This is the fun part.

This is the step that gets people past their years-long sticking point of, “It all sounds great but I don’t know what business to build?”

Nothing of enduring value is build without a plan.

The first step in building a mansion, a jet aircraft or a durable business is to have a clear vision of exactly what you want when the project is completed.

What kind of business would give you the deepest personal satisfaction?

How much income do you need to reliably and consistently generate?

What is the problem you can solve and the exact value you can offer to your customers?

The harsh truth is, we live in a society where most of us are never encouraged to ask ourselves important questions about our optimum lifestyle.

We’re actually encouraged to do the opposite. To settle for less, suppress our dissatisfaction and do what we are told.

Want to say, “No, thanks!” to that arrangement? The first thing you need is a clear, individualized plan.

Your plan is the foundation of everything you do afterwards and informs and facilitates many of the decisions you will need to make.

No matter where in the world you live – we will discuss your vision of your optimum lifestyle and examine what can be engineered to make it a reality.

Questions and (if you want them) private discussions help you explore your personal and professional interests, personality traits, and life experiences to discover ways you can create value to offer your customers.

This is a very liberating activity that opens your mind to “what if” scenarios that move beyond your perceived limitations and, often, self-imposed borders and restrictions.

Our job is to encourage you to think about what possibilities are most interesting to you, what your dreams are, and what would be the most satisfying way to spend your time.

At the same time, we need to steer your ambitions toward the proven, financially lucrative opportunities that exist inside the business niches you are most interest in.

It’s an exhilarating blend of creativity and rationality and most people feel very invigorated to – finally! – be on the path to doing what they’ve been thinking about doing for many years.

You’ll find our 15+ years of online business experience very helpful in this regard.

We know the pitfalls to avoid and the insider skills that can save you a lot of frustration and wasted time and money.

The critical exploration and research performed in Step 1 is also integrated into three of the future modules in Safely Leave The Rat Race.

There is a very logical integration of your ultimate goals that is woven into each step in this program.

This is where we make sure that before climbing the ladder, we have it against the right wall.

At the end of Step 1 you will have a clear vision of your niche, your business model, and the nature of the product or service you will offer.

You will also have confidence in your plan and in the potential for your idea to generate the income you desire and the lifestyle you want most.

The power of the internet is the ability to share the same lucrative computer screens worldwide that the biggest companies do.

Companies like Amazon and Ebay can conduct billions of dollars of business every year from individual customers looking at their computer screens and smart phones.

Your business has the same easy access to those individuals and their discretionary income.

Your business does not need to be located on high dollar local real estate.

It’s located were all the online action is – inside the highest-growth economy on the planet: right between www. and .com on billions of browsers.

Despite this huge potential, it is inexpensive to get set up and to open your virtual doors to business.

Moreover, we are living at a revolutionary time when the internet is allowing the direct connection between many millions of individuals for the first time in human history.

The big corporate and government intermediaries that controlled the contact and narrative of a community or an entire country are losing their monopoly.

This allows any of us to cultivate our own audience or community of people with similar interests, values, or goals.

And these smaller niches are where an individual with limited resources can build and audience and easily make more money than he or she can in a conventional 9-to-5 job.

And by the very nature of the internet, and deliberate pre-planning during Step 2, your website and business can be operated seamlessly from your existing kitchen table, or from a sailboat in a distant harbor, or from a mountainside condo in Italy.

We can help you get your website up and running while avoiding the many predatory operators in this space. (Some of which are very large companies.)

We can also give you honest, objective advice about what functionality you need to launch, versus what can wait until after substantial income is flowing into the business.

There are dozens of decisions that need to be addressed around issues such as .com vs. .info, vs .me and other domain extensions.

What payment processor to use.

What country your business is domiciled in.

What level of hosting is right for your situation.

These do not lend themselves to cookie-cutter answers.

Different people with different goals and priorities need different answers.

Equally important, access to a community of other new entrepreneurs and with our personal mentoring will keep you on track.

It's critical not to be lead down the many blind alleys that lead to unnecessary expenses and time.

When Step 2 is complete you are at the point of being able to gain visibility in a specific marketplace and start building a following of very targeted people.

You'll own and know how to operate a professional website that projects the look and feel your market will recognize and respond to.

This is the starting point of your new financial asset and source of cash flow that is completely under your control.

Your site will also incorporate the business model that is designed to give you the most personal freedom by facilitating the lifestyle you are engineering.

This is where the magic starts to happen and where you really get your head into the game, in terms of living inside your chosen world.

Ongoing marketing outreach and audience building is the indispensable ingredient of any growing business.

The power of the internet is the ability to find and attract prospects with the exact profile that will find your particular website interesting and your offer of service irresistible.

Need to find men aged 50 and older who enjoy travel and are very concerned about their retirement?

Or women who make over $80,000 per year and own a specific type of pet? Or, people with acid reflux who prefer alternative medicine and live in Texas?

There are effective tools and tactics that make that – and much more – easily possible in a few hours of work.

Step 3 is where you begin to build your own nano-economy of tightly targeted people that fit your niche perfectly and come to trust you and your company.

For many people, this is where a long-held dream of working and enjoying a specific niche becomes a reality.

Having your mind and your energy focused on a passion such as travel, investing, or whatever your chosen niche, makes everything related to marketing more personally interesting, engaging, and satisfying.

As the number of people in this nano-economy increases it can become your greatest financial asset.

For example, when you have accumulated 1,000 people who will happily pay you $100 each year, you have an asset that pays you $100,000 annually.

That asset can be grown at a rate much higher than the general economy of any country could ever be expected to grow.

Instead of hoping for a 2% raise at a 9-to-5 job, it’s possible to generate a 200% increase in the size of your market, and therefore in your personal income.

And this is a market you own and control. The power of that condition can’t be overstated.

This is the place where your personal freedom and financial security can be built.

For many people, the single greatest satisfaction they garner from their online business is the feeling of having control over their own financial destiny.

Wishing and hoping for good news from an employer is displaced with the certain knowledge that what you tweak today can literally put more money in your bank account tomorrow.

We will show you how to identify your perfect target customer and where to find him or her on social media.

We’ll show you how to find the best ‘influencer’ websites in your niche that are literally looking for new people to deliver information to their huge audience.

You will also learn exactly how to build an email list of targeted prospects and why it is the bread and butter of virtually every online business.

At the end of Step 3 you will have comprehensive marketing systems in place that draw targeted traffic to your site, retain the best prospects, and automatically sends them valuable content they requested.

These semi-automated systems gradually lead your prospects to conclude that they need what you are offering and will be happy to pay for it.

When your online product or service is added (in the next step) your marketing systems will scale to the limits of your ambition.

This is where your creativity, ingenuity and effort create something from what was merely potential.

This is where you take a good idea and a solid business model and turn it into an actual product or service a customer can buy and that can make you reliable, portable, substantial income.

From a philosophical perspective, this is from where all human progress comes: transforming an idea and impulse from your mind to a reality in the marketplace.

Once you are past this step your success is more a matter of ‘when’ than ‘if.’

Inside every niche there are hundreds of ways to create value. The challenge is to find the right product or service for your situation, skills and long term ambitions.

(And at the end of Step 1 we’ll already know what this will be.)

Step 4 is where we create it and tell the online world.

This is where you seriously capitalize on the work from the first three steps.

Everything in your sales message, the free materials you offer, the form and style of your content has to be crafted so there is consistency and continuity that draws a casual web visitor along a natural path to becoming an interested prospect, and then to becoming a customer and, ideally, to becoming a lifetime customer.

This is where the work goes into creating your own durable nano-economy that can serve you and your network for a lifetime.

It’s also where you can create without the usual external restrictions and limitations.

For many people, this is their first exposure to how liberating and empowering it is to ‘run your own show’ and reap the benefits of your creativity, knowledge, talent and passion.

Our inclination is always to help you develop a durable, enduring product or service that can continually evolve and improve over many years to provide solid and obvious value to customers in your marketplace.

We are wary of and do not recommend exploiting the latest ‘hack’ or ‘shortcut’ to make money online today with a tactic that will be obsolete next year.

Online business today is no different that offline business has been for centuries – you build durable wealth by providing genuine value to happy customers.

You will learn the step by step method to create whatever e-product, service, subscription, membership, or sale of a physical product you need for your chosen niche.

Our experience in all of these models will be particularly valuable to you.

Our expertise and contacts will help you find the services and vendors that you might need to fill in the gaps in your own technical abilities or expertise.

No matter what product or service you eventually create, there are thousands of people readily available to help you with the nuts and bolts of any task.

At the end of Step 4 you will have a valuable, competitive and desirable product or service on offer for lucrative sale to an established audience in your chosen sub-niche.

You’ll also have your product integrated into your comprehensive marketing plan, making a complete, operating online business you own and control.