Cliff notes:

• Why be in business?
• What does it take to be in business?
• Business of you!

Why be in business?

Two reasons are prevalent when people talk about creating their own business. Scoring big is always in peoples mind, the ability to solve your financial issues and raise your standard of living. First things first, be realistic. Is your estimate od $1 million revenue and $100.000 profit a year more of hoping than expecting? I had one of those ideas once, just about as my site reached $600 income a month (about $450 profit) I managed to chart a sale of it for not under $300.000 in around 2 years. Reality check please! In second place on the motivation scale is being your own boss and it is usually a romantic notion that people have about this topic.  If you are the boss to someone else you know that you need to keep work and personal feelings separate, does it work when you are your own boss? All the same rules would need to be applied to your work as you would do to others. Therefore measuring performance, motivation, making sure the tools for the trade are right all falls into your remit and being honest with yourself is hard if your metrics are not hard facts but based on estimation and feeling.

What does it take to be in business?

Close your eyes, come on do it. Imagine what being in business looks like. Suits, meetings, negotiations, making plans and stuff like that. Well no, it is hard working day after another hard working day (sometimes in the same calendar day). Rare are people who are able to just quit their jobs and start a business. Usually a newly formed business owner has a day job and works on the business either by stealing time from his/her everyday job or working afternoons and night and weekends and holidays. Not the cool and sexy lifestyle you imagined right? And not only that you need to just do the work but you need to be constantly on the lookout to pickup new knowledge and tricks to help you edge out your competition. It is hard bloody work and as your amount of sleep goes down, your ability to efficiently execute goes with it and you get into a spiral of trying to work more and achieving less until you burn out.

Business of you!

But what do you mean the business of you? What does business do? You invest time and money to gain financial resources. So how would you calculate benefits that investing in yourself would bring? Without going into really deep research on salary/degree/skill/location correlation I will try and estimate from what I know best (me!). I will make some assumptions, you can take them at face value or challenge, I am known to be wrong sometimes.

Branko Santo (current):

• Degree: none
• Industry: IT (outsourced operations for customer networks)
• Position: Team lead of a small transition team (3 direct reports, PM-like work with strong technical flavor)
• Skills: Technical, Process, PM, Operations (solid all-rounder, strong in people and presentations skills)
• Progression possibility: Very good (don’t see a ceiling from here, probably 1-2 levels possible with current skill-set)

Branko Santo (current + 10 years):

• Degree: none
• Industry: IT (assumption close to current)
• Position: 1st or 2nd line people management
• Skills: Technical, Process, PM, Operations (solid all-rounder, strong in people and presentations skills)
• Progression possibility: Probably at ceiling without anything to differentiate myself further

Branko Santo (added MBA, German language + 10 years):

• Degree: MBA
• Industry: IT (assumption close to current)
• Position: 2nd line or higher
• Skills: Technical, Process, PM, Operations (solid all-rounder, strong in people and presentations skills)
• Progression possibility: From 2nd line and up good timing and chance play a significant part but believe that I have all the prerequisites to go up from 2nd line.

Now the financial benefit is really hard to calculate but after some research I have calculated that getting an MBA would cost me about 25.000 euro ($32.500) and take just about 5 years with 2.500-3.000 hours of effort. With a total cost being around 55.000 euro ($76.500) (direct cost + opportunity cost of 3k hours at 10 euro/hour).

If we assume that an MBA will start monetizing after year 6 (5 for studying and 1 to make it pay) not calculating the benefit of knowledge gained during studies and the effect on salary to simplify calculations. On the 4 years left from the 10 originally in the calculation I will include 600 euro a month in hand as direct financial benefit which comes out to 28.800 euro and that is around half the investment.  If you assume ceiling goes up a level or two just because of the degree your payback will be evident after the 10 year initial calculation.

Chances of scoring a million+ payday is highly unlikely in the business of you but how viable is it in business anyway? The question that raises itself is an old one. How risk prone are you? Upgrading yourself is a surefire way to get some benefits and a business can be sometimes equated to a money-black-hole. On the other hand excitement and the G5 dream is in itself an achievement.

What is your preference?

For all the smart talk, books, theories, habits and definite traits that you MUST have to succeed, I don’t really see that many people making it. If it was as all those smart people writing self-help books and books about how the brain work (I probably read them all) had it right, we would have seen some progress in the general populous. So to hell with all the scientific shenanigans. But back to real science! I will use physics to explain what I see as two prerequisites of success, and consider, what are the chances of little ol’ me being right.

For the sake of the exercise I will separate people into two categories. Those who try to use leverage to succeed and those who try to use effort. If you are one, you are generally not the other or you are a statistical anomaly. As Archimedes put it “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.”. Now this was/is my general principle in life. I use my wits and charm to get the job done, still knowing a decent amount due to being able to intake more information in the orb resting on my shoulders. To work, this tactic does need to be almost effortless. If you try too hard you might break the rhythm and loose your advantage. Now on the other hand are the people who go for it on guts alone, those who put effort first. Most people have short or medium sized levers so they have to resort to effort and a lot of it if they want to make it big. I have seen some people with amazing careers due to pure effort and my hat is off ladies and gentlemen.

Now that we have identified the actors, we need to put up a theory. I will use myself as a clear example of a leverage guy. What I have been doing for the last 10 years it seems is purely extending the lever. The work that I have done has been to make myself more sell-able. It is a fact that I spent more time increasing my ability to do the job than doing the job itself and that has fueled my fast moves through positions, levels and companies. Alas but you come (or are going to soon) to a level where you don’t have a distinct advantage in lever length to most people. This predicament leaves you stranded if you are a one sided lever person. You could for sure try and increase your ability to leverage, but almost everyone now at that level is constantly doing it. This is where the effort needs to come in.

Let’s be honest you have leveraged as far as you can get, and don’t get me wrong it is a good thing. But now you have to put in a good effort so that the leverage actually brings an absolute advantage to your career/life prospects. Using math to show something like this should be pretty simple.

Person A: Average in the ability to use leverage and amount of effort (average worker)

Lever = 5

Effort = 5

Lever x Effort = 25
Person B: Able to use leverage greatly, low amount of effort (smooth talking, get out of jail free type of guy)

Lever = 12

Effort = 4

Lever x Effort = 48

Person C: Pretty good leverage, decent amount of effort (smart, good with people, generally good in everything)

Lever = 10

Effort = 5

Lever x Effort = 50

Person D: Slightly above average lever, great amount of effort (works crazy hours, puts in an effort, climbing the ladder)

Lever = 7

Effort = 9

Lever x Effort = 63

So who has the highest chance of success in life? As it stands Person D is far ahead especially knowing how the corporate world likes a hard worker. But D is I would say at a maximum, there is only so many hours in a day and with those hours it will be hard to increase the leverage (additional degree, extra skills, networking). B has an open field but usually people who fit this type have a problem working hard since they never had to do much in their life as they were always a capable bunch. Now person C has an open path, but is it the road less traveled on?

In general to be a real success you need to have both, in which proportions, that is up to you to decide. And don’t forget the random factors that can push you forward or backward a couple of years worth of effort (right/wrong place/time, acquaintances, luck).

How do you stack up?

First for the poker example! You are playing a decent opponent and have a good hand (not the best but not too far off). Your opponent makes a standard raise and you want to re-raise him. Now to make a meaningful raise you would have to put up about 65-70% of you stack (chips you have). By raising only 65-70% you put yourself into a possible hard decision situation! What if he goes all-in? Are you going to commit the rest of the chips or fold? That is called a hard decision. On the other hand if you went all-in you transfer the hard decision to your opponent, now he has to think if he has a strong enough hand, are you bluffing or if it makes sense to risk it at all.

a) You make the easy decision

b) You have time left over that you would spend on thinking about the hard decision

c) If you make a mistake, hey that’s life be sure it hurts more when you make a mistake on hard decisions

Now how does this transfer into real life? Let’s say you are happy at work, everything seems good, your career is promising inside the company. You are approached by a recruiter for a rival company. Hard decision? Go for several rounds of interviews, perhaps get the job just to find out offer on the table is just a bit better than your current one. Easy decision? Start of with a clear message of what is required to get you to change companies. Money is the easiest thing to position as it is the only certain thing they can offer. Set an “easy decision demarcation”, “If I get offered 80% more money than my current job I can’t refuse.” That is an easy decision and you probably won’t get far with most recruiters but you will save a lot of money compared to entertaining each offer that comes on the table.

Does it make sense?

August was very nice and we had record breaking months on both TableTtopHell (6.266 visists) and TCGHell (2.844 visits) blogs. What is really really good is that it seems we were in a google sandbox for 4 months with TCGHell and that we are finally out.

Can you spot the sandbox?

We fortunately/unfortunately have to scale back on the amount of posting on TCGHell since our star writer is going to be working on playtesting a game which we hope to have out by end of year. Revenue model still undecided.
We picked up Twitter more seriously engaging people all over. And last but not least we had another sale last month which very nicely netted us $17

Have fun people!

Let us imagine a perfect job:

• sliding work hours, 5am – 11pm. Could be covered by two shifts of support staff. Benefit for people who have a non-9to5 biological rhythm. Allow for things like mid-day break for lunch + gym + nap or whatever.
• work performance remuneration. Auction work packages for employees those who can and do more should be rewarded more even in the same group. Assign difficulty and earned “points” for each package and perhaps even let them battle it out if two people want the same package.
• base salary for getting x amount of work done. Imagine you can do what an average person at work does in about 3 hours a day. How about not having to sit another 5 hours but still get your salary?
• cross functional work. Can you imagine being a programmer and working 10h/week as an HR? Maybe you want to make a career change or build up skills. Why should you quit the good life to start at the bottom when you could just make a smooth transition. There are so many positions that can benefit from cross pollination that it really isn’t clear to me why this is not encouraged in companies.
• banning really bad coffee machines. I don’t really care how cheap it is, if you don’t supply the good stuff better don’t supply at all.

That would be a good start to a very nice job where you could really enjoy

20,620 pages

9,108 visitor

That my friends is how much it takes to make your first affiliate sale with amazon

$4.36 closer to 5mil

Week over week on TTH seems to be going well with stable progress, but TCGH is not doing so good stuck at ~50 visits per day.

TTH Week over week

TCGH Week over week

We did break on TTH for the first time 200 unique visitors in one day with just over a 100 coming from search engines (another first).

Audience wise we are progressing nicely, where I am unhappy is on the money earning battlefield. If we try to offload the monthly cost as soon as possible, advertising seems to be the only solution, therefore must start chasing everyone and anyone who could want to advertise with us and create an offer to present to them.

Work to be done, must get cracking.

Why I buy at BD is these little book markers they give out sometimes that I just bloody love! I don’t really need 15 book markers, but I have them, and I get happy when I open an envelope with a book and there is one inside (they don’t send them always).

If you look at it closer there is a 10/14 so these are collectible. And now we come to the problem!

Why BD are you not being smart enough and enticing people to collect these and giving them a place to exchange them?!?!?

• Not doing the stuff I can myself
• Not pushing hardly enough (1h a day)
• Not working on SEO

What am I going to do?

• Make a list of a 100 sites that cover the same niche as we do and ask for link exchange
• Make a list of 40 possible customers to advertise on site and ask if they are interested (cold call + mail)

Alea iacta est!