Employed by Mercedes-Benz, pulling in $300,000 a year … By a lot of standards, James Schramko was doing pretty well for himself. Yet he felt stifled. He was relying on one source of income, which although high, he felt was capped, and didn't have creative control. As he tells Foundr, he wanted to be the primary beneficiary of his own efforts, rather than have his employer reap the rewards.

The upside was that it prepared him well to strike out on his own, as he did six years ago. “Running a multimillion dollar business for someone else … really gave me the solid training to be able to run a business,” he says.

He admits it was grueling juggling his job with a budding business to the tune of an extra four hours every day, but now he works about the same amount, minus the 9-5, that is. He aims for a 25-hour week with time for at least one surf session a day – fitting work around the tide charts.

Schramko's thing is internet marketing and coaching. It's a field littered with snake oil and empty promises but he stresses that “a website is not a business” and “internet marketing is not about sitting in your underpants scamming people with a false promise that they're going to get rich”. Rather, he wants to help others build their businesses and avoid the gauntlet that he ran himself in the early days. Having done the yards and made it through, he's distilled that knowledge and is sharing it online.

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