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

• 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.

• Finally a move away from fun stuff and into big business (this was in 1996).  A friend calls me and asks if I would like to salvage one of his branch offices in the mortgage business
• I’m on a roll so I see little risk in giving it a shot…besides I know a little about the business so it would be an excellent challenge to test my skills in a new industry
• My job was to motivate a bunch of old over the hill loan agents…LOL

 So not knowing any better I set out to do just that and gave it my all for 18 months.  In just 18 months I had turned one of the worst performing offices out of the 20 or so California offices into one of the best performing offices.  How did I do that?  I used and put in place various tactics that brought in more agents, moved to a large office space (got to think big to get big), hired an ex-athlete to be the company spokesperson but most importantly I ran the following ad.  “Think you can’t qualify for a home loan…think again.  Think you don’t make enough money…think again.  Think you have too much debt…think again.  Stop thinking and call us today.”  This ad was so successfully that we had to turn of the phones.  We had 100’s of people calling us for weeks.  In 18 months we went from a paltry 5 million in originations to over 40 million.  Finally a success in a field outside my niche.  Nothing could stop me now or so I thought.