Hi, my name is Mike Flanagan and I’d like to tell you a little about myself.
I started looking at Internet Marketing some time ago. Bought lots of Bright Shiny Objects (BSO’s), did a couple of courses and listened to various ‘gurus’. I registered domains and put up some sites, but only really used them for training purposes.
Now I’ve finally gotten serious and my blog is the hub of an online business.
To be successful in any venture, the advice often given is to follow and copy people who already have success. And the best way to do that is to take one of them on as a mentor.
So I acted on that advice and signed up with a well respected and successful Internet Marketer by the name of Dean Holland, who is the CEO of Internet Profits Ltd. Before I joined his iPro Partner Program, I followed the advice given in his Big Commission Blueprint. This is the course that convinced me to have Dean as my mentor. It was also the thing that finally enabled me to make my first ever income online.
You will notice that my tagline includes the phrase ‘Corporate Survivor’. The first word meaning that I was previously employed by a large global corporation in quite senior technical and managerial positions, with responsibilities for multi-million dollar accounts. The company is one of the three leading Tier One global IT manufacturers, solutions & service providers.
The Survivor part of the tagline is a reminder to myself that I have come through a breakdown and emerged out the other side as a survivor. The experience changed my character, but I have emerged as a far more tolerant and wiser person.
I published a blog post about the breakdown here and created a not-too-serious video about it here.
Original Design
I originally adopted the image of a phoenix rising from the ashes as my logo to represent my burn-out and the beginning of my own rise from those ashes.
I’m updating this section on March 1st 2017 and the phoenix in my logo has evolved to a more stylized version. CS Marketing has also been added to indicate exactly what this site is all about. CS stands for Corporate Survivor and the stylized version of the phoenix logo design is meant to give a subtle indication of a ‘C’ and an ‘S’. Judge for yourself and let me know what you think.
New Design
l’m a technical guy and I’ve always been somewhat of a technical nerd ever since I can remember, so I guess that sort of explains the ‘Technologist’ tag.
‘Entrepreneur’ is reference to the fact that I started my own business once before. In June 1998 I resigned from a secure and stable job to started my own IT consultancy company and walked straight into a challenging IT design project at a major International Airport. Things progressed well and the company soon grew into a 25 employee strong operation offering design, support and Internet hosting.
However in the first couple of years, the bulk of the company’s business was heavily dependent on the air transport industry. The horrendous acts of September 11 2001 forced the world’s airports and airlines into lock-down. A large number of projects were either canceled or suspended indefinitely, which meant small companies like mine couldn’t survive for very long.
I believe that the true mark of an entrepreneur is to accept both success and failure, but carry on moving forward.
