Secrets of Online Entrepreneurs: How Australia's Online Mavericks, Innovators and Disruptors Built Their Businesses ... And How You Can Too

FOREWORD

A book on entrepreneurship is exciting, but a book on entrepreneurship written by an entrepreneur, more so.

Bernadette Schwerdt is a remarkable woman. And when I heard she was writing a book, Secrets of Online Entrepreneurs and had asked to interview me for it, well, I jumped at the opportunity. Bernadette is a writer, yes, but she is also a formidable entrepreneur. Her copyschool business is one of Australia's most successful copywriting training companies and she has trained over five thousand people in the art of writing words that sell. Like me, and so many other entrepreneurs I have met, Bernadette has broad-view experience in the business world, including as a much in-demand public speaker, a corporate facilitator and trainer and an ad agency executive to name a few.

Bernadette has a passion for this exciting world of online entrepreneurship, one which I was fortunate to have stumbled upon in the latter part of the nineties — right place, and right time!

The entrepreneurs she has interviewed for this book reflect the broad range of people who are optimising and capitalising on the opportunities that this technology age provides. Some of the dynamic examples in this book include:

John Winning, the face of new retail in Australia, is still a young man yet runs one of Australia's most successful appliance businesses, Appliances Online, with over five hundred employees.

Tony Nash, a veteran of the internet industry was told that the online book business was doomed ...