I support a strong public healthcare option on extremely pragmatic reasoning, that it would benefit my bottom line, the bottom line of my employees, it would increase flexibility, freedom and responsiveness. Haha, I almost sound like I’m using “Randian” analysis here.

I’ve checked it out. I could get a decent insurance plan through Costco Small Business. But, the simple fact is that it is a huge hassle, and it has nothing to do with my business.

Yes, I could get group insurance once I had a pool of employees. But, it would require that I continue having these employees, since there is a minimum participation level. Also, it would hide benefits I am paying out. If I offer a programmer $40 per hour, that should be what they get For me to offer health insurance will either waste time for me, checking it out, administrating it, paying for part of it, documenting the options to my employees, or it will require me to hire someone else to do that for me. Either way, a waste of time, attention and money. All of that is hidden to my employees, who correctly see what I am paying them as the bottom line.

Employer based healthcare simply limits my options. Why should I care? Because it is traditional in the U.S.? Thanks but I’ll pass.

I believe that a viable, strong public healthcare option in the U.S. would lead to a huge growth in small business. We would be freed of an onerous, time-consuming, expensive task which has nothing to do with our core competency.

In my opinion as a small businessman, the reforms needed are simple and straightforward:

1) Remove all tax benefits for employer-based health insurance.

2) Remove the right of insurance companies to exclude pre-existing conditions and to exclude people based on “inaccurate information” once they contract an expensive disease (called “excission”, this is criminal, IMHO).

3) Require all citizens to buy insurance. Subsidize those who are too poor to pay for it.

If we did this, we would radically increase the flexibility of small business, and of the work force to move to the best available position. As it is, many people are simply trapped by the circumstances of their healthcare at a job which has long since ceased to be the right match for them. This benefits no one.

Technorati Tags: healthcare, socialized medicine, politics, uhc

This didn’t work out so well for me. In a nutshell, when I don’t have client work, I need to spend my time rounding up more client work, or else the dry spell will be unsustainable. Even more importantly, I need to be doing marketing activities all the time, trying to keep my pipeline full. I’ve learned to do that fairly well. In fact, I haven’t had a dry spell longer than a couple days in many months.
But, having gotten good at keeping the work flowing, how do I ever find time to fulfill my original intent?
My solution was to identify the time of the working day that is my “cream” time.  The time I am the most productive, the most on-task, and the most creative.  For me, that is the first couple hours of the morning.

I no longer give that time to clients.  I dedicate it to my long term projects.  That includes blogging, building speculative apps, and building sites like GoSatchmo.

My rules for this time are:

• No checking email until afterwards
• No phone calls
• No client work, period
• No scheduling meetings during this time

I’ve done this before, last year I did it for about three months.  That was the single most productive period in the last few years!  However, it was too much.  I was dedicating up to 4 hours a day to these projects.  As a result, I simply didn’t make enough bread-and-butter money.  My new scheme is to just take the first hour.  I can spare that, and it is sustainable.

Not only that, but I now wake up excited to get to work.  After all, I get to do the most fun and interesting tasks straight off!

(referring to a business model of putting up 10,000 junk web pages for adsense)

That might be focus, but is it proper focus?

Does that build a business and do they love doing it? The graveyard of adsense site roadkill with people who went from making $10,000 a month to $83 a month is a mile long.” — Page 14. NitroBlueprint Manual

Good point!

When considering a course, book or product, consider:

• How am I going to use and apply this to my business?
• Do I want to follow the system this course proposes, or does it just teach a tactic?
• Do I have the time to devote to go through it, learn and apply the material?

Even though I’m burning up with desire to get moving on some of the ideas I learned at the excellent Earn1KADay Summit 2009 last weekend, I’m keeping this in mind. In a nutshell, does it really build a business and will I use it?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

That is really quite foolish, and I think I’ve learned the lesson I need to from it. Blogging is a habit, an outlet and a necessity for me to grow my business.

It is a habit, in that ideas for blogging come much more easily to me when I’ve been writing regularly. Also, the words flow much more easily when I write more often.

It is an outlet since it requires me to think about how I can be of use to others outside my immediate circle. This perspective shift is good for me, it helps me see the big picture and to keep my skills fresh. Not only that, but blogging is a good way for me to break up the day. I’ve missed it.

It is a necessity for me to grow my business. Possibly not so much for this blog, but my programming blog regularly gets me business leads. There’s nothing better than people who write and are already 75% sold or simply offer me jobs.

Technorati Tags: blogging

This is a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company, which makes it not only the biggest job, but the biggest company we’ve ever had on our radar. This final pitch was a half hour in-person presentation before 3 VPs. We’ve already made it though three preliminary rounds, so this was it, and we’ll know within a day or two if we got the job.

I am so grateful to my Toastmasters club for helping me grow in my speaking skills. I’d never have been so comfortable making such a presentation before all the experience I have had in that excellent group.

If we get the job, which I’m thinking there is a great chance we will, then we have the rest of the summer covered for work, and a crown jewel of a connection into the Portland business scene. Woop woop!

Technorati Tags: consulting

He says that some few people can get rich by scrimping and saving. Do it for long enough and you might technically be rich. But you’ll still be a cheapskate. He then points out that all the world hates a rich cheapskate.

That’s true! Some books take pains to point out the (strangely similar across books) tale of some guy (usually blue collar or low paid white collar, like a school teacher) who always counted his pennies, and no one thought he had much money, but then when he died he left millions to a charity.

Ahh…that doesn’t sound like the life I want to live. It really sounds like some sort of pathology, actually. I mean, if you want to contribute to a charity, do it. They love money and they love your time. Do it while you are alive, get involved. But to scrimp and pinch pennies for an entire lifetime so that you can contribute on your death? Not the life for me or hopefully for my children.

There has to be a better way, and I think that way is to get involved with the world. To serve as many people as I can. To build real value for myself and for others. That seems like the way of freedom, and a hell of a lot more fun.

Technorati Tags: frugality, kiyosaki

Ladies and gentlemen of the Academy, all I can say is that I deserve the award. Thanks. We’re number 60, we’re number 60, woot!

I did think that the site described Fearless Money in an odd way, ‘Fearless Money takes the approach that the "Universe truly is a benevolent place" and recently quit his job to sample the ambundance of other opportunities.’

I suppose that is true, it just seems strange to hear my site described that way. It sounds somehow flakey when put that way. Oh well, I can survive being thought to be kind of a flake, especially when I increased my income by a easy 50% over my previous salary immediately upon going out on my own.

Still, I’d have thought the blurb I put on my about page was better at describing my attitude.

I’m a guy who used to always ignore his finances. I was afraid, but I’m not anymore. My new perspective is very simple, consumer debt is bad, saving is good, and fortune favors the well-prepared.

Straightforward and honest, that’s how I like it.

Both my wife and I spend far too much time taking care of the routine cleaning tasks generated by a household of two adults, three children, two dogs and two cats. That time is quite literally stolen from either our family time or our personal time, and we want to get some of that back.

In fact, when I was talking with Dustin last week about goals and dreams for the coming year, she said that was the single biggest dream for her. Anything else, even her long dreamed-of trip to Paris, is less important to her.

Well OK then, what are we waiting for? This morning I made an appointment for an estimate from a maid service that comes highly recommended by a friend. Hopefully we can start next week.

One person whom I told about this plan said with honest puzzlement in her voice, “But then you miss out on the little rituals of life.” I was struck dumb by the statement/question. What?

Now that some time has passed, I can answer that I believe life is so much more than scut-work. Yes, you can find meaning in such work, it is part of the human condition that absolutely anything, if focused upon hard enough, will be found to have some deep meaning it can yield. I certainly don’t judge people who find meaning in rote cleaning tasks, I simply choose to find my meaning elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: maid, household

For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never be all green at the same time. [...] Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it "eventually,&quot just do it and correct course along the way.

Technorati Tags: timothy ferris, 4-hour workweek

I’m not going to give it an in-depth review. I think David Seah has done a better job of that than I’d do. I do wholeheartedly recommend it to almost anyone, although I doubt many will take him up on his challenge.

I wish I wasn’t pessimistic about that, but I am and it is based on what I read in blog comments whenever anyone reviews Ferriss’ book. The review is generally very positive, and then come the nay-sayers in the comments. "I’d be happy to get my job to 40 hours, much less 4.", "Outsourcing is evil and he is evil for suggesting it.", "He’s sleazy, he sells vitamins.", "He mistreated xxx by doing yyy."

I don’t want to be an apologist for Mr. Ferriss, the fact is that I loved the book and I intend to use many of his suggestions, I’ve already started in fact. However I think it may be too radical for many. The book advocates such concepts as: "Take charge of your life.", "There’s a much bigger world filled with more options than you were taught growing up.", "You can design a lifestyle you want if you choose to do so." "You can and should have others do the repetitive tasks that will free your time." (Those are all my paraphrases, not quotes.)

The problem is that many, especially geeks, would rather isolate and not have to interact. They’d rather the path to freedom was possible without having to stretch or grow or take any risks.

For example (sorry geeks, I used to be one of you but I’ve changed), It is hard to make much money if you think all sales is sleazy. Your ability to make money is in direct relation to the number of people you know and to whom you bring value. That’s why blogging, when done by connectors who can build a community like Steve Pavlina can be so profitable.

Many of the nay-sayers seem to be trying very hard to come up with any reason possible to discard the threatening message/challenge implicit in the book. Feel free to do so, and to continue working those 60 hour weeks.

Technorati Tags: 4-hour workweek, timothy ferriss