Tag Archives: blog

1 Year Blogging

Well this year is now exactly 1 year old.  My first entry was on the date back in 2008.  It has been an interesting year.  I expected to blog much more than I actually did.  I have so many ideas but many of them are already written by someone else much better than I could do it.  Then other times I have a great idea for something that I want to share with the world, but I either don’t completly form the idea and I figure that I would rather wait, or else I forget about it by the time I get to a computer.  I have tried to bring up interesting topics, such as my series on MLM‘s and my series on computers.

I have found some interesting stats while I have been doing this.  First off my article on How to select a laptop, is by far the most popular one I have ever wrote.   It has been the most popular article EVERY week after I wrote it.  Other entiries also have stayed popular for months, such as my article about Gold Prices, and one about a new Nigerian Scam that they tried on me.

If you do not subscribe to this blog I hope that you would.  I have a lot of ideas and I am also working on blogging about my new business I am working on.  I would love for people to follow along tell me what they think.

Thank you to all of my readers, I hope nothing but success for you in the next year.

Are you money motivated?

I have found that some of my best thoughts have been posted on other blogs. Over the last few days I have written a series of comments on another blog and I would like to share them here.

I had a very successful computer business. I was working 80 hours a week, and it was my whole life. It was not so fun. I wanted much more with my life, so I started to replace myself. I first started by finding people who could do what I did the same or better. This let my focus on other things. I soon took this too far, spending only 20 or so hours a week working on this business, the rest of the time doing other things and working at my church. I also started a few more businesses on the side. Everything was good, then I really started taking it far, I decided that I liked to travel so I soon was spending weeks at a time away, they could still call me but that was about it.

I had put systems in place, the only problem was that I did not put systems to watch the people managing the systems. My flaw was that I thought everyone was like me…honest and money motivated. So I put in place a system where an honest person could make a lot of money by doing fun work that helped people. The problem I found was that most people are NOT money motivated, when they have enough money they stop working, and second I found a few too many people who were not honest. Due to people not being honest and taking my customers and my assets and also due to lazy people who sat on the payroll I lost about 400k in a matter of 2 years. Much of this time I was away, traveling while managers said it was all going perfect, but they were the main crooks.

Finally I took on a partner, he bailed us out financially. Scaled back the business and made it manageable. The damage had been done, and we shut down our retail operations in Nov of 2007. We still try to sell online, but very little comes from that.

I still think that the idea of systems works, and my goal was always to be able to travel, and leave it to people, but the problem has always been the people. In my years I have employed at least 100 people, some were great and some took me for thousands, I just wish I could know in advance who is who.

Then some people asked me questions…here was my answer.

First when I mean money motivated, I mean people that want to earn big money. Most people are fear motivated, they have the fear of not paying the bills, and not having food, and not having a safe place to live BUT once those fears are gone (Once they earn enough money so that they don’t have to worry) very few people that I know will continue to do what it takes to make higher levels of income. This is why 80%+ of people have crappy jobs and are not really striving to do better.

You second question was, what would I do different. Well FIRST off I would have got out of the computer industry back in 2003 or so when it became super price competitive, and there was no margin or market. I also would not have borrowed the 300k+ that I did to keep my company alive, I would have just let it die and go start something else. But if I had to keep the company I would have had more time mentoring the employees. I would have spent more time figuring out who was good and who was bad and got rid of the bad people. I would have been much quicker to fire people, and slower to hire them.

I also would have spent a lot less money on print advertising and spent a lot more money paying people to make phone calls and go door to door. Our return for that was at least 20 times higher than any print ad we ever did.

OK, Punish me, I have been bad.

I have been working on many things in the last few weeks.  I also had a few advances and setbacks in my goals.  Because of this I have gotten behind on my blog.  I am sorry to all of my readers, I was glad to notice that my readership levels went up while I was not writing.  Mostly due to searches.  Well I have a lot to write about and I will try to catch up a bit in the next few days.

Back to basics, going door to door.

Back to basics, going door to door.

 

We have decided that we need a few more customers.  One of the most effective way we have found to get customers is very old fashioned, low tech but it works.  Tomorrow we are going to visit some nice office buildings, ones that contain businesses that match our target market, ones with 10-20 users.  We are going to start out by going to a mixer for our local chamber of commerce.  These businesses are large enough to generate volume for our company but small enough that they don’t have their own IT departments.  Tomorrow will be a long day, last time we did this we got one large customer that accounted for half of our sales last month. 

 

Sometimes you just gotta get back to basics sometimes in this modern age.  We are used to our websites, our blogs, our IM’s, our text messaging and all out other high tech stuff but sometimes the best thing to do is get out and see people face to face.  Need to boost sales, try getting back to basics, and meet someone in person.