Skip to content


Expert Advice For Online Businesses

About twenty years ago I saw a Kawasaki Ninja 900 motorcycle and decided it looked like fun. I really had no experience with motorcycles and did not know anyone who had one. But hey, how hard could it be?

So I bought one and set off tooling around town. Of course I bought one of the most powerful street bikes ever made, It was fun, but I could not do any of the things I thought it would enable me to do. I would take a sharp corner and lay it down. The bike would shake and scare me so much at high speeds that I could not take it over 90mph in light colored pants. It was fun, well, probably more scary than fun. I just did not have the right bike, the right protective gear or the right experts to tell me how to use this incredible tool. I sold the bike a year later. In retrospect, I am lucky to be alive.

Now, twenty years later, I am hopefully a little wiser. I still like bikes, but have put aside a little of the hubris that prevented me from asking for expert help when I needed it most. I went and spoke with some licensed expert motorcycle racers I knew. They told me which bike, equipment, training and tracks they thought might work for me. I followed their advice to the letter and hung on every word and recommendation they offered. There would be time enough for experimentation, but without a baseline, I would never be able to tell if my changes were helping or hurting. My expert buddies told me what I was doing wrong, where I could improve and items I could use to go faster and do the things I wanted to do.

I studied, purchased the right equipment and hung on every word of advice they gave me. I took and passed my track license and my amateur racer license. In a little over a year from the time I first rode my new bike, I was on the podium at an amateur sprint bike motorcycle race, placing second in front of many other lighter bikers with bigger bikes and much much more time at the track.

That picture above shows you some of my on-track advisors E.J. Bender and Kevin Kernohan (guru-Randy was just too fast to make the shot) in Calabogie Canada last week. Why can I wear white shorts at 150mph now? I now know what I do well and what I do not. I also know that I do not want to waste time researching an answer an expert has on the tip of their tongue? I have no desire to reinvent the wheel. I have experts at my disposal, why not use them to help jump to the top of the learning curve? This advice applies even more so to companies looking to expand their internet presence.

You can do it yourself, but enlisting the help of internet experts in law, marketing, blogging, capital management, customer service, whatever your company needs to conduct online business. Do not lose that entrepreneurial spark. Just learn the track before you start cracking the throttle open here and there. Let the experts get you on the right track and headed in the right direction. After a few laps, you should have a feel for what you might change to make things flow even better.

Otherwise, you can try it on your own for a while. You still
find people like that at the racetrack. While I have yet to see one of them on
the podium, they do get frequent flier miles from the trackside ambulance team.

Brett Trout

Related posts

Posted in Internet Law.