job intended as evidenced by the massive success that you guys have achieved out of it. So really well done.

Go, Rob. This is why I love Rob that… I still remember when, a year ago when I first met you at our 3 day event and to see the website that you created 12 months later, well…

It was less than 12 months, it was amazing. You’ve really taken our lessons to heart. You’ve nailed it. As you said, you’ve come in not from an online background at all, but just with the enthusiasm of yourself and with Kathie there, that between the two of you, your enthusiasm has created this amazing website that’s just been incredibly successful for you. Congratulations to the two of you!

Rob and Kathie were awarded eBusiness Institute graduates of the year
Rob and Kathie were awarded e-Business Institute graduates of the year!

You just nailed it. Perfect. You’re very fitting winners of our ultimate student champions cup!

Liz: So out of interest, guys, for anyone who is starting out who may be using your position that you were in 12 months ago, what do you think your key to success was? What made the difference for you guys?

Kathie: I think with anything, you’re going to always going to be more successful in something if you enjoy what you’re doing. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you’re just not going to succeed at it.

And I think for me, I’m definitely a team player. So I think your motto of taking in family members. So if you’ve got someone like your husband or your children, someone in your backyard, you talk to them. Because if you’re the sort of personality type that I am, you need to share it.

Rob: If you like the journey, go share it with them. And if they like it, they’re part of the team.

Liz: Very inspirational.

Kathie: It brings you closer together as a family, it really does. For Rob and I, this is our home office where we are right now. But Rob and I will just be sitting there, doing websites, or doing something online.

I went out to dinner last night, came home and here’s Rob. It was about 10 o’clock, and here he is on the website fiddling around and I said, ” are you having fun there?” He said, “I know, it’s so meditative.”

Matt: That’s really good.

Liz: Thank you so much, guys, it is just amazing to talk to you. And I’m sure a lot of people have been inspired by your story and your journey.

Kathie: It couldn’t have happened without you two. I can tell you that now.

Rob: Really, it’s true, absolutely.

Liz: Thank you!

Kathie: You simplify it with courage and you’re not someone who micromanages. So you let people go at their own pace. And sometimes, I can remember in the early stages, Matt would be talking about things and I really didn’t understand what you were talking about. And all of a sudden, “Ah, that’s what he was talking about!” It’ll happen in its own time.

Liz: Fantastic.

Matt: Thank you so much, guys.

Liz: Congratulations, again. Really well done and thanks so much for being with us today.

If you are interested in learning more about the e-Business Institute Digital Training Summit where it all started for Rob and Kath then you can check out the details here for this years Digital Marketing Conference being held on the Gold Coast.