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We have great joy in welcoming Amy Bennett to Real Interactive and BeSinful.com. Amy will be managing our glamour modelling site and will also be involved in helping develop and market some of our new sites launching later this summer.

Amy has already had a successful career as a glamour model so will be perfectly suited to building the credibility and success of our modelling sites and business.

Much of her success has come from not just being busty and beautiful, but down to having brains too! Doing a lot of the marketing herself Amy already knows how exactly what our customers want, and better still how to get them to the site in the first place.

If you wish to find out more about our star recruit, or are noisy and just want to see some of her portfolio visit:

www.besinful.com/amylu
www.amylu.co.uk

Just read an article that says the number of UK millionaires is half what is was in 2007.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8068967.stm

I am not in the least bit surprised. Almost most of this drop in numbers will be purely because of the housing market decline with so many peoples rise in fortune over the past decade being directly linked to the increased value of their home.

It always amused me how so many thought themselves clever by simply having properties that increased in value, the reality is most of this was down to luck - they bought at a time when house prices would shoot up value regardless of what they did. Those same people now are probably realising that perhaps 1 house is not the best measure of wealth.

I on the other hand bought our house at almost the very top of the market. Stupid perhaps. But it puts me in a unique position. I paid a price I was happy to pay for our house, I assumed it would go down in value at some point before it eventually goes back up again. So right now I don’t actually care what the house is worth!

I also own a very small property in Bulgaria, again I cam in a few years late to have really seen the massive increase in value, and no doubt it has lost a little value recently. But again I don’t think I care! One day I will get out there, build something nice on the plot and use it as a little get away. I could make a healthy profit on it today, but that’s not why I’ve kept it.

I am patiently waiting for the arrival of our baby who is already 8 days late. Very soonn I will have a valid excuse for the late nights and lack of sleep! Providing I help out around the house. Which of course I plan to.

Aside from that excitement I have much more planned for the short term and long term. These past few weeks I’ve been trying to organise some of my madness, and as a result things are really coming together. Over the next few weeks I will have:

• New employees starting.
• New sites being launched.
• Existing sites being relaunched (this time properly!)
• Monitoring processes being put in place to test optimise every step, action and landing page on our sites.
• Sites being fully integrated with our email solution so that all our sites newsletters and notifications can be fired out automatically with no delivery issues.

My personal site,TimRees.net is just about complete bar some minor graphic updates.

Please do visit the site and subscribe to the RSS feed. Here you will get a little more varied and personal information, and still of course updates on my business adventures.

MakingaMillion.net (this site) will now be very much focused on the my business’ and my own financial growth (or downfall).

I am currently sat in my new office, which I hope will be home to a new small but effective team to take Real Interactive to the top. Phone lines just being set up.

This week has mostly been about settling in here, phone interviews, interviews and reviewing CV’s. I’ve got a small mountain of them to get through still and am confident I will find quite a few more to put through.

I’m very happy to be recruiting at a time like this, there are more talented individuals looking for jobs than ever before with salary expectations not out of our budget. Being a new, small and growing company we can offer better mid and short term progression opportunities than joining a large company.

I think in the past some of the individuals I am seeing would have been more reluctant to join such a small company, but we if anything are more secure than many very large companies now. Even those that are not facing immediate problems are cost cutting and closing departments. I’ve seen so many CV’s from people who’ve had secure jobs at the likes of Vodafone looking for work after redundancy.

Being in Newbury I’d expect to see ex-Vodafone employees, but not the numbers I have, and not of the quality I have.

So - things are certainly looking good employment wise.

On other fronts
Development team is also expanding with designers, developers and project managers all joining making all my ambitious plans look much more realistic. I am beginning to get very excited about seeing a finished BeSinful.com which we’ll be promoting very hard. Though a site with beautiful, scantily clad ladies needs little promoting!

TimRees.net is being worked on and nearing completion. Site exists but is a little tatty right now.

Less than 2 weeks to Abi’s due date, so critical I get as much done in how ever many few days as are left now.

Just a random thought for you…

If you’re concerned about the global climate and want to do something about it - go on a diet!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8004257.stm

bye bye fatties.

I am currently sat in a bar in Kiev. Being a good boy and drinking a non alcoholic beverage.

I left Monday morning and land back home Friday night, and have something like 25 hours of travel in between. It could be less if I was taking internal flights, but I want to experience the railway here first - I’ve done plenty of flights already!

However, with all this travel I am looking forward to it, as the main purpose of the trip is to visit a new development office we’ve just set up. The sun is shining here too so I am even more upbeat about the trip than usual.

It’s important that with two offices here, a few projects and ambitious launch dates, everyone here is pulling together.

I also need to make sure that there is no one is waiting for anything from me. There’s no point in trying to drive speed and efficiency if I am the weakest link.

That’s it - I’ve finished my coke so time for another as I continue to work here.

I find myself at 1.30am working…… again…… and probably not being that efficient. So probably a good time to do something which is not too taxing like writing this post!

A very busy few days - I am still reviewing budgets, but also more exciting things like looking for offices not too far from where I live. This is the next logical next step for building a small UK team responsible for growing Real Interactive. The hunt for a Business Development Manager is now well and truly on.

I’ve also just been putting together notes on the site which will soon effectively replace this one. TimRees.net - no point visiting it until May 2009 as there is nothing there yet. Nothing at all.

So amongst all this excitement on top of the usual development progress, I thought it sensible to have a quick look at what sales were looking like this month. Surprisingly at first glance they don’t look to good: something like 10% down on last month.

I don’t tend to get too bogged down with the exact figures until the end of the month. There is still too much variance from day to day to start thinking about them at this level. Naturally I would still prefer to be up 10% than down!

No point in me guessing exactly what’s going on. What is interesting is that we are close to having more paying members than at any other time before. Which I hope will mean the rest of the month will pick up to reflect this.

We have cut marketing which we knew was ineffective, and now building it up in areas we know are effective. It will take a few weeks yet for this to really show in the sales figures.

And as I let out a rather long yawn I think it is time for me to retire for the night. It’s going to be a rather similar day tomorrow.

Had a bit of a restless night last night. Lots on my mind at the moment, mainly business and thankfully nothing to stress about. I also started thinking about what it’s going to be like having a baby here again, only 6 weeks to go now, and it’s first time I’ve really thought that much about it. Will probably start counting down now.

Anyway, just wanted to post a nice graph so can see the continued progress with revenues generated on our sites. I think we’ll have a month or two flat again while the effect of marketing starts to come through, then we’ll begin to see more growth. My predictions for second half of the year are we will see marketing come good at the same time as launching some affiliate offers. The combined effect should be some insane growth!

There are times in everyone’s life that you have to make some tough decisions and inevitably make sacrifices. Giving up your last rolo to a loved one (though as I have just discovered on wikipedia there is an even number of rolos in a packet so this should not be a problem), or maybe something even worse than that!

Over the past few days I have been faced with a pretty tough choice: To go out and buy myself a a big, fast, sexy and really very silly car…. or not!

I have been doing some financial planning and sadly it looks like it might be in my interest to put this dream car on hold for a few more months.

This is not because the I’m struggling. I could easily keep overheads low and cream off a very healthy profit each month. But knowing the true potential of the business, and supposedly doing my best to build some kind of reputable long term company I know this approach isn’t sensible. The money that could be going on a supercar shall instead be put to better use in employing someone to help grow the company. Clearly a much wiser investment.

I am actually putting the company in a position where the balance sheet will show a loss over the next few months, normally a somewhat risky decision. As 100% shareholder I don’t have to justify this to anyone. Though if I did, it would still be easy.

The sites my company runs bring in a huge percentage of revenues from recurring and re-initiated payments every month. These are existing customers that we have already swallowed the acquisition costs on. These members are automatically paying a subscription every month, or re-subscribing. At any point I can massively reduce overheads, stop marketing, and still see the same income for a few months, before it slowly starts to tail off, and easily pay back any small losses. I have the added benefit that we do not have a long list of suppliers, and those that we do are not directly linked to our member acquisitions, so any future money we make from existing members need not leave the company.

My plan is naturally to grow revenues so future profits swallow these losses without the need for any cutbacks. My projections look good for this to happen, and I have quite a good track record when it comes to realistic projections!

That’s it. No car for me for a few more months then . The trade off is a bigger and more stable company. A sacrifice worth taking.

Maybe we’ll have an Indian summer and I can have my mid-life crisis a little later in the year.