Angelic investors March 28, 2007
Posted by jefft in Case studies, Micro-enterprise, Startups.add a comment
John Waller is Billboard’s top Christian recording artist to watch for 2007, and in this interview he describes how his church has invested in his start-up missionary venture:
SouthLink isn’t a large church, so how did it come to raise $50,000 to help you record your independent project?
Waller: For the first year-and-a-half, I had a lot of According to John CDs. One of them was an album that never got released. When we moved to Colorado, we had all these CDs on hand, so we decided that every family that came to the church would get one, allowing the music to minister to them and hoping they would pass that on to someone else to draw them to the church. After about a year-and-a-half, I began writing songs just for the people at SouthLink, inspired by them and what God was doing in the church. Each week I’d teach my worship team a new song, and after a while the people began asking, “When are we going to get this music?”
We cast a vision to raise money for this project and raised a little over $50,000 in four weeks. I also cast the vision to some of my friends back in Georgia. Dan Cathy, the president of Chick-Fil-A, is a friend of mine that I’ve known for a long time—his dad (and company founder) Truett Cathy was my Sunday school teacher—so he contributed a lot to the project. The church owns 75 percent of the recording, so there is a business advantage for SouthLink, too. Beach Street ended up purchasing a lot of those master recordings from the church. About four or five of the songs carried over from the indie project [to The Blessing], and I’ve also signed for a large portion of my royalties to go back to SouthLink.
The cost of micro-enterprise February 11, 2007
Posted by jefft in Change, Micro-enterprise, Technology.add a comment
. . . is pretty cheap, according to this consultant:
New technologies that give people access to tools and knowledge that previously was only available to a select few. These new technologies give people universal and direct access to markets. They allow people to create and maintain collaborative knowledge bases. They lower the cost of communication. They remove or greatly diminish the overhead cost of doing busniess on many levels.
New decentralized concepts and technologies of cooperation and collaboration that allow solo enterpreneurs to join together and fashion themselves as an outsourcing option for corporations, governments, communities and general markets on all scales.Ideas like “micro-investing, micro-lending, and micro-enterprise” are not just for developing world contries. The same concepts can be applied here in the United States on local levels, working directly with people in communities and neighborhoods of all types. As more “traditional” employment roles are outsourced and offshored, a new opportunity has arisen that can allow any individual to create and grow personal wealth and enrich their life.
