TollGate Riches an easy way to make money by just connecting people

• This project required building a list for the Yosemite Mariposa Tourism Bureau
• This was a different twist to an old problem
• The money is in the list but without a list there is no money

 In this project we were hired by the Tourism bureau to build a list for Yosemite prospects.  Believe it or not Yosemite has been declining each year in terms of visitors to the park.  Our job was to put together a plan to spike Bay Area interest and get people to the valley once again.  We did this by first building a SuperBlog ™ for Yosemite.  The SuperBlog we conceived and build for a few destination clients in the last year.  To go see what a SB looks like go to www.yosemitemariposa.com and take a look around.  Anyway we tied the SB to a radio promotion in the Bay Area offering a bunch of prizes just for going to the squeeze page and providing us with first name and email address.  It was a killer promotion which had over 12,000 people opt-in for the promotion.  In fact the powers at the Yosemite Mariposa tourism board have told us it is the most successful promotion they have ever done.  We all know what you can do with a list and this is a great example of thinking outside the box and really ramping up a killer promotion quickly.  We did the entire promotion including the building of the blog, making the radio ads and getting it on the radio in about two weeks time.  I’m sure that would be a record in anyone’s book.  In this TollGate project we were paid as consultants on the project

• This is a great deal with a terrific result
• I was brought into this deal in 2005 to help a world famous breast cancer surgeon help raise awareness and money for breast cancer
• I’m sure you all remember the Lance Armstrong LivveLong yellow wrist bracelet.  Our deal was to make a multi-colored bracelet for women to wear

 This is an all around great story for a great cause.  The cause was helping raise awareness for breast cancer.  The recipient of the funds was www.curebreastcancer.org founded by Dr. Ernie Bodai.  In a few short moths we produced over a million bands and were able to give a sizable amount of money to his charity.  This was a real feel good deal that worked extremely well and helped in raising much needed funding for Dr. Bodai and his organization.  The three person crew assembled to put it all together was able to open over 2,000 retail accounts in just over six months.  I would love to work on another project like this in the near future.

• It’s now 1997 and high tech is the name of the game
• I like games so why not
• I was recruited to merge a startup high tech company with a market…should be easy I thought

 This was much more of a challenge than I ever dreamed.   It was in the very early days of high tech and few people understood high tech.  Even fewer wanted anything to do with it.  Had I known what I now know I would have never got involved with this project.  Timing was about 5 years to early.  Not all deals work out and this is one that didn’t work or even get close to working.  This was a license deal to place free interactive kiosks.  The only problem was nobody knew what they were or how they worked.  That included the developers who blew though $500,000 only to tell the company that they couldn’t make the software to run the programs.  So the moonlighting trio from Intel packed it in and left the company stranded.  While the overall concept has since been proven many times over the company was just too early to market with a concept that the ordinary person did not understand let alone know how to make it work.  Great idea bad timing.