My Most Stupid Business Mistake EVER & How You Can Avoid It

Its extremely embarrassing to be writing this blog post. I did something that I thought I’d never do.

I created a business without a written contract!!!

• 50% of a business that I spent almost 10 months creating (ManifestMastermind.com)
• a monthly income of several thousand dollars.
• A well established blog with 53 posts, 1,289 comments, 618 inbound links, alexa ranking of 164,316 (TheSocialMediaSource.com)

These were assets that I worked extremely hard to create, but allowed them to be registered in someone else’s name WITHOUT having a signed contract. I actually feel more embarrassed about writing this article than I do in losing the assets (but it certainly stings to have your babies taken from you against your will).

How did this happen? 

Back in October, 2008 I had a discussion with a student of mine from my social media training (Social Media Marketing System). His name is Steve Pohlit.  He already had a registered a domain name called ManifestMastermind.com.  This was the type of project I had been wanting to be involved with for nearly 5 years since I sold my previous manifesting website.

Since he already had the domain name registered, we decided that we would form a business entity (LLC) and transfer the domain name and other assets to this company. We would setup a bank account where we would both have access. We were in complete agreement that each of us would be 50% owners of the company. I believed this would happen, so we got to work…

We spent the next 3 months creating what is now ManifestMastermind.com. We had a verbal agreement that Steve would manage employees & content distribution and I would handle creating the sales process and marketing strategy. I also contributed my massive network of contacts. At that time, Steve didn’t know how to grow his network at a rapid pace, this was something that I was happy to teach him as a business partner. This was a good deal because he had prior management experience and hadn’t previously been able to launch a thriving Internet business on his own. I needed someone to manage the growth of the business, so we were both happy (we should have written that down).

This business of ManifestMastermind.com was released to the public on January 7th, 2009. We instantly had an incoming producing asset that generated a few thousand dollars per month.

Over the next 3 months the business began to grow and I had access to the bank account and could watch sales flow in. At agreed upon times, we would both withdrawl our 50% profit share from the company. I took a short trip to Hawaii to manage a property that I own there. I was also on a spiritual quest (I’ll write more about my realizations later). I was inspired to move back to Hawaii permanently.

During this time, my business partner began giving me orders. He tried assigning work to me that should have been carried out by one of our employees. I even started managing some employees even though we had previously agreed that this would be handled by him.

I started to ask questions about when the assets would be transferred into our joint company. There were several legitimate sounding excuses, so I just assumed that he was busy and we would settle it soon. One delay after another caused the assets to remain in his name until July 2009 (the month this post is being written). I still believed that Steve would transfer the assets into an account that we both owned eventually. After all, we were operating a spiritually-based business.  Who want to steal a company centered around helping people grow spiritually?

I Discovered A Scam…

Between March & June 2009 I was transitioning my life to Hawaii. Moving requires a lot of energy. I was spending less personal time with Steve and he wasn’t very happy about that. We were still working together on the basics of the business. He assumed more of a leadership role and under his leadership the business stagnated. He was spending a lot of time doing things that didn’t help the business.

It wasn’t growing when he started acting independently, so he was getting frustrated with me. I told him that I would soon be fully situated and we would take the business to the next level during the summer. Meanwhile we could enjoy the thousands of dollars of profit each month that we had built when I was running the business until March.

For 3 months I didn’t login to the membership site at ManifestMastermind.com. I checked in with Steve regularly and he told me that he was adding content. I was consulting with him and giving him business advice.

At the beginning of July, 2009 I logged into the private (PAID) membership site at ManifestMastermind.com.

I WAS SCHOCKED AND MORALLY APPAULED AT WHAT I SAW!!!

Over 57% of the content that members were paying for monthly was MISSING! Nothing had been added since I left for Hawaii in March! I was upset that something with my name on it was being used to mislead people! And the quality of what was there fell dramatically short of what we had agreed to.

The content was hard to follow, poorly edited, and wasn’t very helpful.

I struggled with what to do with this information. I confronted Steve Pohlit about this and wanted to work out a solution. There was an easy way to pay our featured members to create the missing content (and some bonus content for the members) and it all would have been ok.

When I presented this situation to Steve, I got a really offensive response. I was told that he was the "founder" of Manifest Mastermind and in total control of the content. He didn’t want to create anything new and it was perfect the way it was. He didn’t see a problem with having only 6 guidance processes when Manifest Mastermind had actually sold 14 (2 new guidance processes per month for 7 months). This would have only cost us about $1,000, but he didn’t want to spend the money to give the members what they paid for.

I was upset about this because I had created the entire sales sequence. I asked him to remove my salesletter & email copy from the sequence and replace it with his own. I was too far out of alignment with what Manifest Mastermind had become to allow my words to sell new memberships to it (he’s still using this content today against my wishes because he’s disabled my ability to remove it).

I was Locked Out

The day after I confronted him, I tried logging into our merchant account (in his name, it hadn’t been transferred to an account with both of our names yet). I was locked out. I couldn’t see how much money was in the account. He was keeping over $4,000 of my money (that account was used exclusively for our joint business and half of it was mine). He was also keeping ALL of the profits of Manifest Mastermind moving forward!

I was told that I could be an affiliate of Manifest Mastermind and earn 50% commission. THIS WAS MY COMPANY THAT I OWNED 50% OF!!! But I was foolish enough to allow it to remain in his name, so I didn’t have a leg to stand on when he decided that it was his all of a sudden.

I Decided to Leave

I looked within myself and fealt that it was best for me personally to walk away from the project. I told him that I was leaving. Since he refused to make up for the lack of content, I sent an email to the paying members of Manifest Mastermind telling them what had happened, and why I was leaving. I left out the part that he was STEALING 50% of the business from me. At that point I didn’t care, it was in my best interest to be done with someone who is selfish enough to steal a business from his friend and mentor…

He also owned a domain that had a blog that I created. Actually, he registered this for me back in February when I did the first Social Media Mania. He was supposed to register this in my account, but he registered it in his name. When I decided to leave Manifest Mastermind, he decided to keep that domain as well.

Hacking Into My Own Accounts?

Having recently been screwed out of a business with an ongoing monthly cashflow, I decided to preserve some of what I had built. There were some accounts that both of us had built together. Many of these accounts were accounts that I created from scratch and had grown with my own efforts. I was already losing the cashflow and the most valuable assets (domain names and autoresponder lists). I wanted to preserve the stuff that I had built.

I went to the spreadsheet that we both used to manage the passwords of all the accounts. After finding out that I was locked out of many of my own accounts, I got lucky and logged into a few joint accounts and was able to change the passwords so that he would be locked out.

Of course, he was upset about this and decided to blame me for many things that were completely untrue. He claimed that I deleted 350,000 personal emails (I doubt it’s possible to get that many emails, unless you get tons of spam that you want to keep).  He’s also blamed me for problems he had with facebook and some other issues. He even claimed that he reported me to the FBI for hacking into his computer (I think this is kind of funny and totally unbelievable  ).  I don’t know the first thing about hacking into someone’s private computer, nor do I want to…

After nearly 10 months of telling everyone that we were business partners and co-founders of Manifest Mastermind, he’s deciding to claim that he was the 100% Founder and that I was never his partner.  You can still see stuff that he posted all over the Internet with my name and his as the co-founders. If you’ve been involved with Manifest Mastermind for longer than 30 days, you know how ridiculous that is!

It seems convenient to me that I would be blamed for all kinds of nasty stuff the day after I sent an email to the members about how they should reevalute their membership.

Intially, I didn’t want to respond to a bunch of false allegations. I don’t know what type of problems he’s had since I left Manifest Mastermind.  His problems are no longer my problems. To me it seems like convenient timing to rationalize me as the source of all of his problems.  I’ve received many personal emails from people who said they felt that Manifest Mastermind was not worth the money that was being charged and they have now cancelled their membership. Perhaps this was a revenge attempt to get back at me for costing him some of his stolen profits. Truthfully, I’m glad that this has cost him something. I don’t believe the Universe will allow him to keep his illgotten gains.

The Lesson

It’s been part of my personal mission to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number of people for several years. This was even adopted as part of Manifest Mastermind from my personal mission statement. Although this is highly embarrassing for me to share with you, I am doing so because I believe it conveys an important lesson:

Don’t do any business deals without having a written agreement on paper!

Although it may be tempting to trust someone, things can change. It’s best to be clear about what the roles and responsibilities of the parties involved are. This prevents confusion and helps everyone to be concrete about what the deal is. If it’s on paper, nobody can change it because they spontaneously want it to be a different deal.

If I would have followed this rule it would have saved me several thousand dollars per month AND would have prevented me from being caught in the middle of this ridiculous high-school drama. Don’t make the same mistake that I did. I won’t make it ever again!

What’s Next?

Manifest Mastermind was supposed to be a spiritually centered website to help you manifest your dreams and desires. I don’t believe that the current content there is helping anyone achieve that goal. Back in January when I invited my friends, subscribers and social network contacts to join Manifest Mastermind I promised to help you with these things. Although Manifest Mastermind fell short of that goal, I will be sharing the content that never made it to Manifest Mastermind with you here on my personal blog (http://briancampbell.com). I apologize for allowing this drama to reach you, but hopefully you will learn from this lesson so you don’t repeat my painfully public mistake

Subscribe to the post comments feeds or Leave a trackback