Friday, February 28, 2014

One thing I’ve learned in my 5 hour business journey

I’ve learned that my body and mind give off very definite cues as to whether or not I’m in the drama as it pertains to poor business thought.  Mainly it is this nagging depression and lack of energy and doubt.  I will be keeping watch of these and update accordingly for any insights.

Customers and how to catch them

Net (building systems) vs hook (not building systems)

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Biggest bet ever!

Hello World.

I made the biggest bet I’ve ever done with my brother this week.  Its on like donkey kong.  The bet is that I will work on business for 5 hours per week and if I don’t have it done by Saturday at midnight then I owe that sucka…..$500.  Yup.  In one week if I don’t follow through this chump will get my hard earned dough.  This post is to do an update.  The other day I was looking into doing this bet on stick.com that my other brother showed me, which I really liked because on it they have a space where the individual can do a journal update.  Hence why I’m doing this post.  I’ll just do my journaling here.

$500 is going well.  I'm at 2 hours and 59 minutes and 56 seconds out of 5 hours.  I haven't made any money yet, but I think I've saved myself some time.  I can't quite discern how great asking w/o selling will be for me, but so far it is working out great.  Example.  I was thinking maybe instead of buying an eBay business I'd just contact realtors and ask them to ask their clients to list stuff to sell with me.  Turns out realtors can't accept commissions/kickbacks for stuff like that.  Plus I was thinking that isn't a home based business and would be a drag to have to go to someone's house and take pictures and then list and then coordinate shipping and and and...too much!  So I nixed that idea. 

Two days ago I read through the Utah state fair guidebook to see what is up with being a vendor there.  Then I looked up costs for buying stuff to do that.

I'm also onto to seeing if making eBooks could be a thing I could do or not.  I figured I could list my barter skills/items that I posted to udemy.com as an eBook to get the feel for it.  Turns out I deleted the text of it once I posted the video and I can't find it anywhere.  Only way I think I could get it, w/o having to transcribe the videos that is, is to ask my friend Tyler Warnick if he perhaps has that one copy I sent him that one time.  That'd be a bit of work and would have to search his emails for attachments I've sent him and then resend it back to me.  If not no worries.  I think the eBook thing though could be a good idea.  Ashlee bought some children’s temple book for like $9 and I’m just thinking that is dumb cause it is a big book and it'd be much better to have that and a billion other books on a tablet or something to save on weight and preserve colors and what not.  So I think I'll try and make that happen.  It'd be something I could do from home and ideally something I could outsource and automate 4-hour workweek style.

Another idea I think I may try and loop back around to as well would be selling people/companies on making apps for them like restaurants and small businesses.  So we'll see.  I figure I'll just keep going on this process of working on business 5 hours per week and eventually I'll land somewhere that makes sense. 

I've been listening to this podcast.  http://automatemysmallbusiness.com/   It's been interesting to listen to the different things they've got going and how they're doing it.  Listening to them makes me think I need to keep going with pursuing business ideas that I can automate for sure.  Its just the way to go and is way cheaper/efficient.  I definitely envy how they're able to work the 4-hour workweek life.  

One thing I really like about their podcast is the ease with which they're able to start new businesses because they have experience in automating their own existing businesses.  I also really like product based businesses.  I think I really want to transition eventually to digital products and ideally subscription based digital products.

One thing they recommend doing is hiring a VA (virtual assistant) to do some task for you.  It doesn't even have to be for business.  It can be for anything.  One thing I'm thinking I'd have a VA do for me is research the most reliable and cheapest solar panel unit to power small things like a laptop, ipod, phone, etc.  Tyler wrote me telling me where he's living that they had an ice storm that knocked out power for a whole day and it was cold.  Fortunate for them they had food and were able to stay at the in-laws who had a wood burning stove and so they were a toasty 75 degrees.  They didn't have anything as far as batteries and flashlights though.  So I think that may be something I work on business wise this week is hire a VA to do that for me so I get experience hiring someone and interviewing them and I can do it for cheap.  Exciting!

I figure I've just got to continue to surround myself with business ideas/success and then take out the option of not doing something and work on business each week.  On my way home from work I’m listening to the biography of Warren Buffet that my dad highly recommended.  Guy just kept trying to figure it out and was a little schemer since he was a kid.  He even wrote off his bike and helmet I think for his paper route to lower his taxable income on his newspaper delivery business ha ha....sigh.  That’ll be me.  I actually liked one thing a lot from the super bowl, specifically Russell Wilson.  His dad would tell him when he was growing up, "Russell, why not you?"  For whatever reason that really resonated with me.  Why not me?  I deserve it just like anybody else.