I'm not against having a team. But I have heard so much about how we need a team to succeed. Well, what is success? If success is to be a Fortune 500 company, then yes, you may need a team to do that. But if success is to make $100,000, $200,000, $300,000, $400,000, or $500,000 a year, then no, you don't need a team to do that. If success means to live your dream, you don't need a team to do that. If success means to be your own boss, you don't need a team to do that. If success means to travel the world or become a celebrity at what you do, you don't need a team to do that. The question is: How do you define “team”? I define “team” as a group of people you hire to help you reach your goals. A team is a very tricky thing because there are different levels of help. First, you have the professionals who will only help if they're paid. Then you have the interns who will help for free, but because they're learning about the business, their help may not be very helpful. Then you have the friends and family members who will help you, but they may also feel like they own you or a part of you. Then you have the partner who believes in you and what you're doing and will help you from the ground up for a payday down the road. Any of those team members could become your worst nightmare or become your sweetest dream.

I've coached clients who had a partner in business who they just couldn't see eye-to-eye with. It drove them crazy. Each had a vision for their baby, and because they were afraid to embark upon the journey alone, they brought on a friend, and this friend hindered their progress with their lane-cluttering ideas. The creator loses creative control and starts to have the creator's vision watered down or distorted with the opinions of others. You can't expect someone to understand your grind if God didn't give them your vision.

I haven't found a team to be necessary yet. I'm sure the day may come, but I've been able to make a lot of progress and change my life without a team. I utilize independent contractors. Those people realize they do not work for me alone. They have to get several clients if they want to make a living. Those people realize that they don't have any say-so over my companies or my brand. They do what I ask them to do, and they only give their opinion if it's asked of them. There's only one person who can see your vision and that's you. That doesn't mean you have to be a tyrant or a dictator, but it does mean you have to be very careful about who you add to your team or whether you need a team at all. I've had people who were paid by me weekly, but I considered them seasonal employees, not team members. A team implies that everyone is an equal contributor and everyone has equal say-so. Even if that's not how you have your team set up, it could easily end up that way. There is a reason we see so many teams split up and groups break up and certain individuals go solo and restructure their brand from the ground up. We saw Beyoncé do it. We saw Justin Timberlake do it. We saw Michael Jackson do it. You have to be careful when building a team. If you were meant to stand alone or build a personal brand, then a team has to take on a new meaning.

Beyond needing a team, there are times when you can't afford a team. Don't hinder your progress or implode your business by paying boatloads of money to people who are only collecting a paycheck. Make sure you don't hire a full team just to look successful or to appear to be doing big things. Some people hire a team for their ego. They feel like a one-man show makes them look cheap and unprofessional. But it all depends on where you are in your brand building. I've seen people bragging about their team and taking pictures and flaunting their team because a team makes us look more successful. A team can also make us more broke. We could be splitting profits when we don't have to. If you're the brains behind your brand and if you are your brand, then you may not need a team right away. I'm not against having teams, so don't get me wrong. I'm against having a team when you don't need one or having a team for the wrong reasons.

Hearing people say you need a team has always been a thorn in my side because, for some people, it means they've failed before they've started. Not everyone can have a team. I was one of those people. I came from a place where no one thought outside of that small town of five thousand. Big dreams meant moving to the next small town within the same county. People stayed in the same area all their lives. There are people where I'm from who will never leave the state, never get on an airplane, or never move. So to be told that I needed a team I was like, a team from where? I'm a country boy, so that means anyone I spoke to thought I was dumb. They thought that country meant uneducated and slow. So I would be on the phone with big-city people listening to them fast-talk and lie. I had to show these people over and over that just because I'm country doesn't mean I'm dumb. That was another thing that made building a team hard. The next thing is, everyone wanted money because no one believed in me. How can this country boy make it? How can a young black man without a degree go where he says he wants to go? The result of that was them saying, “yes, I'll help you, but you're going to have to pay me up front and pay me ridiculous amounts.”

Another hard part about building a team is that people will claim they made you. I've never had a team, but I had help along the way. It may be an idea here, a tip there, and a contact here. I remember one lady wrote me after it appeared to her that I had made it, and she accused me of using her and not giving back. I barely knew the lady. I never met her in person, and we only spoke on MySpace in the message inbox. I honestly couldn't remember how she helped me or what she did. I still don't remember to this day. I think she said she used to talk to me and give me tips. Well, if you got all the tips, how am I doing better than you? Why didn't those tips work for you? Why don't I remember the tips you're speaking of? Those were some of the questions I was asking myself. It also reminded me why I have to be very careful about building a team. I realize that as humans we all want credit. We all want to be recognized. We all want to be thanked and appreciated. We all want to be compensated in some way. I'm fine with compensation; it just has to be in proportion to the job being done. I was writing public relations people who wanted $1,500 to $10,000 a month and had no real contacts. I met graphic designers who wanted $700 to design a book cover but had no real portfolio of work. I met people who said they didn't want anything up front, but they wanted a 50/50 split. I realized quickly that if you don't protect yourself, no one will.

So I took a different approach to building my brand. I decided to do it alone until I was forced to hire team members. I wanted to build my brand to a point so that people couldn't say they made me. I only wanted God to get credit for my success, not man. I was very careful what I accepted from people. If someone did something for me, I paid them or I returned the favor. If I didn't pay them or return the favor, then they are still on my blessing list, and they won't make it out of here without being blessed by me. I made everything a business transaction. I don't accept favors because they've always come with a snare. People will say they don't want anything in return, then remind you a year later what they did for you. As humans we want to be appreciated in some way. Nothing is for free. You'll pay now, or you'll pay later. If they say it's for free, then make sure they believe that God is the one who will pay them back. When I give freely, it's because I'm giving to that person as if I'm giving to God. I know God will meet my needs when I'm in need, so that's why I met the needs of others. Nothing is free though. Everything we put into the world comes back in some form. Every seed will reap a harvest of some sort, somewhere. I don't accept free. I have to pay you, or I don't want it because I don't ever want you to say I owe you.

I started getting knowledge and implementing what I learned. The people who would give knowledge weren't doing it for free. It was a part of their marketing plan. They would give knowledge and then hit you with the big sticker price at the end. I learned early on that they give their best stuff for free, and then when you pay them at the end, what they give you is basically the same stuff over again with a little extra added onto it. There's always a price to pay somewhere by someone. I would get on free teleseminars and listen to the free advice. Then I would get off the call and go implement what I'd learned. I remember one time I wrote a PR lady and told her that I was on a call she hosted and from that call I used the information to pitch myself to Oprah and Tyra Banks. She wrote back that she was blown away. Although I had spoken to her in the past, now she wanted money and I didn't have any to give her. I couldn't blame her for not working for free. I don't like to work for free either. I was writing her to let her know that I made it anyway. I did it because I initially wrote her and poured my heart out for help. If a person couldn't hear my heart and see beyond the quick money and help me, then I was determined to prove them wrong. I didn't have to pay her because she gave away the information for free trying to get people to pay, so I know somebody paid her enough money for the both of us. Like I said, every seed sown will reap a harvest somewhere. She took my email and used it on her website as promotion for her business. She used it without my permission. She gained clients from that testimonial I'm sure. Who wouldn't hire a PR person if they saw on the site that she helped a client get on Oprah? I remember getting emails from people asking me if the lady was my publicist and if she got me on Oprah. Then another PR lady I met talked to me about the appearance, and she made an info product and put it online. She did an SEO for the website, which would come up at the very top when you searched “Tony Gaskins on Oprah” on Google. She was selling my information. The first PR lady asked me to be on a call to teach my tips about getting into the media to her students who were paying her for PR insight. I was being used left and right, but that's the nature of the beast. It's another reason I stayed away from teams early on. Everyone I ran into had an angle. Everyone was a scavenger. It was hard to meet honest people who didn't have motives. The biggest crooks will tell you to trust people more and not be skeptical of everyone who tries to help you. They tell you that in order to get you to drop your guard so they can take advantage of you, and I've watched it happen over and over again.

I started learning the game early on. I had a family to feed, and I couldn't feed my family if I was paying everyone else. I invested in myself, not in others. If a person had a product that was reasonable, I would get it if I felt it could help me, but I wasn't going to pay anyone $1,500 a month for marketing me when I could send an email myself. I learned how to pitch myself, and I pitched myself daily to the media. I had a routine every day. I would pitch myself to Oprah, Tyra, then CNN. I would write a different pitch every day. I used the free advice I got from teleseminars, and I used my gift of writing to craft it. It was short and sweet, with a punch in it. I called it the perfect pitch. I learned a concept on the free teleseminar called “a timely pitch,” and I used it. What “a timely pitch” meant was that you should pitch yourself when something relevant to your story happens in the media. I'll go into details about this later in the book. I pitched my butt off.

I wrote my own pitches, and I sent my own pitches. Then they had social media managers. One young lady told me she charges $3,000 a month. To me she's out of her mind, but I know there are many people who would pay it. I didn't let anyone touch my social media. I post every message myself, or I let my wife post it if I can't. I saved myself between $400 and $3,000 a month. I was actually investing in myself. I invested in myself with my time. It takes time to build a brand. Those free teleseminars I was on cost me because that was time I could have spent with my wife and kids, but instead I was on a call. That's an investment. I googled my fingers off, and I read up on a lot of stuff. For anything I needed to know I would talk to my adviser, Google. I would read several articles and then compare and contrast. I would chew the meat and spit out the bones. No matter what I read I made sure that it sat well with me. I consider myself to be smart, so if it doesn't make sense to me, I don't listen to it. I never took anyone's advice unless I agreed with the advice, expert or not. I'm an expert too. We all are experts, so you have to value your own opinion just as much as the next person's. They could be right, but if you don't agree with them, then you have to live with the consequences. I'm fine living with the consequences of my choices. I'd rather live with my consequences than someone else's. There are so many experts who have never accomplished anything other than building a site and writing articles that they've never implemented. I learned early on that you could make more money teaching someone how than actually doing it. For that reason, there are more teachers than doers. If you look online, you'll see so many info products, but if you look into what the teacher has actually produced, you won't find much. That's why I only teach what I've been very successful at. I started to realize that I knew more than a lot of the experts. I think we all know a great bit, but we talk ourselves out of our genius and believe in someone else's genius. You have to believe in you first. The PR lady who had me on her call had been doing it for 20 years, but she wanted me to teach her class and I'd only been doing it for two years; that blew me away. What I learned from this is that we know more than we think we know.

I was my own manager too. I handled all my own negotiations—yes, even the $65 speaking fee I garnered when I was 22. Maybe a manager could have gotten me $2,000, but maybe I would have never known about it because the manager would have had the school pay their company instead of me. I saw things like that happen firsthand, so it made me very skeptical. Not only did I see on TV how so many athletes and entertainers were going broke because their manager or agent took all their money, but I saw it with my own eyes. I remember a guy coming to me and asking me if I knew a certain celebrity. I told him yes, I'd met her through Twitter, and I could reach her. I actually went to her manager and emailed him over and over. The guy's offer was $30,000 for a cruise ship performance. This artist was on a downtime in her career, so I knew she would have jumped on that $30,000 offer very quickly. But her manager never responded to my emails after the first one. I was blown away. Later I spoke to the artist directly about what had happened, and she was very upset. She called and ripped her manager a new one; then he finally called me back and tried to rip me a new one. I told him that he knew he was wrong and that he had dropped the ball and needed to do his job better.

Another one of my celebrity clients had a manager who was smarter than my client. Her manager structured a deal so that my client didn't know that the company was supposed to pay the manager's company directly instead of my client. So when the very large payout was made, the money went to my client's manager instead of my client. My client had a family to feed and could have really used that money.

I've seen that happen over and over again, and it taught me a valuable lesson. Do your own work until you can't do it alone anymore. I've structured my business very differently, and I'm not sure I'll ever do it any other way. I'm not interested in someone else handling all my work. I need the money to come to my bank account, and then I'll pay who needs to be paid. I need to see every contract, and I'll sign it, not have someone else sign for me. I need to be on the calls so I can hear exactly what's being said and what's being agreed to. If I need an agent or an attorney's input, I'll send them the document, have them send it back to me, then I send it to the company I'm dealing with. All final documents must go through my hands. I don't believe in the middleman. I am the middleman. Guess what? I've never lost any money to someone working with me.

If the work becomes too much for me to be involved, then I have to question the territory. If I can't be a part of the process, then why even process it? If it's my brand that's being represented, but I'm not representing, then why do it? My dad recently went to a publishing seminar under the name of a great American speaker who many know and love. Well, at this seminar the speakers he had there representing his brand were charging innocent people $40,000 to $50,000 to publish their books. Those people probably won't sell 500 books nor will they ever see their investment again. The seminar was a complete scam from everything I heard about it, and it's this speaker's name that will take the ultimate hit. That's why I do my own work. I don't want to send anyone out on a speaking circuit in my name because no one can represent me but me. I don't even want my two sons to represent me; they can build their own brand and represent themselves.

Do your own work. Life is about living it. Don't turn over all your hard work to someone who doesn't care about you or the work you've been called to do. Be active in your brand. Do the servant's workload. If you can't get your hands dirty, then it's not meant for you to be doing this. Get out of the way and let someone else have that space.

I still do all my own work. Yes, I've spoken around the world. I've earned millions of dollars. My messages reach tens of millions of people every week, but I still do my own work. I have attorneys. I have publicists. I have managers. None of them are on salary. None of them can sign on my behalf. None of them are on calls on my behalf. None of them can make a call on my behalf. None of them have access to any of my accounts. None of them can receive a check or send a check on my behalf. I do my own work. I call my own shots. God gave me the vision, so I have to see it through to the end. No one else can see it, not even my wife. Why? Because God didn't give it to anyone else other than me. If I get too busy, then I need to go back to the drawing board. If it starts to outgrow me, then I need to pause and make sure I can still have a servant's touch to my work. I don't want to be worshipped or treated like a king. I don't want fans. I want real people who are real supporters. I want to be able to be reached, to be touched, and to be felt. I want to remain a human and let God be God. There are so many leaders who want to be god-like. They want to build something so large that they become the king, and the fans become the peasants begging for food. I don't want that. I understand that some things will grow beyond the proportions I've seen in my mind, but I always want to be accessible. If I have to charge for my time, then I'll charge for my time as a professional, but I want to be reached.

I cannot entrust the work that God has entrusted to me to someone else. One of the main reasons we scale things is to make more money. Is money your God? How much money is enough money? What are you doing with the money? Are you changing the world? Are you clothing and feeding the needy? Or is the money to fund your greed versus your dream? Has your dream become a fantasy? Are you living and appreciating the grace and favor over your life? Or are you lusting after the material things that money can buy?

We have to question our motives and make sure they are pure. You're reading a book from my publisher, and I negotiated the deal. It's not the world's greatest deal, but I'm fine with it. I'm comfortable with the deal. They told me I needed an agent to get a deal with a major publisher, but I don't have an agent. I spoke to authors and agents, and I found out what percentages authors get in publishing deals and guess what? I got that deal. If I had an agent who had to feel special and to feel successful, then I'd be losing money in the deal. But my publisher will be paying my company, not an agent. Maybe an agent could have gotten me a little more, but what would a little more do for me if the agent were getting 15 percent? I did my own work, and I learned for myself what needed to be done on a deal. I made contact with the publisher before I had an agent, so the hard part was already done. The contract negotiations were going to be pretty standard with or without an agent because the publisher isn't hurting for my business. We are both taking a chance, so why give up another 15 percent on my end? A company is going to give you what they want to give you, and you have to know what you want from the deal. Ask for what you want, and if you don't get it, walk away. Another opportunity will come.

Because I work alone, I just ask my heart what I want for the deal, and that's what I ask for. If I don't know what the deal pays, then I ask a professional, and I pay them as a consultant for their information. If I lose some of it, I know it'll come back around. If I get less than what I was supposed to get, then I know they can afford to pay me a few more times. Either way it works; I'll be taken care of because I'm doing the work my heart desires to do, and there's more to life than money. The money will come.

Be humble but be firm. That's the motto I've built my business on. I'm hands-on with my brand, so it's built the way I want it to be built. I get out what I put in, and I owe no man. I've fared just fine working with companies with them being able to talk directly to me. I honestly feel like it gets me better deals because it's harder to talk to me directly and try to get a deal over on me. It's much easier to try to get a deal over on a manager. I just signed a big deal, and I let them know how I run my company and that they would be speaking with me directly and not with anyone else on my behalf. Because of that they told me they want to do more work with me because they've never worked with a personality as humble as I am. I asked around to some agents who have worked with this company, and they told me that their clients have bigger brands than mine, but I was paid double what their clients were paid. I don't know how it happened, but I know it happened and I'm glad about it.

We live in a do-it-yourself world. So don't be afraid to get your hands dirty and do your own work, especially at the ground level. Although I've done a lot, I still consider this my ground level. I'm still building, and I want to build something different and unique. I want to rewrite some of the rules because this way has worked for me. I want you to know if you'd prefer to be involved and be hands-on in your brand, then it can work for you too. I'm tired of seeing people learn the hard way. Although I'm looking for a manager now, I have some stipulations in place, and I'll keep looking until I find a manager who is okay with my stipulations. Even with what I'm asking, there will still be some ways the manager can get a deal over on me or at least try to, but it'll be harder to do. I think people talk to me on the phone, and I sound easygoing and naïve. I may even look naïve, but I'm far from it. If they send me an agreement and the deal never goes through, then I know they are sitting and wondering why the country boy didn't fall for it. I didn't fall for it because I knew it wasn't a fair deal. I've worked too hard and built too much to be taken advantage of. I know my worth and what I bring to the table. I know what I need in order to feel comfortable, and I won't settle for less. I'll work alone until I find what I'm looking for. I know it's out there, but good things take time.

You also have to consider the possibility that God may want you to do something so unique that people look at what you've done and say there must be a God because there is no way one man can do that alone. I'm open to the possibilities of being one of those people who reach certain heights without being owned by others. Don't get me wrong. If you're blessed enough to start your career with an amazing team, with an amazing structure, and you know there is no way you can do it alone, then by all means take that deal. But if you can't find anyone to help you on your budget, then don't be afraid to go it alone. I still do the work of an assistant, a manager, a publicist, an agent, and much more. It's fun and I love it. It helps me sleep at night. So trust me when I tell you, it's possible to work alone until the right people come along. If they don't come as fast as you'd like, keep going, don't give up, and don't quit just because you can't find good people to work with. Anything is possible.