Favorite Product Question Walkthrough

If you’re interviewing for Product Owner type positions it won’t be uncommon to be asked what your favorite product is.  Resist the urge to pick the latest iPhone or app if you can because the interviewer will already have heard that answer a half dozen times up to that point of calling through a list of 12 candidates over the phone or perhaps even in person.  Instead try and think of something that is unique and that you can actually speak to because you’ve used it.  Bonus points would be to use something that is relevant to the company you’re interviewing with.  What follows is a general framework of how you’d answer that question and how I’d answer it.

1. What is the product and what does it do?  The product is called PEP, Paint Estimating Program.  Initially in my painting business we were guessing on the cost of each project and then we were trying to come up with our own rates for production.  Then we upgraded to this software that is automated, mobile, and uses the PDCA rates of production when doing measurements.  It also integrates with our quickbooks, time clock software, and scheduling applications.  
2. Who are its competitors and what makes this product better?  Estimate rocket, The Paint Estimator, One-Step Estimating, Planswift, and many online spreadsheets from various contractors.  PEP is better because it already has PDCA standards loaded in, everything is stored in the cloud, it has automated follow up after estimates, syncs with quickbooks, customizable presentations to customers, gives feedback timewise on how long what content was viewed on the bid and in what order for AB testing opportunities, as well as workflow management and scheduling capabilities.  
3. How did you first hear about this product and what keeps you continually using it?  At a painting conference I went to learn more about the industry and how to set myself apart from my competitors and what others around the country who were successful were doing.  I keep using it because the price point is affordable, great support and training was and is excellent, and the product is really easy to use and intuitive once you have the basics down.  It makes us much faster by giving estimates the same day, makes us more professional looking, and takes out the guesswork for various rates of production you might not have exposure to prior to showing up for a certain job.
4. Product features/product strategy - Despite how amazing this product is its ability to integrate with our time clock software and assign crews/painters to projects created.  It needs to add the ability to plan and schedule more than one crew at a time.  That would be a short term implementation that would make a big impact.  Long term letting customers check in on the status of a project via their application would be helpful as well.  

This is a brief, but effective way to quickly walk an interviewer through what your favorite product is right now.

Pricing a Product

So you’ve gone through the rigamarole of coming up with a product that solves a need in the marketplace and you’ve validated your solution with potential users, but now you need to figure out how much to charge people to use said product.  What follows is a framework you could use to try and solve this conundrum internally with your team or by yourself.

1. Ask clarifying questions.  Ask for background information on internal costs and pricing or competitor prices and costs.  
2. Customer’s willingness to pay.  What is the maximum a customer is willing to pay?  BATNA - Best alternative to a negotiated agreement, i.e. if Enterprise charges $40/day to rent a car then say our car rental app is the first of its kind with automated driverless cars coming then we’d price around that.
3. Competitive pricing.  Use alamo, rent-a-car, hertz, etc.  Write out advantages and disadvantages of my product and why it skews my pricing one way or the other.  
4. Cost-based pricing.  Takes into account the cost of the product and adds markup afterwards to come up with the price.  You would tally up the unit cost, literal cost of the item, as well as the overhead cost.  May include rent, shipping, or stocking fees as well.  Unit cost of a rental car would be $15/day.  Overhead costs would be parking, maintenance, insurance add another $10/day for a total cost of $25/day.  Add 40% markup results in a price to users of $35/day for car rental.
5. Maximizing profits is typically the first priority, but others may present themselves as more important.  You may want to maximize market share by lowering the price, which could produce network effects, i.e. product value goes up as more people use that product.  May price product higher to give the product a higher perceived value. 
6. Could use supply/demand curves to also help in coming up with a price.  

This is a brief, but effective way to quickly determine what price you could charge a paying client for using your product.

Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Inbound and outbound marketing are two types of marketing that you can use to bring users to you.  Inbound is where your tactics and methods bring the users to you whereas outbound revolves more around buying ads, buying spots on email lists, buying sales leads and then reaching out to those people.  Both are effective at reaching your target audience and we’ll discuss briefly both.

Inbound marketing is here to stay and often comes across as more genuine.  One method for inbound marketing is content marketing.  This doesn’t mean needing to buy an ad, but would require time spent on behalf of the marketing person writing content say for a blog or paying someone to write the content.  This written content would be things like seo, email newsletters, blog posts, whitepapers, and case studies.  This customer progression would look something like: Read some articles/blog posts -> Sign up as a subscriber -> Purchase product.  

Outbound marketing is more of a traditional approach to marketing.  Typical examples of this would be buying ads on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.  Another option would be using affiliate marketing where someone works to sell your product for you and they take a cut of each sale sent to you.  The goal with either channel of marketing, but especially outbound marketing is to make sure that the cost of acquiring the customer is less than the lifetime value of the customer else it doesn’t make sense to continue that paid service.  If you spend $1 to get a customer you want to earn more than that $1 over the life of working with that customer.

Scrum Backlog Grooming and why

In purist scrum planning you can plan a sprint, which is a time boxed event of development/work of anywhere from a week to a month, during what is called a Sprint Planning Meeting.  These sprint planning meetings can last up to 8 hours for a one month time box sprint.  That is a long time to plan all the work that is going to be done in the next month.  Not to mention that perhaps things will change during that time that will make some or much of the planning irrelevant as time goes on.  This is possible in situations where consistent work hasn’t already been done with definitions of done completed and estimates by the dev team provided.  Where there has already occurred plenty of work that can be looked back on and estimated accurately going forward you don’t necessarily run the risk of planning that is useless since you already have a good idea of what it is going to take to do the work.

All that said how can you potentially cut down on the amount of time a sprint planning meeting will take?  Answer: Backlog grooming sessions.  Ideally these sessions happen regularly so that the sprint planning meetings are both shorter and more effective.  These sessions are meant to improve the product backlog.  In it you can:

• Write/update user stories
• Decompose a story into several stories that are too big to realistically be done in a time box sprint
• Devs often love as much detail as possible to accomplish a story and so adding more definition or rewriting poorly constructed stories is useful
• With the dev team estimate the backlog items that haven’t already received estimates
• Add acceptance criteria and flush out the definition of done
• Assess deeper (lower down on your product backlog) stories/backlog items and do long term planning with domain experts or just when those items can be done.

Yes it is important to stay focused on the current workload, but don’t get too hung up on not looking beyond the current sprint if needed.  Just because you’re on schedule for the next release doesn’t mean you can’t proactively look to the future and see what additional research, domain experts, or technical hurdles may need to be addressed now before getting to the future.

So good things to do during a grooming session:

Have a stated goal.  Everybody hates meetings that drone on and don’t actually accomplish anything.  Devs especially hate this since they’re up against what they’re already working on and being in a pointless meeting just takes them away from the work they need to get done now.

At the bare minimum hold your grooming session a few days before the sprint planning so people are familiar with the backlog and can hit it hard during the actual planning session.

If you have stakeholders present, limit them to just a handful.  Don’t have 10-20 people in the meeting because they often don’t know the rules of scrum, will make things chaotic, plus people check out when there are too many people in a meeting anyways and input by default is minimized by the sheer size of the group whereas smaller groups can have more people contribute.  Go figure.

Implementing regular backlog grooming meetings helps sprint planning meetings go better and more efficient, familiarizes the team with what is on the product backlog, which then leads the team to committing easier to sprint goals/commitments.

Scrum Success

Today I interviewed for a scrum position as a product owner for a local tech company.  It was a really good conversation with a sharp lady and the company is doing really good work and will be around for a while based on what I was hearing and how they’re continually adapting and solving client’s needs.  Needless to say I’m interested in the position if they feel the same way about me performing the work.

In most of my interviews I like to ask two questions typically.  First is to the hiring manager and is, “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”  I like to ask this question cause I want to see how much buy in the manager has in their role there at the company, the company in general, and how I see myself working with them or not depending on where they see themselves in 5 years.

The next question I like to ask is something along the lines of, “Now that I have a general idea of what the job entails what I’m curious to find out is what it takes to really excel at this job.  I’m not interested in just doing the minimum, but really doing well.”  I do this cause it shows that you’re thinking ahead, want to shine, and isn’t a question that interviewers get asked a lot in my opinion so it helps me stand out. 

This person’s response to my second question was that I need to have the ability to influence without being a jerk or manipulative. Second she said that you really need to dig in and gain people’s trust by knowing what you’re talking about and just show that you care.  While there will always be new ways of doing things in scrum and other frameworks for completing projects this is something that will always be there, i.e. be nice to people, communicate, and follow through on your commitments.  I that, per the official scrum guide, that, “The Scrum framework consists of Scrum Teams and their associated roles, events, artifacts, and rules. Each component within the framework serves a specific purpose and is essential to Scrum’s success and usage” is important, but if you focus on what my interviewing person said you’ll be successful at anything you do. 

Product Owner: Value Maximizer

How do you maximize value in the workplace or as a business owner?

I’ll tell you what I’ve done.  I have a list of things that I’ve made for when I start a new business to get it off the ground and running.  Here is what that looks like.

Then in my trello list I’ve got over a 100 things to do and continue doing list for me and my team.  Not always are the things listed about making more money.  Sometimes it is a list of things to do to improve employee morale and smooth out processes for the production manager or appointment setter. 

I also like to set aside time once each week to focus on business development things so that at least once a week I’m focused on things outside of the day to day to improve how the company is run.  This same tactic is applied in scrum with the sprint reviews and should be done at least once every sprint so that the entire gets to benefit from the results of process improvement.

The scrum guide says that the product owner is a value maximizer.  I think the key to prioritizing what is most important first, second, and third is to ask the customer (stakeholder) and listen to what their biggest pain point is.  If you can key in on that, create actionable steps to solving it, and then either complete the actions needed to solve that pain point yourself or source it out to your team then you are on the right track for how to maximize the value you render to your stakeholder and make sure that everyone is successful.

Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care

So as I jump into a career pivot from developer to product owner, scrum master, project manager type roles and I’m interviewing and submitting resumes and a common task/assignment with the job is to interface with the customer (stakeholder for you scrum-ites) and take down their information/needs, formulate said needs into actionable bite sized pieces that can be done in a time boxes event of one month or less, and be in contact with the team performing the work to help where needed and update the client as needed.

As I interview though and ask what it takes to really excel at these jobs the common response more or less is to just jump in and get to know people, what their problems are, and show that you care and that is about it.  I don’t know if this is brought up because people just don’t do it or maybe we’re all just craving for someone to do that for and with us.  By the way I can and do totally do this for those who were wondering.  And because this is what it will take to be an outstanding product owner/manager I know that I’ll be quite good at this job.

As I run my business this is where camaraderie and growth among the team and with your clients happens.  It’s when you actually show them you care by asking how their dog is, family is, etc and then you actually follow up with that care whether that is through a text, call, email, or in person is where in my opinion real progress gets made.  The quote from Teddy Roosevelt, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care” applies in product owner management and any professional interpersonal relationship or personal relationship.  So yes learn all the latest agile and scrum and best practice techniques and certifications you can, sure.  But don’t let that get in the way of just being a good person and caring and helping when and where there is a need.

Timeboxes in Agile Meetups

As I dive deeper into the Agile world and continue learning I’ve been going to meetups one to two times a week.  I found a few groups on meetup.com and have attended lots of meetups to learn, help, and network where I can.

For the uninitiated I thought I’d just publish what the experience typically looks like there in case you were interested in coming, but didn’t really know what to expect.  Depending on the size of the group they will break the group up into smaller groups to facilitate more in depth conversations, usually in size from 5-9 people.  This of course is in line with the recommendation of Scrum where dev team sizes are anywhere from 3-9.  Any smaller and there wouldn’t be that much collaboration and any bigger there are obviously too many to really cover as many topics as the group would like and some people are more apt to not comment if they’re in a group that is too small or too big so this helps solve that problem.  Note that this same thing could and ought to observed in your own organization.

From here you’ll take roll and then in your group you’ll be asked to write down things you’d like to talk about.  These can be anything from how to manage problems in the team, duties of a product owner/scrum master, types of software used to track project progress to which certifications are the most relevant or not to get to excel in your role.  Then you yourself get 3 or 4 votes and you’ll mark which sticky notes you want to talk about with your votes. 

The highest voted topics are discussed first and a timebox is given of anywhere from 5 – 8 minutes.  When the timer goes off the group is asked if they’d like to continue, maybe they’d like to continue, or would not like to continue.  This is done by thumbs up, thumbs sideways, or thumbs down.

Now you know what to expect at most meetups.  Others will also include a guest speaker(s) or perhaps a presentation on the company hosting the meetup along with split out group discussions. 

What are your most effective ways to holding meetings and learning and networking?

My experience on agile teams

Someone asked me the other day what my experience on agile scrum teams has been like so I thought I'd write it out here as well.

Some of the teams that I’ve been on are much more structured than others when it comes to agile scrum implementation and use.  My most recent stint was at MasterControl where they did a pretty good job of it and are actively implementing SAFe right now.  When I first started there a couple months into it we all went to a big house in summit county (Park City area for those who don’t know where that it is) and we holed up there with tons of goodies and what not to plan out upcoming projects and things we were going to improve on in the coming year.  Essentially this was like a BIG sprint retrospective where you identify one or more things to do in the upcoming sprint (year) that will improve the overall efficiency of the dev team and for our stakeholders. 

Once we were back we went to work on those things.  My team worked on a 2 week sprint time frame.  We used workfront to track our projects, which were estimated by hours.  We met every week on Monday to talk through progress of each project, any impediments, and renegotiated what was to be done next or what needed some changes on the existing projects. 

Every day we held a daily standup to talk about what we’d worked on the day previous, what we were working on that day, and any impediments or items that were a dependency from somewhere else.  Afterwards the project managers could and would check in with other teams and the dev team/person assigned to a project to get a status update and help in removing said project along.

This was the bulk of my experience in our agile scrum teams with little nuances here and there with MasterControl.

Notes on Escape

That’s exactly the voice/crazyness I was feeling a few weeks ago.  

I need to remember this quote when I want to buy a big tv for the new house :)

This is suuuper interesting.  I grew up in a household that clipped/used coupons pretty regularly.  Problem with it really is mental brain space.  Having a bunch of ideas all at once is fine, but actually dedicating small snippets of time/brain space/energy is trying to find immediate gratification.  Mental space diversion is distraction.  

I love this book's idea of semi-retirement as I think I'd go stir crazy with 100% freedom/relaxation time for myself.  I've done that before and it just doesn't really appeal.  But I do enjoy working on my own time, helping others, and doing so without having to think about the bank account balance.  We'll get there (the wifey and I).  

I also like the idea of planning out a budget for my epic adventure, i.e. finding the total cost, then divide that by how many months are left till said adventure so that it is easier to see what amount I need to save each month to get that thing.

Overall a nice quick read that I'd recommend to anyone.  I read it in maybe an hour tops.

Arthur Cooper Interview notes on Eventual Millionaire

Full service internet marketing company.  SEO, Paid Search, Website design, reputation management.

No matter how great your website is, if nobody knows it exists its not going to do you any good.  SEO, Paid search, reputation management is how to turn that around.  

Bought a franchise.  Buying a franchise = Buying a system.  You still have to produce the clients.  You still have to sell and market.

Hundreds of clients for SEO and you’ll be at the top.  A lot of interaction, back and forth, collaboration, but really fulfilling.

there is no relationship between product knowledge and success in selling it.  It is what those products do for the client that equates to success.

Central importance: You need CONSTANT new fresh content, whether well written content (blog posts), videos or podcasts, that is a good sign of a good SEO company.  

On average (includes copywriting)

For local SEO: At least a $1,000/month.  

For national SEO: More like 4 times that.

Off-site optimization!  Are you doing that?  Social media management and research, podcast interviews, mentions, backlinks, +1’ing, tweets, things that drive traffic to your site.  

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)

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.

Filtering out business ideas is hard work

I’ve brainstormed a whole list of business ideas.  I went through them trying to filter out the good from the bad and still need to do more of that so that I can then get started on the ones I think will do best.  What I will say though is that just going through my list and organizing it and picking out the really bad ones made my brain hurt and was stressful. 

I think part of the stress is that I don’t want to finish filtering the list and then start on the ideas and then not have them pan out.  It’d also be stressful to work on things and then have some initial success and then get discouraged when things got tough/bumpy.

As I sit here it is amazing the victimy/addicty words just spewing forth from my mouth.  Of course things aren’t always going to be perfect.  I just need to stay focused on the small steps.

Things I've learned from others in business and some about myself and business

At the beginning of the year I wrote down the goal that I wanted to make 50k.  Currently I'm at around 42k-45k depending on whether you include health savings account money and 401k stuff that I'm foregoing.  What I decided to do at the first of the year was get a second job to bridge the gap and hopefully meet my goal.  The second job jerked me around a little bit and so I ended up quiting after just a couple months.  Part of the reason I quit was because I wanted to dedicate some time to learning new skills, specifically coding for computers and building apps.  I figured that if I could increase my skills, thank you Jim Roan, I could command a higher paying position within my company or perhaps elsewhere.

 

After some introspection and advice I came to realize that if I were to work to get a higher paying job that I'd still be at another job and not earning the type of money I want to earn and know I can earn.  With that in mind I was left with starting a business.  One thing I did to bridge the gap on linkedin.com was to increase my skills/marketability by building a course on udemy.com.  See/sign up for it here if you'd like.  https://www.udemy.com/easy-self-reliance-and-barter-skills/ 

 

After I came to that realization my brother chipped in and gave me a bunch of course material to earn1k.  See/sign up here if you're interested.  http://earn1k.com/  As seen in the Wall Street Journal...

 

One concept that I picked up from this guy and one other, Tim Ferris, is that one ought to validate their ideas before the jump into any business venture.  I hadn't done that with the course I built and...it is just sitting there, which I'm actually ok with cause it was something I was working on to increase my marketability for getting another position here or elsewhere, but hadn't actually tried to validate and upon further research doesn't appear the format that I went about doing it was ideal.  Lesson learned.

 

One thing I did/do like about informational products is that they're quite a bit of work to get started/built initially, again AFTER it is validated, but once done they hopefully sell themselves and can convert into a constant cashflow stream for my family. 

 

I started doing some thinking about all the ideas I had.  For starters they were in a million places.  

 

 On my flash drive.  On my laptop.  On my ipod note thing.  I've since consolidated all my ideas and need to set aside a time to go through them all.  One thing I want to do is go through the earn 1k material and come up with more ideas.

 

At this time my wife likes doing crafts.  She has submitted a couple ideas to a site that does flash sales where they sell items at a discount to their email list.  Her first two ideas didn't get accepted.  The third one did however about a month or so ago.  They ran her product, see here https://www.etsy.com/listing/165274395/the-world-is-your-playground-24-x-36?ref=af_shop_order, and she almost sold out of everything.  97 of 100 items sold.  She also ended up selling one more on the previous link and she sold another one to a friend of ours last night for 99 out of 100. 

 

One thing I love about her product/business is that it also jives with one of Tim Ferris' main rules, a simple FAQ.  He advises against any business that can't easily answer any customer issues with a simple one page FAQ.  Reason being is that anything more complex than that will need a bajillion customer service reps (more overhead) to answer the endless list of questions.  More questions = more problems, complaints, returns, and less repeat business.

 

I also love that she again did the work once, the product sells itself, and she is rolling in dough.  I think I may advise her to try and figure out how to automate the process for the next round.  That way it is all money coming in, but she doesn't have to do any of the legwork for getting the product out the door once it is sold.  Maybe we could hire out her sisters or something to do it.

 

With her experience I realize that really I don't want to be involved in service based businesses myself.  Now it isn't the worst thing ever and maybe I'd be more willing to do it once the product based business was covering my expenses and I'd finished traveling/seeing/doing everything I want to do and am back at home.  Larry Ellison is a billionaire who mascarades his business around as a product when in fact it is both a product and a service.  Once product is bought he has his team go in and install this and do that and and and...a service side to his product business.

 

One thing I learned or realized or finally had sink in is that if I, or my employees aren't working on the service we provide, then we aren't getting paid, whereas a product just ships out and I'd get paid.  With that in mind I've already started nixing business ideas that aren't product based or that can be automated/outsourced easily and cheaply.

 

Another concept I've come across is vanity metrics.  It was actually recommended to me to read the book, but after hearing the brief synopsis I'm not sure I need to read it.  Basically it is just calling out "busy work" and measuring things that have nothing to do with earning more money or improving anything.  I think this concept could be applied to not just businesses already up and running, but those that are building a product.  One may say, "hey in your barter course you need to cover this and that."  "Ok!  Cool!  I will do that."  Problem is these things may not have been validated in the first place to be valid and one would feel like they're accomplishing things when in fact they're just doing busy work and feeling good about themselves and something that is no good in the first place. 

 

Remit talks about this in his earn 1k course.  He says to NOT throw a bunch of things against the wall and see what sticks.  Building up a bunch of twitter followers for the local garbage business doesn't really matter.  Why?  Cause we already know what they're doing.  Really I think people just want to know how much it is going to cost to pick up their garbage and the times they're coming and then that it gets done.  I would say maybe people would be interested to see what crazy things the garbage man finds in the trash, but is that going to help them get more customers.  Not so sure. 

 

One idea I had was to help list businesses on the local classified site, everyday, three times a day to avoid it falling to the back of the search results.  I did vanity calling right at the very beginning.  I was calling, to look busy and feel good about myself, when I hadn't even done scripting of general questions/responses, and I quickly realized I wasn't helping myself.  Once corrected I was able to validate things much quicker and move on from the idea.

 

My mom is turning into a mogul herself in her spare time.  She's joined a company that is earning her 2-300 a month on the side each month.  She reported to me that she just had her best month last month.  That is pretty dang cool.  Here is my mom, the lady who changed my diaper who knows how many times, and the diapers of my 5 other siblings, who didn't quite have the opportunity to finish schooling till after the kids were out of the house and is now working on a side business and doing well.  I advised that she figure out which of all the avenues would work best for building her business instead of keeping her busy doing things that don't add to the bottom line.  Her business is one of awareness, education, and networking with others.  I hope she's able to avoid busy vanity work and find the things that work best for her.  We'll see what happens.  Fortunately for her my dad has uber business experience and will be able to share with her what would work best and what wouldn't so she ought to be ok and do well after a while.  I'm excited to see how it goes.

Dude what's the deal with gold and silver?

I very easily think gold (silver) could go much much lower in dollar terms.  I'm pretty sure the gold/silver book talks about ratio investing.  That form of analysis makes a lot of sense to me in gauging real values of things.  While gold may go to $700, what is it terms of ratio investing when comparing it to oil or the nasdaw, etc. 

 

I listened to an interview a while ago with the hedge fund manager of the year from like 1999.  The guy predicts gold going to at least $1,100 an ounce so about another 200 from where we're at and way below what the price of gold was then (I can't remember when I listened to the interview).  I think it is wise to listen to people like that.  Top of their class, whether a bear or a bull.  It helps put things into perspective and gives you both sides of the coin to consider. 

 

What is interesting is doing that AND reading up on the past brethren, i'm talking like brigham young brethren and what not.  I've read stuff from the brethren that state that men will be speculators in the last days.  I think a big part of that is because of interest rates being at zero and people getting clobbered with their purchasing power and so they're chasing any gain they can get.  It used to be that simply saving, a carpenter, with a wife and 8 kids at home, could work, pay for college for all the kids, and retire no problem.  Try that today.  Not gonna happen.  Hence speculation and chasing yield in crazy ways that may or may not pan out.

 

just today I listened to an interview of two gold/silver bugs and they stated that the elite are pumping things that aren't real, i.e. stock market and much of real estate, and squashing real things to "shake out weak hands".  Once done to their wishes they'll take advantage, rothschild style, by buying up cheap "english bonds" or gold/silver.

 

Just today my bro who is also heavily invested in precious metals talked about diversifying.  Sure.  I get it.  No yield.  Not getting ahead with these non-cash flowing assets.  For reals it bugs/makes no sense.  What I think though in my head, "don't speculate and beat the rush, panic now".  One day you won't be able to get gold/silver.  I think before that day comes though that Brigham young's prophecy will be fulfilled first that says a wheelbarrow of gold won't buy you wheat.  Again food/water storage...NOT exciting, not sexy, not giving you a yield. 

 

Yesterday we talked about what we were thankful for in elder's quorum.  I said, among other things, I was thankful for the prophets in that they basically have prescribed for us a safe investing strategy.  Food storage, and get out of debt, and then invest in yourself via education/skills training to be able to provide more. 

 

6 weeks ago I went to lunch with a friend who is a lawyer, has a few businesses/makes bank.  He wishes the church would teach about good debt/bad debt.  Honestly I think the spirit will do that for people if they're humble/will listen/see.  "Ears to hear and eyes to see"  One of my brothers read that "none dare call it conspiracy" book a long time ago, but thought, "If it is a worldwide conspiracy, how come nobody comes out and says so, i.e. snitches?"  He now says "It could be, just that on certain levels the henchmen don't know every part of the conspiracy, but just theirs and even then they may not link it together as a huge conspiracy anyways."

 

So...yes silver/gold could get squashed quite a bit more, i.e. a huge deflationary period before the collapse, which i'm loving right now by the way in the form of cheaper gas.  I think mike predicts that in his book too.  I KNOW he has in additional video's on his website.  Pretty crazy stuff. 

My wife is a budding mogul!

Ashlee is selling this poster https://www.etsy.com/listing/165274395/the-world-is-your-playground-24-x-36?ref=af_shop_order

 

She's sold two on etsy and 83 on this daily deals flash site.  She's probably netted about $600 since she's had it up.  Pretty cool stuff.  My wife is a mogul!

http://brickyardbuffalo.com/world-map-poster.html#.UpOU08RzE3k

My worst nightmare

Four hour work week questions

I’d quit working at England logistics and suddenly my car would be in an accident and would be totaled.  We only have liability and so the car would be a total loss.  We’d have to suddenly get another one with a car loan or pay cash, which both would drastically lower our monthly income and we may not be able to afford even just food for groceries and may drawn down our savings significantly. Permanent impact on a scale from 1-10, 2 as we’d just buy a beater or a cheaper ngv that cost significantly less in gas costs.  Not likely to happen as we’re both pretty cautious drivers.

We’d have to start eating our food storage since my/our business wasn’t making enough money to buy groceries and then the economy would implode and we’d have no food to eat when we really needed it and we would’ve been pissed/scared we didn’t just play it safe and stay at the job. Permanent impact on a scale from 1-10, 3 as we may not eat all our food storage and we could use the bishop’s storehouse to offset some of the costs of food if needed and we could build up our store again with a few months of dedicated savings.  Not likely as we could cut back our costs and could find part time work.

We’d have some major medical issues with London or ourselves and couldn’t afford to pay for anything since the hospital bills were so high since we didn’t have health insurance.  Permanent impact on a scale from 1-10, 4 as we’d have to declare bankruptcy and that’d damage my credit history.  Once done though we could rebuild it and be back to good credit standing in 3-5 years.  Possible to happen, but not likely as we all seem to have a pretty good clear bill of health.

Any business wouldn’t bring in enough income to pay our rent and we’d either be late on it or we’d have to dip into savings again to pay for everything.  Eventually when all these things hit at once we wouldn’t have any money to pay for anything and we’d have to move back home, with mom and dad of course paying for the cost of the move out of their own pocket.  Permanent impact on a scale from 1-10, 3 as we could quickly realize we’re not making enough and are uncomfortable with the drawdown of our savings and so I’d go back to work and so would Ashlee.  May happen and is the most likely thing to happen out of all the things mentioned.

  Outcome/benefits of more probable scenarios of leaving England would be that I could wake up when I wanted with my wife and kids.  I’d be able to always get adequate rest.  I’d be working on things that I wanted to be working on and dealing with people I’d have a lot more control over with who I’d be dealing with.  Ashlee may be able to help me work on the business. I’d be able to build synergy with people/businesses that I’d like to build synergy with.  I’d be more fulfilled since I’d be doing what I wanted and not what my boss or his boss wanted.  I’d be able to work from a logical point of view instead of ignoring reality on many things.  I could institute failure in my business and for my employees.  I’d quickly learn what works in business and what doesn’t, whereas now I only know a bunch of theory.  I’d be able to hire other people and help them get ahead in business.  It is possible that one or more of the businesses I work on would include working with my family and friends, which would be awesome to do.  I’d have more confidence.  I’d be able to prove the haters wrong.

      If I got fired today I’d immediately go through all my business ideas myself and with family and pick which ones would be best.  Then I’d validate them.  I may even ask family to invest a small amount of money into the most promising ideas if they wanted in.  If I had to get back to work as a credit analyst I could do so as I’ve already been offered jobs for just such a situation and I’d probably get hired back on at a company that had much better health insurance anyways and so I’d probably come out ahead anyways.

    

    I don’t have my fyf.  I don’t know if any of the ideas I have will actually make money as they’re untested or I’m in the wrong season of the year to start them, those that are seasonal being businesses that require manual labor and that I be there.

“What we fear to do the most is the thing we most need to do.”

     

      Financially I’m not going anywhere fast at England.  They’ve already told me that I’m not getting any more raises beyond that big one I got a year or so ago aside from the yearly increase one I’d be getting going forward.  I didn’t get hired on for the position of credit manager that I’d be perfect for.  They’re not looking to increase my position at that company.  Emotionally I feel like I’m not meeting my potential at that job.  I feel intimidated by people who are no further ahead in what I feel would be progress business wise from coworkers to friends or family.  Emotionally I’m also missing out on spending time with all my family that I’d really like to be spending with them.  We’ll see what happes physically, but I know I could be working out a bit more like I’d like to get into the shape I’d like to and at my current job I don’t have the time I’d like to dedicate to doing just that due to traffic jams, money, and time and location constaints.

I have app ideas, but it stresses me OUT!

I’ve got a fair amount of app ideas and if I let my mind wander I’m sure I could come up with more of them.  Apps are mini businesses.  Businesses ought to be validated before one dives into them so as to avoid investing tons of time, energy, and money into them only to see them fail.  I think if people validated their business ideas before they did them the number that you hear of, “9 out of 10 businesses fail in the first 5 years” would be a lot less.  If that was the case and the number was a lot less then I’d certainly be a lot more motivated to start a business.

So yesterday I decided to do some app validating.  At first I thought I needed to call book publishers for an idea my brother and I have and thought better of it and thought I’d just go straight to the end user to validate the idea.  Funny thing happened.  I more than validated the idea.  First app I pulled up…1-5 MILLION installs.  What is funny is…this totally stressed the hell out of me and even put a damper on the rest of my night.  Why?  Cause I thought, “How am I supposed to compete with 1 million plus download app?  I can’t ever get that many downloads and there is too much competition.”

What is crazy about that is I already KNOW that I need to validate and competition is validation.  I already know many people/businesses have become successful by taking an existing product and making it better and yet as I contemplated the competition all those thoughts went out the window.  CRAZINESS.

It wasn’t until this morning that I realized that I was being a friggin’ idiot and that I’d validated our idea and that if my desire to do the app was there I’d have some people who were willing to give it a try.  Weird how our brains selectively forget things when doing so destroys any excitement lol.

So if any of you have any business ideas and validate like crazy, on your first investigation/try no less like I did, please don’t get depressed. 

Sincerely,

Brock