Fearless Money

I’m attending South By Southwest this year, and of course that means attending a lot of parties, meeting people and connecting. Last night, I got into a fashion discussion with a new friend and I mentioned my new fashion lust.

I want a pair of the incredible Mark Nason Threat boots, which are sadly about $600 new. Ouch. Luckily they are a mere $200 or so from eBay.

The amazing thing is that he had a pair with him at SXSW. Ha! Small world.

Still, I can’t justify actually buying them at this moment, not while dealing with the divorce and everything. Ah well. It is a goal.

Technorati Tags: mark nason, fashion, boots

A little sanity check during an incredibly turbulent time in the economy.

Don’t Quit

If you are already out there building your own business, keep at it. If you were all prepared to jump ship from your lousy office job, do it. The nasty little secret is that harder times clean up the pool for the people who are actually good at what they do.

Yes, a lot of businesses fail, although that stupid “fact” about 9 out of 10 businesses failing in the first couple years is so biased and slanted as to be nothing short of a lie.

For example, you know that selling your business counts as a “failure” in that statistic, right? Sounds like a win to me. The only people who pump that biased “fact” are selling you something or are trying to talk themselves/you out of starting a business. They are losers and you should always ignore losers.

The the truth is that if you are smart, practical and aggressive, you’ll do fine. If you work on the business at least some of the time. If you actually build value for clients and customers. If you actually have a plan, and if you can get over the aversion to actually telling people what you do and why they should buy from you, then you’ll do fine.

In fact, you’ll do better than fine, since all the fair-weather folks will drop out very early on in the so-called harder times. Persevere and you’ll come out on top during the recovery.

Face it, are you really safer at that corporate gig? I’ve been laid off, or quit just prior to mass layoffs several times from supposedly secure jobs. The idea of safety in putting all your income earning potential in the hands of another is simply foolish, and I finally learned the lesson reality was trying to teach me.

Don’t Sell

At these kinds of times, when the market is on a roller-coaster, I usually just turn off all market data feeds for a month or two. I can’t stand thinking “I’ve lost $x,xxx today.”

The truth is, if you look at it historically, the people who simply rode out the huge turbulent periods did fine every time. The people who actually see the big dips as opportunities and buy the right stuff at the bottom of the trough did way better than fine. They joined the ranks of the newly rich come recovery time.

Yes, it is annoying. Yes, you might need to put off that addition to your house because you shouldn’t liquidate the asset you were going to use to pay for it. But selling because everyone else it? You aren’t that dumb.

In the last year, I’ve found that planning and task management is critical to my success as an entrepreneur. Of course it is! I knew that before, but the last year has really helped me come up with a great set of tips for motivation and efficient productivity.

I use a blend of three sources for my motivation, productivity and planning methods. First, I use David Allen’s “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” with modifications proposed by Zen Habits, to manage my enormous-but-well-organized task lists. Second, I blend in the experienced and curmudgeonly advice of Dan Kennedy from his book “No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs (No B.S. Series)” .

The combination works wonderfully for me.

I start every week with a planning period of 30-45 minutes, where I review all my projects and adjust due dates. I resisted due dates for a long time, since they are not officially GTD approved, but taking DK’s advice, I started emphasizing them again, with the result that I feel much more in control.

During the weekly planning, I set 4 or 5 “Must Dos” for the week.

Every morning, first thing, I do the daily planning. This involves setting 3 Must Dos for the day, one of which has to be related to a long-term goal. Referring to my schedule, I write out a detailed schedule for the day, with no unscheduled time for the productive portion.

Then, throughout the day, I track how my time is actually spent. It rarely fully matches up, but that isn’t the point. The point is to get extremely good at estimating my time and how long tasks actually take.

Several of DK’s ideas from the “No B.S.” book have strongly impacted how I approach my daily productivity.

Firstly, I almost never answer the phone. I prefer to respond to voicemail via email, since it is more concise. If I am going to have a phone conversation, I try to limit the time allotted before the call is underway. “I have a meeting starting in xx minutes, so I’ll need to be off before then.”

I do not read my email at least until after lunch. To do so is to invite distraction during my peak productive hours.

When I do read my email, I read and process all of it, leaving a clean inbox. There is almost never a problem that arrives via email that can’t wait these few hours. If there is, it is probably because I’ve allowed a client to expect this level of service, and I have to learn to train the client better.

I do not attend meetings unless I am billing for them or unless I am convinced the project will make me at least $10,000. Meetings are a life and productivity killer.

If I do attend big meetings, I try to leave when my part is over.

On a monthly basis, I block out my time for the next month. This means filling my calendar with big blocks of time already allocated to projects or to daily disciplines such as writing or marketing. I do not lightly change these blocks of time. I’ve found this tip alone has increased my productivity by at least an hour a day, probably more.

The result of this focus on productivity, client management and task completion?

I no longer struggle to fit in productive time in the small sections of time afforded me between interruptions. It makes me enormously more effective, and possibly more important, happier. I don’t have to bite back a reflexive snap at someone who calls me just as I’m entering “flow” when writing or programming, because I just won’t answer the phone. Instead I enter the flow and really get some things done.

Technorati Tags: productivity, gtd, time management

For as long as I’ve had any business, I’ve done my own accounting. After all, I have a decent accounting program (MYOB FirstEdge ) and I understand the basics of accounting.

In a way, it is like programming or a particularly boring board game. You learn the rules and apply them to the inputs: receipts, bills, invoices and expenses. But all the time I find myself delaying and avoiding keeping my books up to date.

The final straw was me realizing on Thursday that I hadn’t been treating PayPal properly. I’d been treating it as “undeposited funds”, when really I should have been treating it as a bank account. It wasn’t a big deal before I started getting a flood of payments via PayPal primarily from my overseas clients . So, I downloaded my past year history and entered all of it that way.

Of course, that meant I needed to correct (with journal transactions), all transactions I’d entered inappropriately as petty cash or undeposited funds. Laboriously, line by line, I got it all to balance and be understandable. Like I said, I can do it, but it makes me want to pound my fists into the desk in bored frustration and irritation at the time this is taking.

Bleah and bleah again. I’m definitely outsourcing that job as soon as possible. I’ve got an interview with a bookkeeper this Thursday. It will be money well spent not to waste my time on stuff I find so incredibly boring.

Technorati Tags: accounting, outsourcing

A couple years ago, I lost several hundred dollars to experimentation Google Adwords, without making a dime. I suspect that this is completely normal. It is easy to lose much more, I imagine.

I was discouraged, leaving Adwords alone since then, despite the fact that I know a couple people personally who make multiple six-figure incomes purely from Adwords campaigning. But, with my recent subscription to Earn 1K A Day I’ve decided to try it again.

Many members of the site highly recommended the technique found in the Campaign Blast Method ebook. So, I bought it and read it through. The idea is quite simple really.

1. Get a ClickBank account and/or a CJ account to get access to thousands of products you could promote.
2. Pick a niche. There is tons of detail in the book about how to pick good ones.
3. Pick a seller in the niche. This is more a matter of weeding out bad ones than necessarily finding good ones. The guide had several ideas about what to look out for, primarily “leaks” on the sales pages.
4. Research a quick set of keywords that buyers of the product would be using in searches. For this, I ended up using NicheBOT to help me find good, low competition keyword phrases.
5. Put up your campaign.
6. Check daily, and look for a winner (made a sale), or a loser (spent more than you’d make on a sale).
7. Remove losers, keep and expand winners.

Steps 2-5 above are supposed to take about an hour. My first campaign (a loser) took 5! But I’ve been getting much faster, especially with the help of NicheBOT, and I’m down to about 90 minutes.

I made my first sale, finding a winner in a hot niche, about a week into the process. That about fits with what the book gives as a guideline. It says 1 in 7 to 10 will be winners.

In any case, I’ve lost my fear of Adwords, and I’m finally starting to make some money. I’m not near six-figures yet. More like two. But if I can make two, I can make six! It is just rinse-and-repeat at that point.

Technorati Tags: adwords, campaign, nichebot, review, affiliate marketing

I guess I fell off the edge of the Earth.

I think possibly the “I don’t want this site to die” blog entries are a great indicator that a blog is about to fade. I knew it when I wrote that last one. Ah well.

So what has really happened?

Well, this site was one of the few things keeping me happy and interested when I was an employee. In the process of successfully and happily reinventing myself as an entrepreneur and business owner, this site has rapidly lost interest for me.

These days, I worry more about pitching $500K global site relaunches than I do about whether a few dollars got put in the wrong bucket of my budget. That’s not to say that it isn’t important, just that my priorities and viewpoints have naturally shifted.

I want to revive the site, but I’m not going to try to summon interest in writing about personal finance. I’m going to talk about the things that really matter to me these days. The need to develop multiple income streams, the joy (no sarcasm intended) of billing clients, the fun of pitching big clients, and ways that I am succeeding or failing in these areas.

Seriously though, my favorite time of the month is billing people. I love it. That and stating my (deliberately “premium”) bid price to a prospective client without batting an eye are my new favorite activities.

Yesterday I had my kickoff call with a new client from Germany. Analyzing the sale, which is always a good idea, I was thinking about why he didn’t even blink an eye at my hourly rate. It truly is a bit higher than many can get away with charging for web development work, and I often have to defend the rate. I’m worth it, of course, but that isn’t really the point.

The point is that he didn’t even flinch at the rate. I thought about it. Maybe my blogging at CodersEye is so great and such a credibility enhancer that he was primed for me. Possibly my work with the Satchmo open-source Shopping Cart Engine was the selling point. Those help of course, but they also help me with my U.S. customers.

Then I realized the key difference. He’s German. To him, with an incredibly strong Euro, my rate was normal, or even a bit cheap. Haha! I’m the cheap outsourced labor now.

So how do I feel, being exploited

I feel wonderful. I can charge my preferred hourly rate, so I win. He can pay me at a reasonable-to-him rate so he wins. If this is exploitation, I’m all for it. Please, exploit me.

Hey all you Europeans! Outsource to the newly cheap American programmers!

Technorati Tags: outsourcing

I’m home for the evening from a weekend Buddhist meditation retreat, and I was thinking about how unlikely it was that I’d have much to post on this blog about it.

But then I realized that there is something of value for my readers. I’ve blogged before about giving gifts and feeling better about spending money, due to budgeting, but I’ve never talked about the education fund. In our "freedom account", I set aside money for adult education, along with a separate account for education intended for our kids.

That very important bucket of money goes to whatever educational opportunities we want. I’ve taken Spanish classes, bought books & CDs, and now paid for a weekend meditation retreat. My wife has taken language classes of her own, and paid for roller skating lessons.

Why?

You may be wondering how this is different than just buying these these things straight out. It is remarkably different, actually. There’s no hesitation, no quick balancing the checkbook to make sure we can afford it. No guilt or discussion about spending the money. That’s what it is *for*, and the money is already set aside.

I hope that makes sense. If you were raised with a frugal mindset as I was, you’d understand how liberating this freedom from spending guilt really is. Budgeting is such a help in this area, in ways that I never expected when I started a couple years ago.

Technorati Tags: budgeting, education, meditation

I’m in the middle of reading Robert Frank’s fascinating new book "Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich."

One measure of a book is how many conversations it sparks, and by that measure this book is gold. I brought it on vacation, ending up talking about it to my brother in law and his roommate in separate conversations. I’ve probably talked about it with nearly every friend I have, which has got to be a record for me.

It gives a wealth of facts and figures to support the conversational, unbiased reporting of how the wealthy (and the extremely wealthy) live and think. I hadn’t realized the explosion in numbers of millionaire households, essentially tripling in the last 10 years. Nor had I known that most of the new wealthy are Democrat rather than Republican.

I was particularly fascinated when reading about the difficulty the wealthy have in finding good household managers (new-style butlers). The pay is very good, the work is interesting, and the accommodations excellent. Yet there is a shortage of trained, willing household managers. I think many people, most definitely including me, think "nice pay, but I’d rather be the wealthy guy than the servant."

Another interesting area is Mr. Frank’s discussion of where "true wealth" begins. Defining that status as the level at which one can live a wealthy lifestyle off of investment income, he puts the stake in the ground at $10 million. That assumes a rather decent yearly allowance of about a half million.

For any of us interested in wealth, this is a fun, informative, light summer read. I heartily recommend it.

Technorati Tags: richistan, book review

By the way, we did get that giant client. This is mostly a job for my design partner, but it was an amazing feeling to land such a big job.

It is a big surprise to me, discovering how much I enjoy the process of selling. I actually like reading books about sales and marketing, and I thoroughly enjoy the process of connecting with a customer. Geeks aren’t supposed to like that.

I like it and I seem to have a solid knack for it, so I’m thinking of scaling back the amount of time I spend programming. That way, I can do more technical sales for my company. I think that technical sales may be a rarer and more lucrative skill than programming.

Technorati Tags: sales, technical sales