Most all my self-employment experience has been in association with other businesses. When I first became interested in self employment I did not realize how much co-operation with others was involved with being your own boss. One needs to get along with providers of so many products and services, and of course there are also the clients and customers to get along with. Overall, I love it. It's kind of wild and wonderful and every day is a new adventure.

Supervisor & Trainer 1981/82 "MacLean's On Campus" program. Worked with 12 sales representatives for U of T, York U., and half the community colleges in Metropolitan Toronto, providing them with display posters and coded cards to fit into the display posters, and providing them with guidance and a friendly ear in their roles on the campuses getting the subscription displays up and available to the students on the campuses. I myself focused especially on getting cards out to the students at the University of Toronto's Scarborough and St. George campuses. This was a forshadowing of my later involvement in multi-level marketing, as Macleans on Campus, like most MLM companies, used ID codes to identify referral sources, and also like MLM companies, provided commissions not only on one's own activities, but also to the supervisor for the sales of the people he supervised. As is natural for self-employed individuals working in association with another company that provides a product that one is marketing, I was paid only commissions, no salary or hourly wages, and there were no deductions taken off my paycheques.

Editor/Producer Summer, 1982; contracted by Process Industry Consulting Service (PICS), owned by Jose Roncon, to be the editor/producer of a 30 page, technical document directed towards the pharmaceutical industry. Upon completion, I was further contracted to research and plan the distribution scheme for the document.

Independent Distributor 1985-1987, I worked with the Shaklee corporation, promoting their nutritional and cleaning products. Mostly I joined in order to get the products at the wholesale price, although I did sell less than half a dozen bottles or jars of products to friends and family members. Eventually I dropped out of Shaklee, but did not lose my taste for multi-level marketing (MLM). Shaklee was one of the first big companies to use multi-level marketing strategies, and the first one that I worked with (not counting Macleans On Campus, which did not think of itself as an MLM, even though it paid two levels deep), but it was far from the last!

Mobile Disc Jockey 1985 to 1988, working in association with Universal Sounds, owned by Alan Heller, whom I remember as a very nice young entrepreneur who managed a fairly large stable of talented DJs. I would go out on the road most every weekend an play music at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and birthday parties. My most embarassing moment was when I was working a wedding at Casa Loma, with its very old and loose electrical outlets, and just as the first song for the newlyweds to dance to was playing, I took a step in one direction, my foot lightly touched an electrical cord, but that was enough to pull the plug out of the loose socket and kill the music and the mood. The groom looked furious. I'm still sorry about that accident to this day. I hope Casa Loma has upgraded their electrical system since then.

Sole Proprietor of Natural Match This was promoted by me as an international introduction service for people into natural living. It was, with permission and encouragement, modelled after a similar service called Natural Match, run by a nice British couple who lived near Cambridge, England, and also ran a company called Home Swop. I ran Natural Match from Spring, 1988 until Summer, 1989, when I sold the business to a fellow Torontonian who made quite a few changes to the way the service operated.

Writer In the mid-to late 1980s I did a lot of volunteer work in the performing and literary arts, with hopes of going professional. I managed to have one article I wrote published for pay. It was called "New Age London", and was printed in October, 1988 in a magazine called Toronto Dimensions .

Counsellor and Psychotherapist From 1994 to 2000 I actively ran a private practice out of my North York home and also out of a rented office in the mid-town area of Toronto. I specialized in writing Dreikurs Life Style Summaries (D-LSI). During this time I wrote several articles which were published in different local magazines distributed for free around town, province wide to my colleagues in OACCPP ) and internationally in Ahimsa , which in those days was the name of the quarterly journal of the American Vegan Society . I also gave several lectures around town, mostly to brunch meetings of different religious groups, for which I not only got paid, but also fed!

Network Marketer In 1995 I joined Cell Tech, where I got some great training in face to face network marketing from my sponsor Debra Rosen, her sponsors Pat and Bart Burness, and their upline leader, Cindy Bertrand. I learned much about nutritional products such as digestive enzymes as well. At the time I was a vegan and wanted digestive enzymes that did not come in animal gelatine capsules. When I learned about another network marketing company that sold enzymes in bulk powder form with no capsules at all, I joined up with them, and shortly after that sold my Cell Tech business. The company I joined was called Staff of Life. Shortly after that they changed their name to R-Garden. It was with R-Garden that I really started to become successful in network marketing, the turnaround happening around 1999 and 2000. Since then I was blessed with a fairly steady stream of earnings from the R-Garden company which continued until the end of 2006 when they changed the marketing plan from multi-level marketing to a straight one level deep affiliate program. I've put emphasis on earning a living through online network marketing. I've been quite busy in developing this element since I got my R-Garden website in 2003. You can see an overview of all the different networking programs I'm currently in by clicking here.

Investor My move towards online network marketing of R-Garden led me to exploring online methods of advertising. One of these methods was traffic exchange, which can be a free way of generating traffic to one's site, earning credits towards getting visits to one's site by looking at other people's opportunity sites. Well, looking at other people's opportunity sites through my involvement with various traffic exchange sites opened up my eyes to many other network marketing opportunities, but also investment opportunities where my money could make money for me. I have a liking for medium and high yield investment programs, but only those which are not ponzi scams, but real investment programs where money invested goes towards trading on the stock market or commodities. For more information about my involvement with such programs, please click here.