Getting the Edge in Business

Here is some great advice from Mark Cuban about gaining an advantage in the world of business.  In his view, it’s not who you know, how much money you have, etc that make you successful; it’s about whether you have the EDGE and the GUTS to use it.  Great motivational stuff:

• The edge is getting so jazzed about what you do, you just spent 24 hours straight working on a project and you thought it was a couple hours.
• The edge is knowing that you have to be the smartest guy in the room when you have your meeting and you are going to put in the effort to learn whatever you need to learn to get there.
• The edge is knowing is knowing that when the 4 girlfriends you have had in the last couple years asked you which was more important, them or your business, you gave the right answer.
• The edge is knowing that you can fail and learn from it, and just get back up and in the game.
• The edge is knowing that people think your crazy, and they are right, but you don’t care what they think.
• The edge is knowing how to blow off steam a couple times a week, just so you can refocus on business
• The edge is knowing that you are getting to your goals and treating people right along the way because as good as you can be, you are so focused that you need regular people around you to balance you and help you.
• The edge is being able to call out someone on a business issue because you know you have done your homework.
• The edge is recognizing when you are wrong, and working harder to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
• The edge is being able to drill down and identify issues and problems and solve them before anyone knows they are there.
• The edge is knowing that while everyone else is talking about nonsense like the will to win, and how they know they can be successful, you are preparing yourself to compete so that you will be successful.

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Sources:
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/05/13/success-motivation/

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Who benefits from recessions?

I saw an interesting interview with Pastor Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life, on Fox Business Channel today.  He stated a few interesting things.  During a recessionary time, people lose faith in materialism.  Three industries benefit directly:

1. Church attendance goes up
2. Bars gain more traffic
3. Movie Theater attendance goes up

Well, what is it that people are searching for when they begin to increase their attendance to the following places?

1. Church – people search for meaning
2. Bars – people search for connections
3. Theaters – people look for relief

There is a lot of sadness, madness and blame going around during recessionary times, what is the best way to combat this?

1. We must learn to work together, blaming does no good
2. Everyone has to take responsibility for their part in the disaster, we have been living beyond our means as a society
3. Look at what is left, not what is lost

Interesting analysis and thoughts.  As I thought more about this, I realized that there is a lot of truth to what he is saying.  I have never seen him interviewed before, and though I disagree with his stance on certain issues, I respect his opinions.

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Google Gmail adds a task list…finally!

I came across this post this morning and remembered you asking me if Google Calendar had a task list.  Apparently Google has integrated the task list into Gmail and it is easily accessible via the iPhone.  The article below explains how to enable it in gMail and how to access it via an iPhone/iPod Touch.

Google’s Gmail is one of the company’s most popular services, and the service has been enhanced with an add-on feature, a Task list, which is now ready and waiting for iPhone users.

However, to use this new feature you must first log into Gmail and enable Tasks. Once you log into your Gmail account, locate Settings, and then go to the Labs tab and enable Tasks. That’s it and you’re ready to use this feature on your iPhone. Gaining access to the task list is easy: just launch Safari, surf to http://www.gmail.com/tasks, and you will see the new iPhone compatible mobile web interface for tasks in Gmail.

Just like any other task manager, you can add new tasks, check off your completed tasks and delete tasks. You can also add notes to any task. You can also manage multiple tasks lists, and separate tasks onto one list for work tasks and one list for personal tasks. Task lists are immediately synced with the Tasks list in Gmail whenever you make changes.

Unfortunately, there is currently no offline access to Task list(s), so you must have an active cellular data or Wi-Fi connection to use Tasks. Tasks also does not allow you to prioritize your tasks as this can only be done in the desktop computer version of Gmail’s website.

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Sources:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10155864-233.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=iPhoneAtlas

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Conference Call with Mike Piper

Great call with Mike, it gave me a much better understanding of the process we will need to go through in order to make this venture successful.  Wow, that was a lot of info to digest.  Even going through the notes below is pretty cumbersome.  I am first giving my overall reaction to the call, then below that I have detailed notes of our Q&A.  Take a deep breath and get ready…

Summary of my analysis after the call:

Advantages of our Frugal Book idea:

• We have a straight-forward topic that potentially appeals to many people
• We can easily search and find ideas for generating creative content for the book
• We both have a good working (and successful) understanding of the material we are covering

Challenges with our idea:

• Will need to create a successful blog in our topic area
• Will need to convince readers (as well as other bloggers) that our material is worth buying and contains significant value over what readers can find on other blogs or through internet searches

My quick analysis of book topics in general:

• Evaluating the viability of a topic (I am doing my best below to break down each model here)
  • Mike’s Tax Topics:
    • Complex topics, niche target (people that want to do their own taxes) with objective answer/solutions –> Mike is compiling answers and simplifying it in a short resource book
  • Mike’s Investing Topics:
    • Complex topics, broad subject with subjective answers/solutions –> Mike is compiling data and proposing a viewpoint for a solution
  • Our Frugality Topic:
    • Simple to moderate complexity of topics, broad subject with subjective answers/solutions –> We are attempting to compile proven ideas/solutions to saving money and presenting as a quick resource guide that guarantees results
  • Our Job Interview Topic:
    • Moderate to Complex Topics, niche subject (sales jobs) with subjective/objective answers/solutions –> We are compiling the most common questions and presenting researched answers/solutions to them
• Of the topics above, the tax topic lends itself best to this business model and surprisingly, the job interview muse (and possibly a book?) actually looks pretty good on paper…

Action Steps for us to make a book successful:

1. Create a website to market the book
2. Write book
3. Format book
4. Send it out to proofreaders (7-8 people)
5. Revise Changes
6. Design Cover (outsource this)
7. Convert to PDF and send to Lightning Source
8. Approve the proof (will eventually show up on Amazon)
   1. Amazon publishing can take from 2 days to 2 months
9. Find people to review the book on Amazon

Notes: Steps 3-8 may take a couple months

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Q&A Notes

The rest of the info below are notes from the conversation with Mike:

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JetSet Life Interview

An amazing example of what creating a successful muse allows.  The most impressive and inspiring thing to me from this interview was Melissa’s answer to the question: What do you have coming up next year?  This is not your typical 20-something year old’s response:

I plan to find a contract job in London for 6 months or so to learn how to live independently and get to know the city better as someone who lives here rather than a tourist. After that, I would like to learn Italian and perhaps get an outdoors job there during summer. I will probably go back to Australia to work on the next growth stages of the business and after that, possibly move to New York.

Simply awesome.  I would love to be able to have a similar answer to an open ended question like this.  The full interview is here:

————————-

This month’s 20 questions is a case study in Jet Set Living. This girl is the real deal. Kim and I met Melissa in a random chance meeting outside a club in Mykonos at 7am. She said “I think I follow you guys on Twitter“. What has evolved since then is a fantastic case study of how you can have a muse in place, abandon the deferred living concept and live a life of total excitement.

Background: Melissa was born Melissa O’Young in Australia and lived in Sydney until she was 23. When in Sydney, she got a degree in Commerce (Finance and Marketing). Afterward, she worked in marketing for 2 years at Unilever.

Feeling suffocated following the conventional path of buying a place, accumulating a mortgage and focusing on the next promotion. She opted instead to abandon comfortability and complacency. She quit her job, bought a one-way ticket to London and threw her self out of her comfort zone to see how she would react.

So many questions…….

1. Why does a girl with a perfectly good life in Sydney suddenly quit her job and buy a one way ticket to London?

I wasn’t inspired by anything anymore and every day that went past seemed to be the same. I didn’t want to use my savings to buy a place and accumulate a mortgage, as I knew I would trap myself in Sydney for awhile. You’re only young once and it was the perfect time to do something like this. I have been influenced my whole life by the society that has shaped me and I admit that I was a bit sheltered. So, I thought it would be interesting to see what I’m like without the influence of those taking care of me.

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Follow up with Mike Piper

I had told Mike about several of my ideas and he sent me the following email after our interview:

• BuildFingerStrength.com is available :)Also, the sites that I read for ideas on search engine marketing are seomoz.org and seobook.comHere’s a pretty good resource for beginning to learn SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rewriting-the-beginners-guide-the-outlineWas good talking to you. Seriously, please do keep me updated as things come along. I’m eager to hear, and I’d be happy to help whenever possible.

MY REPLY:

• Awesome Mike, thank you so much for ‘opening the door’ in the first place by taking action and showing me that you can actually succeed.I will definitely be keeping you in the the loop, as i hope you will do the same for me.  Lets see who can quit their job first!  The race is on!-Mike NewtonP.S. do you even consider investing anymore?  I mean, hell, you turned about $1300-$1500 approximate cost for ISPN #’s and book expenses to about $20K+ annually?  It would take $400K in conservative investments to equal that.  Thoughts?

MIKES REPLY:

My last day was Nov 21. I win! 😛 The business income definitely doesn’t replace the job income yet. But, due to the business’s income over the last year, we have about 9 months of living expenses saved in cash. And, as you said, the return on investment is nuts. (Essentially, if you consider my foregone job income–plus benefits–as the opportunity cost of the income stream I’m building, it’s a no-brainer.)

And, no, over the last year we’ve just saved everything as cash for exactly the reason you stated. That said, once the business income is greater than our expenses, I do see us going back to funding the IRAs etc.

Newton: Really, you left on November 21st?  Any particular reason?  I’d be very interested to know!  The IRA’s certainly make sense after that, especially for tax purposes.  I guess congratulations are in order on leaving, great job good sir!

Piper: Nope, there was no reason that the 21st was the magical date or anything like that. Kali and I just decided that we had enough cash saved up that it made sense for me to try working the business full-time (at least for a while) to see how much I could grow the income from it.

Newton: pardon my french, but you are *&^%%$ awesome.  that is so encouraging Mike, congratulations on making it this far.  If you had been busting your ass on this project, how quick do you think you would have been able to get to this point?  I remember you saying you were working super passively/part time.

If you wrote a book a month and put them up on Amazon, what would happen?  I know it takes a while for the books to get selling, but how could I speed up the process?

Piper: Hmm.. Great question. It’s hard to say exactly. The first book took a long time because I had to figure out how to make a website, how to format a book, find a printing company, etc. (Oh, another thing I just realized I originally outsourced was the cover art. I was pretty happy with how it went. That said, I’m now doing my own just so that I can make changes easily whenever I want.) And yes, I was working on it very part-time.

As to putting a book up on Amazon per month, I guess my question would be whether or not that’s even the most effective way. I feel like what I’m learning right now is that each product has provided less revenue than the one before. I almost just wish I’d stuck with 1 or 2 products and really just cranked at drawing in traffic to the website.)

….Alternatively, if they were about totally separate topics, it might have worked better. The problem now is that it’s one website about taxes, and it has to draw in enough traffic to start and keep three books selling. It might have gone better if it was one book and site about taxes, another book and site about some totally different topic, etc.

As to actual timeline, it depends a lot on the type of product. Are you specifically considering books like I’m doing? (There’s a lot of pros about it, but a lot of stuff that sucks also…)

Newton: I would probably have many different subjects.  I wonder if it would be better to have 1 website per book?  I thought most of your sales came from Amazon traffic, vs sending people to Amazon from your website.  Or was it that you need people to go from your site to Amazon to get the first sales?  Thoughts?

I am just brainstorming subjects.  They are all over the place.  I will probably stay away from investments and the market.  I might be overly eager to jump in, but if you jump in do it with both feet right?  I just want to try as many things as possible (especially considering the low startup cost) and see which work out.  Anything from the So There I Was… book to the instructional videos, i am ready to run.

Piper: Well, if you don’t have 1 website per book, you at least want a way to completely separate the traffic within the same website. Otherwise you run into the typical sales problem where you present too many options at a time, and the person ends up buying nothing at all.

Yes, most sales (like 90%) come from Amazon’s own traffic. However, I’ve definitely noticed that a slowdown in clicks from my site to Amazon leads to a disproportionately large decline in sales. I suspect it’s a function of how amazon’s recommendation system works. For instance, if in a given week I have a few less sales, it causes me to slip to a lower position on various recommended lists in Amazon (like the “Also bought” or “Ultimately Bought” lists on other products’ pages).

And I’d say yeah go for it and get started. Just pick one of your ideas and go. But make sure to give a product a fair shot before giving up on it. In my experience, things don’t completely take off right away.

One more thought: I’d try to find something that people are actively searching for. It’s (probably) easier than trying to sell entertainment. That is, no matter how entertaining a book may be, what keywords would you want to rank for in Google in order to sell a book like the “So there I was” book? In comparison, it’s pretty easy to figure out what keywords to target if you’re selling a product about making fondant flowers. (That said, I’m sure there are effective ways to market an entertainment product. I just don’t have any experience with them.)

Read Full Post »

Follow up with Mike Piper

I had told Mike about several of my ideas and he sent me the following email after our interview:

• BuildFingerStrength.com is available :)Also, the sites that I read for ideas on search engine marketing are seomoz.org and seobook.comHere’s a pretty good resource for beginning to learn SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rewriting-the-beginners-guide-the-outlineWas good talking to you. Seriously, please do keep me updated as things come along. I’m eager to hear, and I’d be happy to help whenever possible.

MY REPLY:

• Awesome Mike, thank you so much for ‘opening the door’ in the first place by taking action and showing me that you can actually succeed.I will definitely be keeping you in the the loop, as i hope you will do the same for me.  Lets see who can quit their job first!  The race is on!-Mike NewtonP.S. do you even consider investing anymore?  I mean, hell, you turned about $1300-$1500 approximate cost for ISPN #’s and book expenses to about $20K+ annually?  It would take $400K in conservative investments to equal that.  Thoughts?

MIKES REPLY:

My last day was Nov 21. I win! 😛 The business income definitely doesn’t replace the job income yet. But, due to the business’s income over the last year, we have about 9 months of living expenses saved in cash. And, as you said, the return on investment is nuts. (Essentially, if you consider my foregone job income–plus benefits–as the opportunity cost of the income stream I’m building, it’s a no-brainer.)

And, no, over the last year we’ve just saved everything as cash for exactly the reason you stated. That said, once the business income is greater than our expenses, I do see us going back to funding the IRAs etc.

Newton: Really, you left on November 21st?  Any particular reason?  I’d be very interested to know!  The IRA’s certainly make sense after that, especially for tax purposes.  I guess congratulations are in order on leaving, great job good sir!

Piper: Nope, there was no reason that the 21st was the magical date or anything like that. Kali and I just decided that we had enough cash saved up that it made sense for me to try working the business full-time (at least for a while) to see how much I could grow the income from it.

Newton: pardon my french, but you are *&^%%$ awesome.  that is so encouraging Mike, congratulations on making it this far.  If you had been busting your ass on this project, how quick do you think you would have been able to get to this point?  I remember you saying you were working super passively/part time.

If you wrote a book a month and put them up on Amazon, what would happen?  I know it takes a while for the books to get selling, but how could I speed up the process?

Piper: Hmm.. Great question. It’s hard to say exactly. The first book took a long time because I had to figure out how to make a website, how to format a book, find a printing company, etc. (Oh, another thing I just realized I originally outsourced was the cover art. I was pretty happy with how it went. That said, I’m now doing my own just so that I can make changes easily whenever I want.) And yes, I was working on it very part-time.

As to putting a book up on Amazon per month, I guess my question would be whether or not that’s even the most effective way. I feel like what I’m learning right now is that each product has provided less revenue than the one before. I almost just wish I’d stuck with 1 or 2 products and really just cranked at drawing in traffic to the website.)

….Alternatively, if they were about totally separate topics, it might have worked better. The problem now is that it’s one website about taxes, and it has to draw in enough traffic to start and keep three books selling. It might have gone better if it was one book and site about taxes, another book and site about some totally different topic, etc.

As to actual timeline, it depends a lot on the type of product. Are you specifically considering books like I’m doing? (There’s a lot of pros about it, but a lot of stuff that sucks also…)

Newton: I would probably have many different subjects.  I wonder if it would be better to have 1 website per book?  I thought most of your sales came from Amazon traffic, vs sending people to Amazon from your website.  Or was it that you need people to go from your site to Amazon to get the first sales?  Thoughts?

I am just brainstorming subjects.  They are all over the place.  I will probably stay away from investments and the market.  I might be overly eager to jump in, but if you jump in do it with both feet right?  I just want to try as many things as possible (especially considering the low startup cost) and see which work out.  Anything from the So There I Was… book to the instructional videos, i am ready to run.

Piper: Well, if you don’t have 1 website per book, you at least want a way to completely separate the traffic within the same website. Otherwise you run into the typical sales problem where you present too many options at a time, and the person ends up buying nothing at all.

Yes, most sales (like 90%) come from Amazon’s own traffic. However, I’ve definitely noticed that a slowdown in clicks from my site to Amazon leads to a disproportionately large decline in sales. I suspect it’s a function of how amazon’s recommendation system works. For instance, if in a given week I have a few less sales, it causes me to slip to a lower position on various recommended lists in Amazon (like the “Also bought” or “Ultimately Bought” lists on other products’ pages).

And I’d say yeah go for it and get started. Just pick one of your ideas and go. But make sure to give a product a fair shot before giving up on it. In my experience, things don’t completely take off right away.

One more thought: I’d try to find something that people are actively searching for. It’s (probably) easier than trying to sell entertainment. That is, no matter how entertaining a book may be, what keywords would you want to rank for in Google in order to sell a book like the “So there I was” book? In comparison, it’s pretty easy to figure out what keywords to target if you’re selling a product about making fondant flowers. (That said, I’m sure there are effective ways to market an entertainment product. I just don’t have any experience with them.)

Read Full Post »

Amazing Interview with Mike Piper

I had the chance to speak with Mike Piper of Piper Tax yesterday for a good 30 minutes and interview him.  We spoke in depth about publishing books via Amazon, passive income, and many principles from 4HWW.  Here is a summary of my notes form our conversation:

• Mike had trouble monetizing the tutorial b/c Google coundn’t find the file- also couldn’t link out

His biggest takeaways from the 4 Hour Work Week was actually how Tim Ferriss went about promoting that book.  A few key points Mike saw

1. Do guest blogging on other peoples websites when your book comes out (have posts pre-created)
2. That makes the bloggers job easier and allows you to link back to your site to drive traffic
3. Email bloggers 1 chapter of your book and allow them to post it, then talk about it (much easier than sending them the whole book to read which takes too long, plus people can get a taste of the book and go to your site to buy the rest.
4. Coin a phrase and own it (long tail, lifestyle design, etc) that people will adopt virally and associate with you (your concepts that you can bundle into a phrase)

We then talked about his tax books and how they are doing.

• Not suprisingly the first one is doing the best, 2nd one is 2nd, and 3rd one is 3rd- due to how long they have been on the market.  The books follow an exponential curve in that the longer they are out, the more they sell due to other books linking to them on Amazon, more traffic on his website  Simple Subjects, etc.
• Aside from writing the book, everything else is outsourced using Elance: the editing of the book, the cover design, the printing, shipping, and essentially all the sales traffic.  It is literally 100% hands off.
• Aside from having to buy the initial group of ISPN #’s, each book costs approximately $200 for everything above.
• Each book is pulling in about $7500-8000 annually AFTER ALL EXPENSES.
• He said that once google links up to your site and recognizes it, the rest just kind of happens

I then shifted the interview to web traffic and tactics he uses

• He has his tax site setup like a blog, although he doesn’t actively blog on it.
• His new site, The Oblivious Investor,  is up and he does regularly blog on it to bring in active traffic.
• He links out to other blog sites and in turn gets links back to his site which drives traffic.
• He doesn’t pay anything for advertising.  He tried adwords but it doesn’t work well with his site because the sale doesn’t actually happen on his site, it happens on Amazon.  Because of that he can only track traffic up until the point they click through to Amazon.  He can’t track anything beyond that and cannot see who bought from Amazon and who didn’t.
• For the most part, Amazon provides all the traffic due to the sheer volume of people going there (as Mike put it, people are visiting Amazon to buy things and shop in the first place)
• Adwords would work well if you sold straight from your website.  Then you just need to fine tune the search terms to maximize traffic.  But for him, it would take a TON of traffic to equal the amount of sales he gets from Amazon.

I then asked Mike what comes next after he replaces his income.  “I’m not sure what comes next.”  He said he will reach a point of diminishing returns with writing, where it will become more profitable to spend time promoting the existing books instead of writing new ones.

I finished up the conversation by asking him what 2 books he would recommend and he said Bseth godins “the dip” and “the cow”- not a how to but conceptual.

Read Full Post »

Amazing Interview with Mike Piper

I had the chance to speak with Mike Piper of Piper Tax yesterday for a good 30 minutes and interview him.  We spoke in depth about publishing books via Amazon, passive income, and many principles from 4HWW.  Here is a summary of my notes form our conversation:

• Mike had trouble monetizing the tutorial b/c Google coundn’t find the file- also couldn’t link out

His biggest takeaways from the 4 Hour Work Week was actually how Tim Ferriss went about promoting that book.  A few key points Mike saw

1. Do guest blogging on other peoples websites when your book comes out (have posts pre-created)
2. That makes the bloggers job easier and allows you to link back to your site to drive traffic
3. Email bloggers 1 chapter of your book and allow them to post it, then talk about it (much easier than sending them the whole book to read which takes too long, plus people can get a taste of the book and go to your site to buy the rest.
4. Coin a phrase and own it (long tail, lifestyle design, etc) that people will adopt virally and associate with you (your concepts that you can bundle into a phrase)

We then talked about his tax books and how they are doing.

• Not suprisingly the first one is doing the best, 2nd one is 2nd, and 3rd one is 3rd- due to how long they have been on the market.  The books follow an exponential curve in that the longer they are out, the more they sell due to other books linking to them on Amazon, more traffic on his website  Simple Subjects, etc.
• Aside from writing the book, everything else is outsourced using Elance: the editing of the book, the cover design, the printing, shipping, and essentially all the sales traffic.  It is literally 100% hands off.
• Aside from having to buy the initial group of ISPN #’s, each book costs approximately $200 for everything above.
• Each book is pulling in about $7500-8000 annually AFTER ALL EXPENSES.
• He said that once google links up to your site and recognizes it, the rest just kind of happens

I then shifted the interview to web traffic and tactics he uses

• He has his tax site setup like a blog, although he doesn’t actively blog on it.
• His new site, The Oblivious Investor,  is up and he does regularly blog on it to bring in active traffic.
• He links out to other blog sites and in turn gets links back to his site which drives traffic.
• He doesn’t pay anything for advertising.  He tried adwords but it doesn’t work well with his site because the sale doesn’t actually happen on his site, it happens on Amazon.  Because of that he can only track traffic up until the point they click through to Amazon.  He can’t track anything beyond that and cannot see who bought from Amazon and who didn’t.
• For the most part, Amazon provides all the traffic due to the sheer volume of people going there (as Mike put it, people are visiting Amazon to buy things and shop in the first place)
• Adwords would work well if you sold straight from your website.  Then you just need to fine tune the search terms to maximize traffic.  But for him, it would take a TON of traffic to equal the amount of sales he gets from Amazon.

I then asked Mike what comes next after he replaces his income.  “I’m not sure what comes next.”  He said he will reach a point of diminishing returns with writing, where it will become more profitable to spend time promoting the existing books instead of writing new ones.

I finished up the conversation by asking him what 2 books he would recommend and he said Bseth godins “the dip” and “the cow”- not a how to but conceptual.

Read Full Post »

Tim Ferriss and the 4-Hour Work Week

I have heard of this guys book before, but I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it because I had read some reviews that his views were somewhat unrealistic.  But after digesting his interview on about.com, I think he makes a lot of great points, and there are many things that we can do to streamline our lives and be more productive.  It may be a challenge to apply all of the concepts to a business, but these points should definitely be considered as we brainstorm and put together a business model.  Here are my notes on the interview:

• The main premise of this book is how to avoid the “Deferred Life Plan“.

When you really sit down and calculate it, there is no reason to put these things off. And there is every reason not to. It also makes it very clear that some fantasies are only interesting for three to seven days. And so sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, for example, gets boring very quickly. It’s nice. Once you recover, though, it’s extremely boring and you need an alternate activity. And if that’s only interesting for a few days and your retirement life for last thirty years, that leaves a lot of thinking to be done and I encourage people to do that now as opposed to when they retire.

• 3 Major Realizations Tim made:

1. 1. most business models are entirely unscalable
   2. most entrepreneurs are business managers and not business owners
   3. income has really no practical value if you don’t have control and possess time

• I interviewed people who were finding their own life hacks and realized that if you recognize that there isn’t just one currency — income — that, in a digital world, you have three currencies (in descending order):

1. time
2. income
3. mobility

And if you really master the time and mobility components, it’s possible to live like a $500,000 investment banker of ten years ago, worth $50,000 today…Branson is a good example to someone who proactively designs a life. He seeks out the creation of these once-in-a-lifetime experiences over and over again and the latter portion of the book, called “Liberation”, really talks about that.

• One of the most valuable exercises an entrepreneur can perform is to take a step back, not looking at what’s popular, not consider what everyone is doing or what people are expected to do, and really ask what rules you need to set for your own business, from a process standpoint and a cash flow standpoint, so that it can be successful.

• I recognized that certain rules like offering every large customer net 30, net 60, net 120 — it was expected, but if you set a rule, which in my case was prepayment for all orders, if you are able to create the demand for that product, people would follow your rules…The ability for someone to get a 4-hour workweek requires some difficult and emotional decisions and doing what is unpopular. The extent to which you can do that depends on a number of factors. But for example, it’s infinitely easier to create, in my opinion, a scalable business model that requires minimal management, if you have a product versus a service.Service businesses are more challenging to scale because it involves management and more personnel. And there is a host of variables that come along with that. They require actual human supervision and that is a very taxing resource.

• One other point I want to make is that the extent to which you have to scale your business is entirely dependent, in this book, on what’s called the TMI, target monthly income. So if you want to have a Lamborghini Gallardo race car, you want to go to Fiji, or you want to take two trips throughout the domestic U.S. per month and you define what you want to do, what you want to have and then calculate the average monthly cost, that’s your TMI and it’s surprisingly low. When you actually create time, the question of what to do becomes much more interesting and much more important than what you have and it’s surprisingly less expensive than people realize. But most people never calculated it.

• What I realized also very quickly is that it’s much better to be the first or the only person doing what you do as opposed to the best person doing what you do. So, if you create a new product category, or a new service for yourself, it’s much easier to distinguish yourself and the value proposition is faster to convey and therefore you won’t get more customers…It’s the first-mover advantage that establishes you as the leader in mindshare.

• The easiest way to find virtual assistants is to use a company, for example, Get Friday, an Indian-based company that’s also in the U.S., which enables them to handle tasks not only during your business day, but you can assign a task at 5 p.m. and then it will done and in your inbox at 9 a.m., which is nice. Elance.com is also a very good site for finding virtual assistants and you can have this type of help for $5 to $15 an hour. It saved me thousands of hours. It may have cost me a small amount of money, but millions of dollars of additional revenue has been booked as a result of the time that I can apply to high-yield activities as a result of this type of outsourcing.

• How do you get to the 4-hour work week?

1. Definition, which involves determining your target monthly income and defining certain other variables and parameters that determine your ideal lifestyle.
2. Elimination which is, the batching, Parkinson’s Law, everything that can be done to remove unimportant, minimally important tasks and time-consuming activities, in addition to interruptions and managing other people.
3. Automation, which is the outsourcing component and also the automation of income. How do you restructure your business that is process-driven as opposed to owner-driven and what does the virtual architecture look like, where can you find any service providers, all that’s in that section.
4. Liberation, which is the mobility piece. So let’s say you have a supervisor, how do you negotiate a remote work agreement, what is the sample negotiating script look like for that. Also, once you create time, how do you design a life, how do you create those alternative activities and those alternative realities that most people never have to make decisions about, because they don’t have the time.

Tools that Tim uses to be successful:

• GoToMyPC.com– remote desktop access
• Skype – VOIP
• Gmail– remote data storage
• Sony Vaio mini laptop, model# VGNTXN27N – 13 hours battery life
• Phillips Noise cancelling headset
• Uses a simple PDA, not a smart phone
• Avoid impulse areas completely instead of relying on discipline (i.e chocolate, email, etc)
• No RSS reader – too time consuming – checks a few blogs several times a week
• Follows a “low information diet”, only looks at front pages of most newspapers
• Blogs Tim likes:
  • Lifehacker.com– getting the most of things
  • 43 Folders – efficiency (site not being updated anymore?)
  • Duct Tape Marketing – small business marketing
  • How to Change the World – Guy Kawasaki blog on entrepreneurship

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Sources:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/
http://entrepreneurs.about.com/od/interviews/a/timferriss_2.htm

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