New program for the new year – $100 Business with Chris Guillebeau

Happy New Year!

As I mentioned in a post last September (Reduce overwhelm, expand your reach and have more fun with partnerships), I have been working really hard behind the scenes on a number of new programs and partnerships to deliver more value and support to my clients and blog readers. This has added tremendous fun to my life, as well as expanded my business and income.

Some of you have been enjoying the free calls about creative business planning I am doing with partner Charlie Gilkey – see here to catch up on the first two calls and learn about the next. We are beyond excited about our retreat for creative entrepreneurs in February, detailed here.

And Michele Woodward and I continue to support the development of coaches with KickAss Mentoring and the new Career Invention Certification. Working with Michele has been a tremendously gratifying experience, and I thank my stars every day she crossed my path.

The brand new project: $100 Business with Chris Guillebeau

Starting on January 18, I am thrilled to launch a totally new initiative with the wise and well-traveled Chris Guillebeau. Chris has made an amazing life and flourishing business (and upcoming new book) spreading the art of nonconformity. The rebel in me loves everything about his message, and the business owner in me loves his approach to growing a thriving online business without losing your soul or ethics.

You can read what Chris says about our new project in his full post here.

But the main details come from this snippet:

Together with a partner (that would be me, Pam) I’m starting an online community to address this need. It’s called the $100 Business Forum, and over the course of 28 days, we’re going to help each participant move closer to their own “very small” business. (I fully expect that many of them will actually be able to launch the project before the end of the month.)

I’m letting you know about this now because we’re launching this in just eight days, on January 18th, and the group size will be very limited. (It has to be this way because we’ll be spending personal time with everyone in the group for 28 whole days.)

A more strategic launch would have more advance notice, a bigger inaugural group, and so on — but a more strategic launch director would probably not be writing the launch copy from a small island in the Pacific. So here’s how it works:

• Participants will have regular access to me and Pamela Slim, author of the great Escape from Cubicle Nation book, which won the AONC award for best book of the millennium a few months back. Somehow I managed to convince Pam to partner with me on this project.
• Not only will you have access to Pam (and me, but who would pay for that…), you’ll also be able to learn from every other member of the group. We’ll have a private website where each of us will share ideas, evaluate different projects, and even help out with promotion and marketing.
• In keeping with my theme of 2010 (SCALE and REACH), this project is going to start small and get really big. After we fill up the inaugural group, we’ll take signups for the second group, which starts April 5th. I have no doubt we’ll have an eager, fun tribe of participants for both groups.

I’ll tell you more about it next week, but if you want to be in the inaugural group, mark your calendars for Monday the 18th, 7am PST / 10am EST / something-o-clock GMT.

I will let you know the minute the doors open for registration with a short post on my blog. I am really excited to work with (and learn from) Chris, as well as see the amazing things the $100 Business crew will produce. If there is one thing I learned from last year, it is that smart, creative, fun people working together produce amazing results.

Hope to work with you soon!