Sep
30
I am talking about self-employed people especially but this also pertains to small business owners as well. What is the most valuable asset in life? TIME! Yes money is valuable as well but having more free time provides us the opportunity to create more money, expand a business, venture into new markets and sit back and plan the future of your endeavor. If your too busy working 15 hours a day being self employed trying to make as much money as you can your going to burn out eventually. Being self-employed is great but if you don’t work do you still get paid? If you got sick or injured and couldn’t work for the unforeseeable future how long would you last before you ran out of money?
The first company I ran I was about 20 years old when I started it with some buddies and we had an eBay business and a massive warehouse with loads of consignment contracts, we got real estate foreclosure deals and liquidated all the assets on eBay, we got this one deal from the Smithsonian which included 50 massive bins that we were filled with thousands of canvas maps, original prints and the negatives to make all of the National Geographic Maps and books. We started selling them on eBay and our websites and built up a client base, I was selling about $2000 worth a day at one point but I was also working 20 hours a day and pulling all nighters. I made around $20k a month for doing grunt work of taking pictures, writing descriptions, shipping out items but I lost focus of the business itself. I had to turn away consignment contracts, expansion opportunities, I was so caught up in the quick money that when the maps finally ran out I was right back where I started, well I had a massive bank account but the business had gone no where. Looking back on that time, I was afraid to let anyone else do the simple job of selling maps and I put myself into self-employed mode and not business owner mode. I could have easily hired any college kid, work at home mom or person off the street and paid them $10/hr to list these maps and that would had freed up four months of my life and provided me with passive income. I could have hired two or three people to do the job and instead of having $60k I would of had $50k and four months of my life back! Used that time to hire more employees, create more business contracts and after the four months had ten times as much inventory, more employees and closer to financial freedom even if my bank account was empty at that point it. It would start growing more rapidly with more contracts and employees and my work load goes down and down and income goes up and up and the climb out of the rat race begins….
Yes I know there is the old adage…never pay somebody to do something you can do yourself….try running a business that way…let me know where you end up in five years
I eventually did learn to delegate, and hired college kids to ship out packages, another college kid to answer the phones and handle e-mails and customer relations. I hired someone to go find deals for me, someone to handle the accounting, etc. During that time I found myself with nothing left to do, If I did not show up for work it didn’t matter anymore I was still getting paid. Finally I was not self-employed anymore and I was a business owner, I could jump back out of the work cycle and it flowed without me being involved which led me to expand the company and take it off but that’s another story after that…
Today I am self-employed, but I work like a business owner. At any given time I have about 20 or so websites under my media company ranging from E-Commerce sites, forums, blogs, membership sites, etc and there is no way I can manage them all and keep them updated and flowing. There is no way I can dropship products, handle customer complaints, list items on eBay, write blog posts, goto auctions and buy products, ship out a hundred items a week…..soooooo I act like a business owner with twenty employees, but instead I hire freelancers, contractors and other businesses to do the work for me. You can do this too! I don’t care what business your in you can use some help! You will never leave the rat race if you stay self-employed.
Here are some examples of what I outsource:
- I pay a blogger to write 50 posts a month of new content spread across 5 blogs (not this one =P) – I earn more in the adsense on the sites than I have to pay out so its PROFITABLE
- I pay college kids $8/hr to ship out physical items I sell – The handling fee that I charge for shipping and small profit I make from shipping covers them.
- I pay an accountant to keep track of the books – nuff said here! numbers are boring
- I hire marketing firms and SEO/SEM companies to handle link building, search engine traffic placement, keywords..etc (Yes you can do this yourself…but once again your getting nowhere fast)
- I have webmasters install PHP scripts, write bits of code to make sites more ascetically pleaseing, design banners, icons and logos (graphic design takes forever!)
- By outsourcing unimportant tasks like these I can focus on more important matters like selling a small web business or buying one, creating new business relationships, planning the future – DON’T GET STUCK DOING THE SAME THING DAY IN AND DAY OUT! Open your eyes! There is a better way to live.
- I constantly bid out projects on freelance sites a few good ones that you can get away with having a smaller budget on are ones such as vWorker and Scriptlance - elance is also good but there are a lot of bigger companies and hiring price tags for projects on that site.
Sep
20
Ok, so you made your first attempt to start a company or be self-employeed and venture out on your own with delusions of grandeur but something went wrong…your venture failed. You had staked so much money into it, countless hours and you blood sweat and tears when needed. You had to such pride, you were taking the road less traveled and blazing your own path. You didn’t need to answer to anybody because you were on top of the world and you dictated your own life now. When people would call you arrogant you would tell them it was just confidence and maybe they needed some of their own. Over time you had been so caught up in your business that you lost sight of your personal life, maybe pushed a few friends away and maybe hurt the ones that love you. Maybe you put on an extra pound or two or maybe 30 and lost touch with the rest of the world….ok I am obviously talking about myself and what happened to me, but I know I am not alone at least on some accounts.
Being so young when I first became successful didn’t help either, at the age of 21 running a company while all my friends were still in college and living with their parents while i’m driving a new sports car, eating lobster dinners, meeting with executives and important people while my friends are worried about mid-terms and finals doesn’t help to deflate an ego. So when failure finally comes and you had been living your life as though you were invincible and impervious to failure how do you react? Maybe people had been waiting on the sidelines for you to fail and now they want to stick it in your face, and maybe you deserved it. Maybe you had to move back home with your parents and borrow their car to go out because yours was repossed. Maybe you don’t have your 200k credit line anymore as a safety net. Maybe nobody was there to pick you up when you fell because you had pushed them all away….
So how do you overcome failure?
History is not paved with the memories of those who failed and gave up, their names have long been forgotten. The first step is to take responsibility for your failure. It’s easy to point fingers and blame the world for your problems and those around you. I blamed the people who stole a car and burned my warehouse to the ground, I blamed my ex-girlfriend for wanting to spend so much time with me while I could have been working, I blamed all of my business partners for not doing their parts and I had to do everything. I was a coward, a 23 year old coward who could not take responsibility for failing. Finally I realized after being humbled to the ground that I was responsible for everything that had fallen on me. I should have made sure that the company was properly insured and would cover the damages and cost of the inventory that burnt up in the fire. My ex-girlfriend was just being a good girlfriend, and having someone love you, make every meal for you, support you right or wrong and just simply want to spend every waking hour with you is something that can’t be taken for granite. If you have to work and have to take care of business, do it but make time for the ones who love you or you will have nobody to share your success with.
After you have taken responsibility, forgive yourself! This can be a hard thing to do, I punished myself by taking so many adderal every day, all day and night that I locked myself away from the world and just tried to forget the past. Face your mistakes, face your failures, don’t abuse yourself or your self-esteem will go out the window. Say “I failed, but I also learned how not to run a business, how not to live my life and next time around I will make adjustments and changes so it doesn’t happen again”.
After you have taken responsibility and forgiven yourself you are ready to study your failure. Analyze exactly what went wrong, what you did when it went wrong and study what you could have done differently. Be confident in knowing you can make it work, believe that you can have another chance at success. Battles are usually won before they are fault, if you don’t think you can do something then you can’t! Take I can’t and I don’t know how out of your vocabulary. I had a rule with my employees, they couldn’t tell me that they couldn’t do something or they didn’t know how to do a task, I made them learn and figure out how to do it. Success is a habit and so is failure so train yourself to never give up, to figure things out and find answers and it will be as habitual as brushing your teeth.
Spend time with your friends and family, get back to childhood happiness. Surround yourself with POSITIVE people and successful ambitious company. If you let negative people into your life they will drain your spirits and kill your can do attitude. Build a network of business associates that share similar goals. Find a mentor, someone who can keep you balanced, motivated and reassure you when times are tough.
Don’t let arrogance get in the way of learning and growing, trust me you don’t know everything and you don’t have all the answers. If you get complacent and stop learning you will fall behind, be open to knowledge as it can come from unexpected sources. Study your competitors and those who have been successful in your business, don’t assume they can’t beat you and that your too smart and you don’t need any help being successful.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes again, this is a common theme that I see happen a lot. People fail once, loose money somewhere and they don’t have the courage to try it again and take risks. In life you have to be willing to take risks and chances, if you are not willing to risk anything your not going to gain anything. Get out of your comfort zone, do things you wouldn’t normally do, be adventurous.
If this helps even one person, this was completely worth my time…I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite presidents:
“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Aug
29
Throughout my business travels and experiences I have met all kinds of different people from geniuses to morons, apathetic and the driven. The world needs both lambs and shepherds so there is nothing wrong with settling for a “normal” work a day life. But if you want to become something more, I encourage you to venture out and stake your claim.
“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checked by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Fortune will always favor the bold, but being bold will require the will and heart to persevere. In life the one who wants it more will get it, I have known so many highly educated and highly intelligent people that end up doing nothing with their lives, too scared to take a calculated risk, too scared to fail and end up living mediocre unfulfilling lives giving nothing back to society and a legacy that will die with them. I am not knocking on college, personally I just went back to finish up a degree that I left off ten years ago to pursue a business. I think an education is needed for success but that does not mean a college education, self-education can be far more valuable. If you are going to college do it for the right reasons, for an education and to learn, not to get a degree so you can get a job. Albert Einstein was a C student, he suffered with ADHD, he would say he was blessed with ADHD. There is a genius inside all of us! believe in yourself!
“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison
Here is a short list of just a few college drop outs that did ok for themselves….you may know a few…
Ford Motor Company Dead$188 Billion (in 2009 dollars)Bill Gates
Microsoft $59 BillionLarry Ellison
Oracle $27 BillionSheldon Adelson
Las Vegas Sands Corp. $26 BillionLarry Page
Google
Graduated University of Michigan
35$18.5 BillionKirk Kerkorian
Tracinda $18 BillionMichael Dell
Dell $17.3 BillionPaul Allen
Microsoft $16.0 BillionDavid Geffen
Geffen Records $6.5 BillionSteve Jobs
Apple $5.4 BillionRichard Branson
Virgin $4.4 BillionTakafumi HorieLivedoor $3.6 BillionRalph LaurenRalph Lauren $3.6 BillionSubhash Chandra Goel
Zee TV $2.3 BillionJerry YangYahoo
Graduated Stanford
$1.9 BillionMark ZuckerbergFacebook $700 MillionRussell SimmonsDefJam $340 MillionMatt Mullenweg
WordPress $200 MillionMahesh MurthyPinstorm &SeedFund $200 MillionJawed KarimYouTube $64 Million
Aug
29
People say it’s not where you’ve been but it’s where your going that matters, and that statement I feel is really only half way true…the places we’ve been and the experiences we’ve been through are what make us who we are. Once you have been through the right experiences and situations it will fuel where your going. If you have never failed at anything you’ll be much more unlikely to truly succeed at anything. When I was just 20 years old (2002) I started my first company without any formal business experience, business training or education and no financing for that matter. What did matter was where I was going but since I had not yet run a business before I was unaware of all that goes into it. Three years later the business finally went under but myself and the co-founders had grown the company to the point where it had acquired two smaller businesses, a board of directors, 12 eBay drop-off locations, employees and a 50,000 sq ft warehouse full of inventory which literally burned to the ground and slowly became the cancer that would eventually kill the company with debt, loss of employees and eventually my personal bankruptcy, business bankruptcy, eviction, repossession and so forth.
I must have failed a thousand times in my first business experience but my will was not finally broken until I lost everything. Some people would not be eager to start another business and get back out there, I was one of those people and I shut down completely. For a solid year after this experience I was broken and had to move back in with my parents and slept twelve hours a day and laid in bed for another four to scared to get back on my feet and face the day. I had such a negative outlook on life that I felt like anything I did from now on I would fail at. I had burned all my bridges with business contacts and friends and felt chained down. It wasn’t until two cousins of mine saved my life, both of them needing money sought to learn about selling online. This finally awoke me from my lifeless comatose state and lit a fire back in me that still burns to this day to never want to be a failure again.
It can be beneficial to try and fail if you learn from them, so many people try and fail and become defeated, owned and destroyed. You can control your destiny, you can surround yourself by positive people, you can believe in yourself, you can break the chains…
What happens to powerful massive elephants happens to many of us, although the elephants can break the chains that hold them in captivity they have grown so accustomed to being chained down from birth that they have lost the will to try and break free….don’t be like the elephant!
|
