Erich Stauffer

Category: Entrepreneurship

  • My Media Heroes

    I’d like to share who some of my heroes and inspirations in the publishing business (bloggers, media moguls, and Internet marketers) have been and are:

    • Nick Denton: President and founder of Gawker Media, an online publishing group which puts out titles such as Gawker, Gizmodo and Lifehacker. Nick has been involved in internet media since 1996, first writing on the subject for the Financial Times of London, and then founding two companies in the late 1990s. First Tuesday, an internet-era events business with branches in 80 cities, was sold in 2000. Moreover Technologies, which is headquartered in London, provides news search technology to Fortune 500 companies and portals such as MSN. After graduating from Oxford University, Nick began his career as a foreign correspondent for the FT during the revolutions in eastern Europe. Later, while investment banking correspondent, he co-authored All That Glitters, the definitive account of the collapse of Barings Bank.
    • J. Michael Arrington: Founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in USA and elsewhere. Magazines such as Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the Internet. In 2008, he was selected by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world. Wired magazine also included him in a flowchart of “internet blowhards” citing his obsession with “Web 2.0”.
    • Walt Disney: During a 43-year Hollywood career, which spanned the development of the motion picture medium as a modern American art, Walter Elias Disney, a modern Aesop, established himself and his product as a genuine part of Americana. David Low, the late British political cartoonist, called Disney “the most significant figure in graphic arts since Leonardo DaVinci.” A pioneer and innovator, and the possessor of one of the most fertile imaginations the world has ever known, Walt Disney, along with members of his staff, received more than 950 honors and citations from every nation in the world, including 48 Academy Awards and 7 Emmys in his lifetime. Walt Disney’s personal awards included honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, the University of Southern California and UCLA; the Presidential Medal of Freedom; France’s Legion of Honor and Officer d’Academie decorations; Thailand’s Order of the Crown; Brazil’s Order of the Southern Cross; Mexico’s Order of the Aztec Eagle; and the Showman of the World Award from the National Association of Theatre Owners.
    • Rupert Murdoch: An Australian-born American media magnate and the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of News Corporation, often called News Corp. Beginning with one newspaper in Adelaide, Murdoch acquired and started other publications in his native Australia before expanding News Corp. into the United Kingdom, United States and Asian media markets. Although it was in Australia in the late 1950s that he first dabbled in television, he later sold these assets, and News Corp.’s Australian current media interests (still mainly in print) are restricted by cross-media ownership rules. Murdoch’s first permanent foray into TV was in the UK, where he created Sky Television in 1989. In the 2000s, he became a leading investor in satellite television, the film industry and the Internet.  Murdoch and News Corp now own MySpace, Fox, and the Wall Street Journal.
    • Alan Webber: An award-winning, nationally-recognized editor, author and columnist, he launched Fast Company, the fastest growing, most successful business magazine in history and winner of two national magazine awards, one for excellence and one for design. He was named Adweek’s Editor of the Year in 1999, along with co-founding editor William Taylor. Webber understands the important characteristics of a “fast company”: the ongoing competition for the best people, for great ideas, and for the right way to think about leadership.
    • Biz Stone: Co-founder, Twitter Inc. Stone helped found things besides Twitter: Xanga, Blogger and Odeo. He worked for Google with Blogger. He once won a debate at Oxford Union.
    • Mark Elliot Zuckerberg: An American entrepreneur best-known for co-founding the popular social networking site Facebook with fellow Harvard classmates, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes where Zuckerburg is now CEO. He is currently one of the youngest billionaires in the world with personal wealth of US$4 billion in 2010 due to his 24% share of Facebook.
    • Matt Mullenweg: The founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software that runs much of this site and millions of other sites around the world. He wrote the foreword to WordPress for Dummies and the French WordPress book. Matt worked at CNET Networks, but left in 2005 to found Automattic, which is the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, bbPress, IntenseDebate, and BuddyPress. Matt is or has been an adviser to Sphere, WeGame, Rescuetime, and Foodzie.

  • 5 New Ways BP Could Make Money

    BP has been branded as “beyond petroleum” for about 10 years now and The SDN would like to help them with that goal by brainstorming new ways BP could make money outside of oil:

    1. Harvest nickel, potassium, titanium, and zinc from household dust.
    2. Mine nickel, zinc, iron, aluminum, titanium, and copper from ocean water
    3. Purchase and recycle landfills world-wide, re-purposing steel, copper, plastic, and glass.
    4. Recycle electronic waste, harvesting silver, gold, and copper.
    5. Build desalination and water treatment plants worldwide that are powered by geothermal-powered sterling engines, wave energy, and solar power.

  • Strengths and Streams: Part II

    Identifying Strengths and Revenue Streams: Part II

    This is part II of the post Identifying Strengths and Revenue Streams.

    How you can brainstorm to find your “strengths and streams.”

    “Strengths” are the opposite of weaknesses.  Weaknesses make you feel weak, whereas strengths make you feel strong.  “Streams” refers to revenue streams, which is any and all the ways in which you can or have made money in the past.  Brainstorming is the act of recording as many different ideas as possible in a short time without criticizing them as you go.  Save the criticizing (analysis) for after the brainstorming session.  Sometimes bad ideas can help you think of good ideas, so write down any idea that comes to you during this time.  Ready? Here we go. Answer the following questions in order to help you identify your “strengths and streams”:

    Strengths Test – 10 Questions

    1. What makes you feel strong?
    2. What makes you feel weak?
    3. What activities are you not just good at, but also feel good doing?
    4. What revenue streams do you have, no matter how large or small?
    5. What are some ways you have made money in the past, which you no longer do?
    6. What are some areas or ideas of things you have thought of doing, but for one reason or another never got around to doing?
    7. Have you noticed any changes in technology lately that would make something easier for someone to do something?
    8. Have you noticed a change in the demographics around where you live that might open a possibility for a new product or service?
    9. Have you noticed any “cuckoos in the nest” where something that wasn’t supposed to happen did, or something was an unexpected success?
    10. Have you noticed any examples of something that was supposed to succeed, but didn’t? What could you do to adapt to this new reality?

    When I was young I used to collect aluminum cans to recycle for money.  As I got older I collected antiques to resell.  Later on I bought books to resell online or through local book dealers.  These were all retail activities which involved both labor and a product.  Eventually I started trading labor for revenue, which is called service.  I began doing computer repair and web design.  Eventually people began paying me for my advice and I became a business analyst.  Internet marketing is a mix of product and service because you are using your labor to help sell a product that you yourself do not deliver.  The service is in the promotion, marketing, and advertising of the product.  Anyone can do this using the free tools like the Thirty Day Challenge and other websites like Managing Actions which teach you how to be more effective by first changing how you think, in order to change how you act.

    Limiting Factors

    In order to be successful, you’ll need to overcome obstacles.  The first obstacle you’ll face is your own limiting thoughts so you’ll need to know how to deal with those right away.  An example of a negative thought is, “I can’t raise $8,000 to $10,000 in 2 to 4 weeks.  That’s impossible.” The first step is to realize that you are having a limiting thought, acknowledge it, then let it go.  Just because your brain creates a thought, doesn’t make it true.  Learn to manage your thoughts in order to manage your actions.

    The second factor is the people you associate with.  In the same way that you have a greater chance of smoking if you live or hang around smokers or that you have a greater chance of gaining weight if the person or people you live with or work around are already overweight, if the people you hang around or not successful, are not following their dreams, or do not have multiple streams of income, then they are a limiting factor.  If you want to change, then you’ll need to spend less time with these people.

    Next Steps

    Every meeting should have two things: minutes and action items.  We have just had a meeting here.  This article is our minutes.  The action items are as follows:

    Erich: use all available tools and resources to build and promote the identified websites in order to profit from Internet Marketing.

    You: take some time to define the problems you are having, where you want to go, and what you want to accomplish, this will become your goal.

    Erich: measure the success or failure of the Internet Marketing campaign, determined by the metric, revenue per man-hour.

    You: brainstorm to identify your “strengths and streams” – find what makes you strong and what makes you weak, then write down all forms of income past and present.

    Erich: update the personal finance measurements with increased net worth, revenue, profit, and savings from the Internet Marketing campaign.

    You: manage your thoughts in order to better manage your actions. Notice when you are having a limiting thought, acknowledge it, then let it go.

    Summary


    This is not a get rich quick scheme.  This is about how to set a goal, make a plan, and execute (ready, aim, fire).  There is no “thing” that can make you rich, if that is your goal.  There is only you.  Mitch Hedberg said it best when he joked, “I bought a jump rope — but man, that thing’s just a rope. You have to do the jump part yourself.” [Thanks, Johnny] No blog, no self-help book, and no business can help you succeed more than a determination and drive within yourself.  If that is missing, everything else is just a rope.

  • Identifying Strengths and Revenue Streams

    How to Identify Strengths and Revenue Streams

    I need to make $8,000 to $10,000 (depending on what measurements, more on that later) in 2-4 weeks. This is how much I need in order to get back on my feet, financially. I have a day-job as a business analyst, but it doesn’t bring in enough to pay for my daily expenses, let alone the other events like car insurance, BMV taxes, speeding tickets, hospital visits, and car wrecks that happen along life’s path. This also leaves out any fun, gift giving, or getaways that a normal person might want to do. I decided to do something impactful on the bottom line. I needed to stop the cycle of overdrafts, late fees, and the risk of losing my cars, home, and other assets. I needed a plan.

    Triage

    The first thing I did was to get organized.  Personally, this is how I solve every problem.  I continue to organize it until there are no more problems within the problem.  In essence, I create a system.  The system then solves the problem.  This may not be the most effective way to solve a problem, but it is how my mind works and it is one of my strengths.  I feel strong whenever I am categorizing things, especially when I have to name or rename things in order to categorize them.  As a side note, I encourage you to ask yourself what makes you feel strong, then to write that down.  In the same way, notice what makes you feel weak (this is a weakness) and write that down too.  Then, start to do more of what makes you feel strong (your strengths) and less of what makes you feel weak.

    Getting back to the problem at hand, I began by simply listing out all of my daily expenses in a Google Spreadsheet (by the way, if you ever need help setting up Google Apps or using Google Docs, I am your man, just leave a comment and I’ll be able to contact you from there).  Amazingly, I had not been doing this, but instead, paying bills as they came.  I had no idea how much money was coming in or how much money was going out.  If I wanted to know how much money I had, I logged into online banking and whatever the balance was, that was how much money I had.  I’m astounded about how many people manage their finances this way, or maybe it was just the people I was hanging around (more on that later).

    Analysis

    Once I had all of the bills, debts, and income listed out on a spreadsheet, I could start to do my analysis.  It wasn’t pretty.  I was getting snapped by late fees, overdue fees, and loads of interest charges.  I could save a boatload of money just by getting my bills caught up and paid on time.  And if I could get debt free, I could save even more on minimum payments, not to mention the interest.  In general, the faster you pay something off, the less interest you pay.  I had listened to enough Dave Ramsey to know that I needed to have a budget, start an emergency fund, and begin the debt snowball.  The question I had was how to do all of this when your budget is already negative?  One idea is to rotate the late payments so no one payment gets so late that you are either sued, leaned, garnished, or repossessed from.  I noted this as a possible solution, but saw it as more feeble than just trying to increase revenue, while keeping expenses low.  And that is exactly what I decided to do.

    Start

    I did not wait to do anything.  I knew that time was of the essence to as soon as I identified the next step, the next step was taken as soon as I was able to take it.  This sounds easy, but it is highly contingent on your motivation, your energy, and your measurements.  You might know what you need to do, but not want to do it.  This is a motivation issue.  Or you might want to do something you know you need to, but you don’t have the energy because there is only so much time in a day.  Then there is measurement, which shows what you value.  You can’t manage what you’re not measuring and whatever you are measuring will grow, so picking the right metrics and the right measurements is crucial to managing and growing your personal finances.

    Motivation

    I am using a variety of sources to help motivate me towards my goal of achieving $8,000 to $10,000 in 2 to 4 weeks.  One resource is TED Talks.  TED is a website of inspiring videos of entrepreneurs, teachers, futurists, and writers.  When I am feeling less motivated, I simply browse to ted.com and watch a video or two until I am sufficiently motivated to be more like that person, whom I view as successful.  In the same way, Karl Moore videos also inspire me to take action.  I discovered Karl Moore while doing the Thirty Day Challenge where he does “Mindset with Karl.”  The motivational videos mention the Thirty Day Challenge, but can stand alone on their own merit as truly helpful videos.  Karl Moore also writes books on happiness and self-development like The 18 Rules of Happiness and The Secret Art of Self-Development.

    My children, or more specifically, my children’s desires are another source of motivation.  As I wrote in 4 Steps from Wanting to Receiving, having to decide what I can and can’t buy my children at the gas station is not a good feeling for me.  I would like to be able to choose what candy to buy them for health reasons rather than financial ones.  For some reason, this exercise motivates me more than any late fee ever will.

    Energy

    We all get the same amount of time each day, but because of our body’s limitations, energy is finite.  This means that energy must be spent in the most useful way as much as possible.  At my day job we would call this “utilization”.  While production is the sheer amount produced, utilization is production mapped against time, in other words it is how much was produced (how productive were you) in a given amount of time.  That is your utilization rate, which energy (and motivation) can play a large part in.  Managers wanting to more fully utilize their employees might want to invoke actions that either increase energy levels (by say rearranging a department based on strengths, not just needs) or increasing incentives (positive or negative). I have written a post on Ways to Stay Alert and Focused.

    After approximately 10 hours of working and drive times, I had approximately 3 hours of energy left to do work at home or somewhere else each day.  In order to be successful, I am going to use motivation in order to spend an additional hour each day in order to achieve this goal in 2 to 4 weeks.  To do this, I am going to be eating more fruits in the morning, more whole grains at night, and less or no meat for supper in order to stay energetic as I can throughout the day.

    Measurement

    The Law of Focus states that whatever you are focusing on (measuring) will grow.  In Management, Measurement, and Value I note that there is a clear link between value and measurement in that what you measure you also value.  You could say that a measurement of your values is in what you are measuring.  If you, as a manager, are only tracking stats on whether or not your staff shows up on time or not, then your staff will probably show up on time daily.  It shows that you only care (value) about whether or not they are there, but past that point, you are out of the loop.  Contrast that with the manager who tracks personal performance daily to get the utilization rate of each individual staff member, which he can do after implementing the staffing model I developed for his department.  Each staff member is now performing highly and if they come in late, it doesn’t matter, so long as they maintain their personal productivity numbers.

    So what did I decide to measure? Remembering that what you measure will grow, I decided not to measure how much debt I owed.  Instead, I measured net worth, income (revenue), profit, and savings.  I also made another Google Spreadsheet which listed all of my assets, all revenue streams, the profit of each revenue stream, and savings from reducing a debt.  Every day, I would log into the various websites which contained information about my metrics and update the spreadsheet with new values.  Because my mind was focused on net worth, revenue, profit, and savings, I consciously and subconsciously began taking actions to increase those numbers.  In the same way that a manager sees improvement in whatever he or she measures in their  department, I would see improvement in my net worth, revenue, profit, and savings simply by measuring them.

    Actions

    Now that I have identified the problem ($8,000 to $10,000 in 2 to 4 weeks), identified the tools I have available (time, motivation, and energy),  and identified what metrics we are going to use to measure success, the first phase of this goal is complete.  You might call the first phase of research and discovery, “Analysis,” and this next phase, “Execution.”  In the same way that an idea is first created in the mind of man, then written down, and finally designed; it does not take shape until it is developed, manufactured, or implemented.  This second phase is what most people would consider the meat, the actions, the specifics.  It is where you actually do what you say you are going to do.  It’s the “fire” part of “ready, aim, fire.”

    I began by doing a cost-benefit analysis of what activities would net the most gain in the metrics I had chosen.  I identified the resources I had available (the tools), which were my day job, a business that does business consulting in Indiana, an Indianapolis web design company, an Indianapolis coworking group, a DVD conversion blog and an Indiana VHS to DVD business, a blog about query string parameters, doing Indianapolis computer repair, helping my wife with her custom hand-knit wool clothes business or her blog about breastfeeding and Motivated Moms, helping Zac with his cognitive psychology training and discussion on what it means to be human, promoting the Erich Stauffer figurines web site, getting another side job, or having a garage sale.  My wife or children could also get a job or create more revenue for the family.  All options would be considered in order to achieve the goal.  This was a brainstorming exercise, which I’ll discuss with you later on to help you decide what activities you could do in order to achieve your goals, but first I’ll discuss how I did my cost-benefit analysis.

    Costs and Benefits

    It is easiest sometimes to decide what you are not going to do so I first struck the last choices having to do with my children and wife working.  My wife is a stay-at-home mom, but she also home-schools our three children, is a member of La Leche League, and the president of her local Alpha Chi Omega chapter – in addition to knitting for her Cloth Beginnings business.  I also decided not to help other people with their businesses because they don’t care about my goal as much as I do.  This strikes out my day job, computer repair, Zac’s business, and my wife’s business.  While one may want to support a business that is already doing well (defined as profitable – having more revenue than expenses) in the same way that you have the greatest chance at developing a strength you already have than by fixing a weakness, knowing the following information helped me with my decision.  While my day job is a profitable business, it just gave me a raise in July for the year and so is not likely to give me another one and it is not currently allowing any overtime.  Therefore, this opportunity is maxed out.  If I find an opportunity that reaps more revenue than this avenue in my cost-benefit analysis, I may scrap this job altogether.  The other businesses are either not profitable or are sole proprietor shops where the owner wields much influence.  The time it would take to both motivate the owner and get decisions made is longer than the time I have allotted for my goal (if ever).

    After striking those choices, I could then analyze what was left over much easier.  This is the same technique used in the TLC show, Clean Sweep, where the first step in the organizational process is figuring out what you don’t need.  In Clean Sweep, the first step was dividing everything in their house into two piles: trash or keep.  This was the first sort.  The next sort moved everything from the keep pile onto a keep pile or a sell pile.  Only the things left in the keep pile went back into the house.  Even if items did not sell, if it went to the sell pile, it didn’t come back in the house.  Troubleshooting can work the same way.  Let’s say you are troubleshooting a broken computer.  One “pile” would be hardware problems, the other “pile” would be software problems.  Once you decide the problem is hardware and not software related, you then do a fine sort to find out whether the problem is with the hard drive or RAM (memory), for example.  In this case, the following choices remain, which must be analyzed using the fine sort method:

    1. Watershawl, Inc. – business consulting, computer (technology) consulting, Internet marketing, graphic design, web development, web design, hosting, SEO, and online advertising.
    2. Nook Share – a website about Nook covers.

    I created two units of criteria in order to decide which pile the above revenue streams would be placed in.  Remembering the goal to make $8,000 to $10,000 in 2 to 4 weeks, I made the following rules: 1) it must be currently making revenue and 2) it must have the potential to make more revenue than it is currently making.  Again, we strike those activities which don’t meet the criteria.  Watershawl, Inc. and Nook Share both failed the first criteria and Erich Stauffer doesn’t have enough global search traffic in order to make more revenue than it is already making so that left Watershawl, DVD Conversion, Turn Film, and Query String Parameters.  The next criteria is time.  What is the sales cycle on revenue? Will the money be able to come within the next 2-4 weeks? Watershawl’s sale cycle is on average, 2 months, whereas DVD Conversion, Turn Film, and Query String Parameters are all affiliate marketing businesses, which rely on pay-per-action or pay-per-click advertising for revenue.  As soon as ad account levels reach certain levels ($100 on average) they pay out within 2 weeks.  I had just exited the business consulting, computer repair, and web design business for the Internet marketing business.

    Read part II of this series on Identifying Strengths and Revenue Streams.

  • Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation

    TED has a talk entitled, “The Suprising Science of Motivation,” where career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think.

    With a trio of influential bestsellers, Dan Pink has changed the way companies view the modern workplace. In the pivotal A Whole New Mind, Pink identifies a sea change in the global workforce — the shift of an information-based corporate culture to a conceptual base, where creativity and big-picture design dominates the landscape.

    His latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, is an evolutionary transformation of the familiar career guide. Replacing linear text with a manga-inspired comic, Pink outlines six career laws vastly differing from the ones you’ve been taught. Members of the Johnny Bunko online forum participated in an online contest to create the seventh law — “stay hungry.”

    A contributing editor for Wired, Pink is working on a new book on the science and economics of motivation for release in late 2009.

    Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think.

    All of these ideas will be especially relevant to the newest entrants to the workplace, the Millenials/Gen Y. I have been doing staffing models for a while now. To make this all really work, the requirements/expectations and measurements for each role need to be transparent. “Get your work done” is viable only when people truly understand what others think “getting your work done” really means. So, each employee needs to know the results that are expected.

    In my experience, organizations can miss the ball when they fail to motivate and innovate. They give people responsibility and lattitude, but they don’t clearly define the results expected and how progress will be measured. As we know from the Law of Focus, what we measure only expands and grows.

    On the other hand, a larger organization having every individual participating in business planning does start to become a bit challenging. The key is that the vision and goal of the business is clearly stated to all employees, that vision doesn’t change drastically year on year, and taking the time to recruit the right people who are buying into the vision as opposed to how much money they can make. Like Jim Collins says, “You have to get the right people on the bus.”

  • Studying Success

    Successes can motivate you and give you ideas on what to do differently.  My wife has pushed me to use my personality and blend it with what I enjoy doing.  Find something to do that you would normally do for free and start charging others for your services.  Then you will succeed, at least that is what my brother taught me.  This blog post shares a little bit about my family and what my brother has shared with me about how he decided to start his own business.

    Most people don’t like to mow their lawns.  My brother has never complained about mowing.  He finds it peaceful and rewarding when he turns around and sees the straight lines and clean cut grass.  Then he started noticing all the horribly installed fences.  He wanted to install straight, neat and top-quality wooden privacy fences.  He then built his first privacy fence on his property and have critiqued it over and over again in his own mind.  Through those trials he learned what works and started his own fencing contractor business.

    Here is a story my brother tells about learning how to sell:

    I knocked on the door next to a new mowing customer I got two weeks ago because their lawn was worse than the one I was mowing.  When the lady answered she was not prepared to talk to me.  I asked her if I could give her a quote for mowing and she said she had a 13 year old.  Ok I left a business card anyways and said if she changed her mind to call me.  3 days later I got an e-mail from them.  No phone call, just an email.  I was driving to St. Louis on Wednesday when they wrote the email.  I did not check my email until Friday morning while waiting for a colleague in the hotel lobby on a free computer.  Shocked that they even responded and I was now 3 days later to respond, I quickly gave them a call, scheduled a time to meet.  emailed them the estimate at night, they next day they called with the good news that we got the bid and 50% down.

    A Delay is Not a Denial

    Just because someone does not return your message right away or come to a conclusion right away, it doesn’t mean they aren’t interested.  A delay is not a denial.

  • 4 Steps from Wanting to Receiving

    I went to bed last night thinking about my experience earlier in the day with my daughter at the gas station.  We walked there to get my wife a coke, but had some “extra” money to get her some candy.  When we walked through the candy aisle, she started looking at the bags of candy on the left and I looked at the money I had.  I had to bend down and tell her that she could only look on the other side of the aisle, in a section in which I could afford to buy her something.  In bed that night I started thinking how much more awful it would be to do similar things in the future to clothes she’ll want to buy, trips she’ll want to go on with friends, etc..

    All that we have been reading about, hearing about, and preaching about, start doing and acting on it – believing it.  We know it’s true, but I would encourage you to develop the faith.  If I could boil all of our conversations about this down, it would go something like this:

    Develop and understand what you want.     – Desire, or love, is what keeps you attached or attracted (as in Law of Attraction) to the rest of the steps involved. I would venture to guess that for both of us right now, this desire is to first be able to pay all of our bills monthly, then be able to provide extra for our families.

    Believe or train your mind to believe it. – Faith is the next step, bridging the what (desire) and the how.  This is where limiting thoughts from yourself, friends, family, and society creep in, but can be let go through self-talk or mental exercises.  It’s a matter of being acutely aware of your thoughts and managing them towards your stated desires.

    Act as if you have already received it.     – This means both being thankful for everything you have now, but also what you will have in the future.  It also means acting how you will be after receiving the desire, for example, developing systems and/or routines for paying bills and saving money once the revenue starts coming in, believing that it will and we need to be prepared for it.

    Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. – This adage means to not review a gift before accepting it.  Once you have the desire, have trained your mind to believe it will occur, and have started changing actions to prepare for it’s arrival, the next step is it’s arrival.  Make sure that for more open-ended desires like “more money” you are also open-ended on where you expect the money to come from.

    I’ve been listening to an audio version of Peter Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship book.  In that book, Drucker talks about how entrepreneurship is not about starting a new business, but identifying surprises, incongruities, or miss-assumptions, and then creating something new that shifts resources from an area of lower yield to an area of higher yield.  The reason I bring this up is because sometimes businesses, which are ran by humans with similar brains and emotions to our own, go through this same process.  Some succeed and some fail.  Let me give you an example:

    Drucker talks about Macy’s department store in the early 1960’s.  We can assume that the desire of the business was to earn revenue.  They believed that they could and acted as if they had already received the revenue by purchasing buildings, inventory, and machines to process the transactions.  But in the early 1960’s, more revenue started coming from appliance sales than from fashion and for twenty years, managers worked to suppress these appliance sales in order to keep the ratio of fashion-to appliances the same.  Then in the late 1970’s new management embraced the change and despite rampant inflation, Macy’s department stores began beating the market.

    Another story is about IBM thinking they would sell equipment only to universities and scientists until one day they were bothered by a woman who complained that she could not get an IBM sales rep to come down to her library to talk to her.  The next morning, the head of IBM walked into that library and closed a deal with enough revenue to cover next month’s payroll.  That was when IBM decided two things: that they would start selling to anybody and start asking for the money up-front.  You see, the original sales rep desired to make a sale, he believed that he could make sales, but when a sale came by that didn’t match his idea of what a sale would look like, he passed it over.

    Even I encountered this yesterday while doing micro-niche searches for the Thirty Day Challenge.  I kept coming up with results matching resumes and jobs, but every time, rejected them as not what I was looking for.  Then it dawned on me that what I was looking for should only be classified by the mechanisms and categories that got me there.  As long as it fit the goal (desire) of finding a micro-niche that had over 80 hits a day and less than 30,000 competing websites with phrases that matched mine, I had found what I needed.  To clarify, there are two steps past that (SEO competition review and Monetization) which my brain may have been pre-filtering for, but it’s hard to tell pre-filtering from bias.

    Be sure and check out what Zac has to say about this topic in particular in a blog post he wrote back on January 6, 2009 entitled Who Limits Your Success?

    More > If you liked this post, be sure and check out > The Law of Focus…

  • The Art of Gardening

    While pulling weeds in my garden this afternoon, which I am accustomed to doing after church on Sundays throughout the summer, I began consciously trying to free my mind from everything outside of the relationship between me and my garden. And the moment my mind was free, I was able to find the answer I was looking for.

    In the recent past I have been viewing my life in sections, what you might call roles.  I am a business analyst by day, a business consultant by night, a blogger, an entrepreneur, a father, and a husband (and yes, I fear I prioritize in that order, but that is a subject not covered in this blog post).  I preferred calling the roles “sections” because I could better categorize in my mind how to act in each area, while remembering my character – who I am makes up a large part of how I act in each section.  A value I set on myself, the whole of all those sections, was to prioritize things that are revenue generating over those that are not, least most being cost-centers (expense generators).  And since my biggest client was my day job as a business analyst, that gets highest priority.  In the same way, my family is a cost-center so they get lowest priority.  My wife costs more than my children so she is ranked lowest.

    However, I have a garden.  I chose to plant a garden last fall and actively have been working on it since.  This garden is roughly 200 square feet, of which half is corn and the other half made up of strawberries, green beans, tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapenos, and sunflowers (subconsciously I even listed the plants in the order which are most expense-saving to aesthetic-only).  In the fall I turned over shovels of weeds.  In the spring, I brought over compost-rich soil, and a neighbor helped me plow and till.  My wife bought seeds and my daughter helped me plant them.  At least once a week I go out, get on my hands and knees, and pull weeds.  It takes about 5 minutes per corn stalk because the weeds are so thick.  Each corn stalk will create roughly 80 cents worth of corn – if any corn comes at all.  There is no fence around my garden so there is also a risk that some one or thing will harvest it first.  I’m thinking all of these things while pulling weeds and then this question hits me, “How can I put so much effort into something non-revenue generating?” to which I intuitively knew the answer, “Because it’s exactly like starting a business, which you love to do.”

    The Art of the Start

    Starting a business usually involves many hours of preparation and toil for little or no return – all in hopes for the big payoff at the end, the harvest.  Buying the seeds is easy and clean.  Preparing the bed is a little harder, but at least the weeds aren’t growing then and you can ride the results of your preparation for a while.  Planting is not so much difficult as mentally challenging and sometimes stressful.  It’s no longer just churning up dirt, you’re dealing directly with product development now.  Plant too deep or space to unevenly and you’ll get waste.  There is no way to know how the decisions you’re making now will affect the harvest, but they will – tremendously.  You water the seeds through promotion and pull weeds by dealing with all the little problems until the harvest comes in.  But if you don’t stay on top of the problems, the problems keep growing.  Just because you ignore the problems doesn’t mean they stop growing.  The funny thing about weeds is, individually they are easy to pull.  The problem is in their magnitude.

    Like in Getting Things Done or any other personal productivity program you can think of, the key to projects or problem solving is defining the next step and taking action.  Projects can sometimes seem like what author Jim Collins calls “big hairy audacious goals”, but if you break them down into “next steps,” big goals can seem manageable.  Author Jack Canfield tells an allegory about driving to California from New York at night: you don’t have to see all the way to California, you only need to see the next 200 feet in front of you.  So if your project is 200 square feet or 200 feet, define the next step, but of equally importance: take action.  The weeds, or problems, will not stop coming.  You must develop a system for dealing with them, stay on top of them, and you just might enjoy a bountiful harvest.

  • A Rainy Day is the Best Time to Sell and Umbrella; How to Become Successful in a Recession

    Now that America is in an Awakening, we need manufacturing more than ever.  Start in the ground.  What raw materials do we have to work with?

    • Fossil fuels for energy (hundreds of years of coal, at least ten years of oil, and some natural gas to boot)
    • Copper (a third is still in the ground, a third is in use, and a third is in landfills – we’ve got to go remining)
    • Iron (used to make steel and the first Industrial Revolution, it will be used again for the Awakening).

    Lets start with US automakers.  GM, Chrysler, and Ford.  Go Rockafeller and bring it home, vertically.  Fire the unions, convert unused factories into foundries or merge with a metal manufacturing company such as US Steel.  Second, convert other factories not needed for road vehicle manufacture and begin making locomotives or “mag lev” transportation.  BE TRANSPORTATION COMPANIES, NOT AUTOMAKERS.  Consider partnerships with GE and Boeing (and get your head out of your ass).

    America needs a SWOT analysis and to act as a cohesive whole to make the Awakening work.  What tools does America have to work with?

    • Large amounts of energy – dams, wind, nuclear, coal, natural gas, wave, thermo, and solar.
    • Large educated workforce – we might not be the best educated, but we are a smart population.
    • Willing workforce willing to innovate – Americans are bred to take risks, that’s how we got here

    US financial industry, you were like the son who asked for his inheritance early only to squander it, but we took you back, even threw a party for you under a big TARP tent.  Start lending.  Take a risk.  Be entrepreneurial, invest in those who need investment, and give hope a chance.  If you fail, you already know America will be there to catch you when you’re too big to fall.

    The construction industry, you were the straight man, emerging in the Awakening as the “victim” of the collapse.  Its time to use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.  Lets renew our inner cities and small municipalities.  Stop all new construction until existing buildings are repaired or in use.  We’ve got to right the ship.  The immigrants are leaving the country.  You’re losing your workforce and potential new home sales.  There are enough lead-paint, 16-gauge, non-grounded fire traps in America’s small towns to keep every home builder in business for a decade if not a generation.

    So how can you become successful in a recession?  Same as always:

    1. Stop doing what doesn’t work and resolve to be open to change.
    2. Write down a dream or a goal (ask yourself what you want to have, become, or do).
    3. Build a team – surround yourself with like-minded individuals with similar goals.
    4. Pick a distribution channel (Wal-Mart, Amazon.com, your own website).
    5. Figure out who your target market is (who your customer will be).
    6. Pick a product or service (something to resell, rebrand, license, distribute, or sell).
    7. Find out how much it will cost to make or do and what you will charge for it.
    8. Test with your target market (if successful, go on, if not, start back at #1).
    9. Let people know about it (promote through trade magazines, or online through PPC).
    10. Create procedures so that you can sell your business and start another.

    I highly recommend three books for those who want more detail on how to start a successful business in good times or bad: