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?

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

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?!?!?

I love books, I love improvement of any kind and I love people explaining stuff.

Why do I hate Books where people write how they made it big? Well because they talk from hindsight. I would really really love to see someone document their travels in making millions from zero (or close to) and saying what he is going to do step by step posting all kinds of data.

That would kick ass

I just might do it!

A typical RPG starts of with yourself creating a character. It involves a bit of randomness which is what we get with our genetic and upbringing lottery. Then you take what you have and try to turn the numbers into a fully functioning unit (not always a person ). You start off with lowly equipment and no experience in what you want to do, and what you want to do is usually solve puzzles and kill all kinds of evil things. With everything you do you gain a certain amount of experience ( XP ) and when you have enough collected you are able to gain a “level”. Each level grants you the possibility of improving your lottery numbers in a way you would like to specialize.

Now that you start progressing you are able to fight stronger foes and solve harder puzzles which in turn give you more XP. But there is a caveat, as your levels progress so does the amount of XP needed for the next one. And its not proportional. Foes for example give you x2 amount of XP but you need x4 for the next level, so double the time needed.

At higher levels you will be fighting specifically hard enemies and will have to devise specialized strategies for beating them even going to the brink of the rules of the game. This is called meta-gaming. Conclusion? Higher the level, stronger the foe, bigger the reward.

Now does this sound somewhat like your job prospects? You come into a job that you don’t really know how to do or have some basic XP maybe even gained a level by attending some type of training. This leads you to the every day slog at work, or does it? It all depends on how you see work. As in gaining levels in RPG, upgrading yourself at work requires more and more as your level raises. Thus if you keep doing the same thing everyday you will plateau quickly.

So for progress you need to find more challenging and novel work to do. And if you relentlessly keep at it you will progress in time and reach a certain step which is built to be a chasm to scare people away from it. Only the brave shall even attempt. It is easy to attack a three-headed dragon in a game, but in real life going to your boss (or your bosses boss) and requesting a promotion or a raise is not that easy. Now you meta-game a solution. What do they say you need to do to get promoted? What actually works? Usually these two are not the same. Craft your solution and get that dragon!

Now the question is at which level you want to stop? If you are happy with your current position and work, you could be just counting the days working the same old thing and that is totally OK. If you are a perfectionist you will be working your tasks to the maximum, even when it is not needed. There are situations when a good enough solution is the best solution. And then you have those who are all about the ROI which let us be honest is the essence of meta-gaming.

As this one was just spewed out from an idea I got last night it might not be thoroughly thought out. Please do comment if you have any input!

Thanks!

As time went on it looked like the proportion of honest people to cheaters was going the wrong way. This bugged me so bad that I had to investigate how easy it would be to trick someone into buying your site even thought it was not really what they thought it was.

During the 6 months of somewhere in 2006 when I was working hard on a couple of projects I decided to create a site for the sole purpose of checking how easy it would be to trick someone (disclaimer: no I didn’t take anybodies money but I could have). So lets see what a site has to have to be sold as a property and the steps you need to take.

1. Content is king, yeah you need it. To present your website as a legitimate content provider you need to have some. The more the merrier. You could actually create this content, or you don’t have to. Hire a cheap English speaker to rewrite content from sites in the same niche (so that a copy paste search won’t find anything). Build enough content across a 6 month period and you will be nicely indexed in Google, you might even get some traffic.
2. Do a decent design that is either made for adds or to look fancy. If you make an AdSense looking site you can easily explain why it is ugly. Or just make it to look awesome and sell it for what it looks like.
3. Put up Google Analytics and hire a bot net to create legitimate traffic (different countries, depth and time of visit, number of pages).
4. Put up Google AdSense and when you need to take screen shots of your earnings just save a page into HTML and edit the numbers in text. So this is not a photo manipulation and no one can tell the difference since there is no difference it is a real screen shot. Google if you are watching please do something about this!!!
5. Find a customer, present your inflated visits and earnings. Let them have their Google Analytics and AdSense on your site to verify visits and earning (just go about your business as usual and have the botnet clicking).
6. Do an Escrow.
7. Collect your large sum of money.

Was I a victim, yes! I got sucked in twice once while buying a domain and once a site. So how to defend yourself against this? Check incoming links on Google, if it is disproportional to the traffic the site is claiming that is one clue. Check keywords that the site is advertising for, if they are not ranked anywhere it is fishy. Search for keywords from article titles and compare texts by actually reading them. Do copy paste searches in Google to see if it is a copy paste job.

All in all you can never be sure, and for me it is safer, better and easier to start a site from zero the way I want it and like it than buying a “developed” site which is shady.

Watch out these scammers are good, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This might shock you a bit but there are more privileged people in the AdSense program. As they say “We are all equal, just some of us are more equal!”. After digging through a list of those who get a percent more here and there I had a startling discovery. Google pays Chuck Norris more than it gets from advertisers!

Not only that but if you look at Chucks CTR you will see he has over 100% which is unheard of! Also this brings me to the question are Sergey and Larry laundering money through Chuck? Would make perfect sense as it is well known IRS does not check his account (there is a post on wikileaks, link to follow later).

Now this would not be so strange that we didn’t dig up a couple of emails with Google support from none other than Bruce Lee! So you thought he was dead? Guess not, and he wants the same privileges like Chuck.

Re: [#63252312]

From:	Google AdSense <adsense-support@google.com>
To:	bruce.lee@gmail.com

---

Hello Bruce,

Thank you for notifying us of the clicks that have been seen on Google ads of Mr. Norris. The advertiser you are referring to is a valued member of our community and blogs often on his trouble of blending in the ads on his site. We have even consulted Mr. Norris to work with an SEO expert on improving his incoming traffic from search engines. If you have put in half the effort as he has instead of punching people out you might have had more money.

Please note that clicking on your own ads for any reason is prohibited, as it has the potential to inflate advertiser costs. We appreciate your efforts toward avoiding such clicks in the future.

For additional questions, we encourage you to visit the AdSense Help Center (http://www.google.com/adsense_help), our complete resource center for all AdSense topics. Alternatively, feel free to post your question on the forum just for AdSense publishers: the AdSense Help Group (http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help).

In case you feel frustrated, watch a video of Mr. Norris doing roundhouse kicks, always helps me sleep better.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

—————-
To access the Google AdSense home page or to log in to your account,
please visit: https://www.google.com/adsense

There are rumors that Chuck is going into affiliate marketing, so earn something while you still can or just run for the hills. I heard growing tomatoes is a nice profession.

Yours truly

Branko Santo

Poker at its basic is a simple game. There are 52 cards and anywhere between 2 and 10 players. The rules are clear and enforceable. Everyone has the same chance of winning if the skill factor is removed. The basic rule in poker as postulated in “Theory of Poker” is “If your opponent plays differently than he would, if he knew your cards, you already won.”.  You will not win every hand, as sometimes they will get lucky, but in the long run you will beat them. Now lets look at some lessons.

Lesson 1: Not everybody is on the same level!

Is this really something that needs to be said? But hey read the rest of the lesson.Every player thinks on a basic level

Level 1: Which cards do I have?

Level 2: Which cards does he have?

Level 3: Which cards does he think I have?

And the game goes on to other levels. What does this mean to us in real life? If someone is a nice person with a straight forward agenda you don’t really have to “put him on a hand” (guess which cards he has). He plays the way he gets cards, if he has something he bets, if not, he folds. But as levels go up, the players get trickier. Also in life and in business you just can see that someone is doing something behind your back, but you may not know what.

Lesson 2: If it is in the books, everybody knows it!

Progression of knowledge is such that the most profitable knowledge is hidden from people. Imagine if you had a secret formula which would bring you a lot of money and nobody else knows it? You wouldn’t be sharing it around, you would be making money. So is knowledge from the books useless? Definitely no! The mainstream of players know at most the stuff from books. You separate 95% of your opponents into those who don’t have even book knowledge and are really bad and those who have book knowledge. This ties into Lesson 1, therefore you can adapt your play according to your opponents level to maximize profits. So where is the cutting-edge knowledge? Well on the edge! There are poker coaches which charge $1.000/h (one thousand dollars an hour), but if every class you take increases your profitability by $500 a month it pays off. This is very similar to taking a lower wage to be able to work with great experts in your chosen field. You are spending money (which you could earn) to gain higher potential future earnings.

Lesson 3: You can’t do it alone!

You alone, cannot change your ways. If you work alone, study alone and try to do everything on your own you will go down a very narrow path. Poker-wise this is called a leak, where you have an exploitable trait in your game. Business-wise it would be like working for only one customer or having only one product. Sooner or later you are going broke, that is just how business works. You need opposing ideas and views, you need somebody to stand up to you, there needs to be somebody to tell you they discovered a new trick. Alone you can get to a certain point, after that you need a network as in business to really be able to use your talents and determination. Sitting down with a couple of friends that are doing the same thing you are for coffee and exchanging the highlights of yesterday is the surefire way of advancing results for everybody.

Lesson 4 and 5: Side income might turn into main income. Tools can increase your productivity by far more than you expect.

Several things that have shown how serving a hobby population can make big money is creating software for easier or more efficient consuming of the hobby and training for the same. In poker it is evident by for example a program called TableNinja which lets you use keyboard for everything required to play (I managed to increase amount of tables played at the same time from 6 to 18 in a month) which in itself increases the throughput and thus your income. On the other hand the best players can create a site with training videos and services where the biggest one in the poker world (Cardrunners) charges $30 a month. If we make a guesstimate that they have five thousand subscribers that is an insane constant income. Therefore if you are making tools or training it can be a great income or if you are using them can increase your income significantly.

Lesson 6: There is only so many hours in a day.

You are one person and even if you play 12 hours a day (I burn out totally at 8), PLAYING poker is not scalable as a business unless you are really really good (and then only by going up in stakes). No hustle will help you there if you don’t have the chops for it.

Lesson 7: You are going to hate some days of doing what you love.

No matter how much I enjoyed playing, some of these days were pure torture. You are not playing well, or it just is not your day with the cards (there is a possibility you are doing everything ok and still loosing). You get angry/depressed/demotivated and are not sure how you are going come back to it tomorrow. When you go to work, just by going there you make a statement, but when you work at home and for yourself it is much much harder.

If I come up with some new ideas, will add them, until then, enjoy