CAN A BIG BUSINESS BE BUILT WITH SIMPLE INFORMATION PRODUCTS AND DIRECT MARKETING? MEET THE $200 MILLION MAN!

This article was taken from HOW TO MAKE MILLIONS WITH YOUR IDEAS by Dan S. Kennedy.

“My good friend Ted Nicholas started in the publishing business with a simple inspiration. Ted was a hyperactive entrepreneur who started a number of corporations; each time he incorporated, he was annoyed by giving the lawyers hundreds of dollars just to get a few forms filled in, usually by the lawyer’s secretary. It occurred to him that this probably irritated a lot of other entrepreneurs, and for some people starting on really tight budgets who wanted to protect themselves through incorporation, it might even be too costly and stop them in their tracks.

A little research revealed to Ted that incorporation was actually very simple for most small business purposes, and anybody could fill out and file the forms. There was no requirement that a lawyer do it. Further, he found that there were significant tax, privacy and other advantages from incorporating in Delaware, regardless of where a person lived and operated his business.

Ted wrote all this information down and turned it into a very simple, straightforward how-to-book. He added all the forms needed to incorporate in Delaware, one blank set to use and one sample set completed as a model. Finally, he added the phone numbers and addresses of incorporation offices and other contacts useful for incorporating in Delaware and every other state. He turned it into an 8 ½ x 11” 100-page book that cost him about a dollar to produce in quantity – although this same information could have been put in a number of different formats. (Today, Form-Your-Own-Corporation Kits are commonplace, sold on computer diskettes, as books or manuals, or just the forms in an envelope. But at the time, Ted was plowing new ground).

Ted titled his book How to Form Your Own Corporation Without a Lawyer for Under $50.00 ad started promoting it with small classified ads in the Wall Street Journal, newspapers, and business magazines. From this very humble beginning, operating out of his living room, Ted went on to sell over 1 million copies of this book. In total, he sold over $200 million worth of thirteen different business books, manuals in three-ring notebooks, and reports he wrote, plus a number of other authors’ products, before selling his company. Enterprise Publishing, to Dearborn Press, a New York book publisher, in 1992. You probably saw Ted’s full-page ads for How to Form Your Own Corporation in airline and business magazines.

Ted has become something of legend in direct-marketing industry circles. He is very much in demand as a lecturer at publishing and marketing conferences (including mine), and picks and chooses a consulting project now and again, but he spends most of his time at his retirement home in Switzerland, skiing, enjoying fine wines, traveling a little, writing a little, and relaxing a lot. The $200 million man is a very relaxed fellow.”