OK, now I really got your attention

What’s this nuclear plant in a second floor apartment? Am I going crazy or maybe it’s a good moment to call SRI (the Romanian “brother” of the more famous CIA)? Or maybe I need some medication (you know, those nice things we are offered daily in the spam we can’t live without.

No, I am not mad and I didn’t fall in the April Fools Day trap either, I am just presenting an idea I got today while going home with a taxi. This nuclear plant in an apartment stands for any weird business idea we might have that is very hard to be put to work.

One of the first things you need to ask yourselves when thinking about a business is: “Can I really manage this?”. I had a friend who wanted to start a kindergarten in a 5 rooms apartment with a very very small yard. She said she’s so passionate when it comes to kids, that it just didn’t matter. And since I have the talent of ruining other people’s dreams I was able to shatter this in few well asked questions:

• you know you need: a dorm, a large bathroom, a sport hall and a kitchen (at least), these are the rules in my country;
• you know you have to hire teachers, janitors, a nurse at least;
• you know you need more space in the yard;
• you know you won’t be able to make some money from the few kids unless you ask for some huge prices no one will pay;
• you know no one would bring their kinds in this dump.

She was a bit mad at me for no letting her dream, but she eventually agreed that I do know what I am talking about (I should after spending my high-school years learning to be a kindergarten teacher).

I also have my dreams: I would love creating furniture or having a custom car painting firm. No, I don’t have experience in either of them, but I am sure my passion and hard work might help me. And who cares I am a woman. But I cannot do any of these. I don’t have the space needed, I cannot even use my vacuum cleaner without making my neighbrours angry. So my business ideas remain in the “daydream” stage. I know I’d made some awesome donuts too, but there’s no place for such heavy cooking.

So, to end this hectic article: we need to know if our business plan is really viable. If we can afford the space, if the business plan is guaranteeing us some future earnings at least. If this is something we can do and not as utopic as my nuclear plant in the apartment.

Sometimes we fail to notice the most obvious things.

It was yesterday. I was looking again at some new blogs and scanning through the content. I don’t read, I skim (until I find something worthy of my time and then I am getting more inclined to actualy read). There was a project with an article that would encourage the readers to start their own business, if they really hated working.

What I could understand from that article was something like “Do you hate working? Start your own firm!”.

I couldn’t agree less with this statement and I consider this in the end to be a BAD REASON to start a firm. Why have I started my own firm?

• because I wanted to work more. Yeah, I was feeling like I am not reaching my true potential there and knew I can do more Read the rest of this entry »

Some days ago I was approached by a friend of mine who’s also got an advertising firm. We had some small projects together and I was offered a job as a web developer in his company. I do have my own small firm, but in the end some more money won’t hurt. Right?

So we met to discuss the conditions of my ‘employment’ and of course the price I am willing to work for. As you can imagine, after 6 years of doing this web design thing, having my own 24 sites and tens of others created for my clients, plus many clients at my door to work with them, my money request wasn’t too small.

I am already a specialist in this field and he knew that. This is the reason I was approached since he knew my portfolio and he needed my services. Still, when we started chatting he realized he cannot afford “hiring” me. He was willing to pay a way lower price for me to work on the firm and I wasn’t willing to work for pennies anymore.

3 years ago I worked for a design firm. I had only 3 years of experience, I was still a so-so designer. My own network was still small (6-7 sites instead of 24 as I own now) and of course my wage couldn’t be too big). Still, in all these years my experience grew exponentialy, I have worked on so many sites it just makes me sick and you can imagine now I know my value on the market.

Here are some small conclusions I drew, maybe they’ll help others too:

1. KNOW your value and be realistic. Don’t ask for a huge salary when you know you are less experienced, don’t sell your skin for less than it’s worth though.

Read the rest of this entry »

I think this kind of motivational article is always good. There are many good things into getting on your own and stop working on that 9 to 5 program. There is money to be made and happiness to be found. I like such articles. It makes people understand that a bit of a risk is OK. And that they can do MORE than just working “for the man”.

What I totally dislike is the fact most such articles just brag about the positives and don’t tell their readers about the possible problems they might run into.

Working on your own might be the best thing that happens to you or the thing that ruins your life forever. Let’s set the record straight and try to see through the “fancy talk”.

Here are the things THEY DIDN’T TELL YOU:

Read the rest of this entry »

I recall 1 year ago, when I first started working on my own web design firm, my first thought was: “Oh, my God, I am gonna be my own boss”.

I worked some years ago for someone else in the position I have now (web designer) and it served me as a great experience too. After I left there, all the information I gained served me so well when starting my own small firm.

One of the most important things I learnt was that YOU WON’T MAKE IT WITHOUT A LOT OF WORK. My boss was the same age as I was, a young and classy woman. She wasn’t that desperate to make the business work since she had quite a relaxed financial situation. She never too her job seriously, thinking that being the boss means only telling others what to do.

When I started my own design firm I was afraid. I know she still hasn’t got a good business plan, she doesn’t earn as much as needed to be in a profit and she could file on bankruptcy at any time with that firm since it’s a “dead baby from birth”.

What made her fail? What makes a business fail in the end?

1. You cannot run a business just on weekends

Or when you feel like working. There were days she wouldn’t show up at work, days she would rest or have fun. I could totally relate to this: it’s better to have fun at 25 than work your mind off. Still, relaxation doesn’t make a business strong. So, you cannot take too many days off or have a relaxed program. It would show.

2. Weekends? What are they? Ah, I get it, 2 more days of work in a week.

One thing I have learnt for sure in this year is that the weekend is also a good time to work. When you have just started and the business is slowly picking up, there are not too many weekends to relax on. In 2007 I had 2 weekends off: both times I was in Germany with my boy friend, so I couldn’t work. All the other 50 ones I spent relaxing for 2-3 hours and working for 10 at least in a day.

3. “Nine to five” is a cute expression, don’t make your schedule on this though.

Yeah, 8 hours of work, weekends off. The typical working schedule. We hate it when we are employees, love it when we have a business and would even cut more hours from it. Sure we can do this, if we don’t want to make that business work in this century.

When you are on your own firm there is no more such a lax schedule. The working day can be 15/20 hours sometimes, if needed, the weekends can amass up to 30 hours of work again. There is no time for happy life, at least for some months.

As a conclusion: the main error in my ex-boss style of work was to not put that extra effort. We cannot keep on this crazy working schedule for too long. No one likes working for 80 hours a week and not having a minute of rest. It’s not a plan for a long time, it’s a plan for kickstarting a business, for securing those first clients and being ready for the first employees.

A good business cannot be run in a 2 hours / week schedule either. At least for the first months a new business man cannot afford too many weekends or vacations. It’s a risk you are willing to take. Your business won’t grow unless you work in an “unhuman” manner for a while. That nice 9-5 job is a past thing now: work a lot on the first months/years and then you can harvest the awesome results.

Need I say that in 1 year’s activity my small firm had few times more earnings that the firm I used to work on? I have worked for thousands of hours already, but yes, the future sounds pretty nice in my case.

I have just opened a paid forum posting service as one of my (too) many online projects. We have already “hit” some clients and hired a team of editors to keep the content writing up. So far, so good.

I did have a nice ‘chat’ with a guy on adminfusion who was a bit shocked at the “high” price we have on our services. It’s 0.30 USD/post in the higher plans and he was totally put off by this. My short response was something like “please then go to the very cheap paid forum posting services and then come back here to tell me how much paid posting sucks”.

It would be a nice idea to elaborate on this though.

There are MANY services, and a lot of low quality posting.

When I started the service I already knew this is a very hard niche. There are some well known sites that do this and I kinda look small as compared to them. What gives me hope though is the fact MOST people who used paid forum posting were displeased with the quality of the posts. Here is what they complained about:

• the posts were made too fast .. imagine running a non active forum and having 400 posts made in 2 days .. then again nothing.
• the posts were in the general chat or the welcome forums. Of course it’s difficult having to reply to specialized topics about webmaster business, finances, cars etc. It’s easier to stick a “hello”, “welcome here” or “how cool” message in the offtopics. I am still certain people don’t pay for this crap.
• the posts were short and bland .. starting good topics and making interesting replies it’s a bit hard. Many editors take the short easy road and don’t care about quality. Well, in the end QUALITY matters.

Knowing all these problems from so many reviews made by ex-clients, helped me set a business strategy. Our paid forum posting service will not fall into the trap of low quality. Here is some of the things I was able to “force” on my editors, and these also justify the price that’s a bit higher as compared to others:

• we have good editors who post in a month’s time .. they don’t “spam”, they have a limit of 3 posts/day .. nothing more
• I forbid my teams to touch the “welcome” and “general chat” categories. I did have clients who replied to my email message and asked us to please also post something there so the forums would look more “normal”. After getting the “green light” from our clients, we started posting there, few messages, some excellent topics and quality content, even if on the offtopics.
• the posts ARE NOT oneliners. My team has a 30+ words/post policy to respect. Most of the time we get to 50+ or even 100+ words on a thread/post since we just type fast and are inspired. Of course my client won’t have to pay for the additional work, it’s something we do since we really want them to receive the best content possible.
• writing in the specialized categories takes more effort (sometimes we do a bit of a research in the forum’s topic so that we know at least something about what we have to discuss there).

This would be one of the reasons our clients pay 0.30 USD/message and not 0.20 or 0.10 as in other caases. Great quality takes effort and should be paid more than low quality spammy posts.

Another good reason would be that we pay our editors 0.20 USD/ post.

We cannot have such an excellent team of content writers and pay them 5 cents / post. NONE of these highly specialized people who work for such low payment. If we want to be able to provide our clients with the quality we promise, we also need to pay our editors well and offer bonuses for every 5 finished jobs.

Such a service NEEDS PROMOTION. Paid promotion. In under 3 weeks we have invested almost 60 USD in advertising. It’s not a huge sum, but for a very new project it’s already something. We were able to make up for this money already and are on a good “plus”, but this is not the end. As the service will grow, we’ll have to finance it more, advertise even more serious and invest a lot of money.

So, next time you think a paid forum posting should be very cheap try to also see what this would mean:

• low quality messages
• bad editors who’d work for a very small payment
• no investments into the service

And if you still are not convinced, try us for a 20% off. It’s December. All our posting plans are just 80% now. 

I have to admit I am NOT a “team” person. Whenever I had a task I’d ask to work alone. The funniest moment was, 10 years ago I think at the International House in Timisoara (a place we went to learn some better English) .. We were 11 in the “class” I think and we had to work in pairs. Knowing how bad it is to have someone on my team (they always dragged me down and I had to work for them too) I asked with the nicest voice: “Tina, can I be a pair?”

It was funny, but I think this is what I am .. a “pair” person, who’s making the “pair” all by herself.

As I mentioned before .. I am not a team person. I was always pretty fast when having to work on something. I found out that, if I worked on a team, my results would be worse: we’d fool around (well, we’re not always that interested in learning/working), I would lose pretious time trying to explain my partners the solution and most of the time, totally ..ssed on their stupidity, I’d have to do all the task by myself.

No, I am not Einstein, but I do seem to have a higher IQ. And this makes working with me impossible on an equal level.

This would be the main reason I don’t believe in equality in a business.

I discussed months ago this issue with my boyfriend and we kinda agreed: there are some excellent teams working nicely, but most of the time partnerships end in “divorce” after some time. Why cannot people be that compatible?

• they have different speeds and capacities to solve a task. Just like me, in my schooldays, some might solve a problem faster, some might solve it slower or might never find a solution. This SHOWS and, in time, can become a problem;
• some are working hard, others are hardly working .. again .. at the beginning this might not be such an issue, but as time goes by, the one doing all the job will rebel.
• money changes a lot .. all the things mentioned above become more serious when money is involved. When high revenue starts rolling, people start thinking more about how to maximize their own profits and get rid of the slow working ones.
• people are people .. as in marriage, a business relationship means a lot of compromises, many potential fights … It’s hard to work in a team since you have to work with other people. They won’t always agree with you and living as a “couple” is hard.

I know this might not be what you’d expect from a “business related” blog entry. Maybe you’d like me to praise the team work and tell you how wonderful a community is. Well a community is superb (this would explain why I own 14 forums right now). I am addicted to interaction, to people and all kinds of projects. But I don’t see them as an equality position. I am a leader or have a leader.

Knowing the hierarchy really helps me work better. I know my tasks and can achieve my goals as an employee or as the only leader.

What do you think?

I am sorry dear reader, but time has come for us to set some things straight and hope that you’ll understand at least now, that the myth of getting rich overnight is just this: a myth.

You’d tell me there have been many cases of people who turned from “zero to hero” because of a twist of fate. People who woke up one day to find themselves horribly rich, just because they had luck or made a genius decision.

We have the lotteries we flood weekly in the hope we’d be able to change our lives. People invest money so that they might win the “jackpot”. The luck one has is built up from all the money invested by him and the others who chase this dream. One might get rich, or one might invest money for many many years. Maybe a trust fund or just a good investment with all the money put into that lottery would be better. But people want overnight success.

Online there are such stories too. We have the “kids” behind Google who became rich after selling the business. We have more recently YouTube that’s been sold for some unholy price, we even have that inspired student who created the million dollar homepage. They weren’t that lucky (as in a lottery ticket), they were inspired. They had that moment of true inspiration when they decided to do this or that. They created something new, something totally off any given limits at that time and they succeed.

Copycats are now all over the place. But the true success is achieved with something unique …

Should we now just call our quits? Just because some of us are not that inspired nor that lucky? Should we really care about getting rich overnight and the fact it’s not that easy? That it’s impossible for most of us?

We could do this, or we could start seeing business as it is: a steady effort into getting somewhere. We could try earning more each day, by working hard and having a good plan, by being well organized and consistent in our work.

Most of the “getting rich overnight” schemes are scams. I’d say all, but I fear you’d accuse me of being too hard on this reality. Let’s say that a HUGE percentage (99,9%) are total scams, planned for people to get rich overnigh (the problem is that these people who’d earn a lot are not you and me, but the people who devised them).

Most of the “how to get rich overnight” books are just platitudes sold to stupid people who still believe in Alladin’s Magic Lamp … People buy them and think they’ll discover the secret.

The secret is here and still we fail to see it: you can be a successful businessman by having blind luck or a “strike” of genius or (most common for many) by working hard, being dedicated, focused and consistent.

That we can do.