Sam Carpenter (@workthesystem / Blog) is a consummate entrepreneur, business owner, and author of Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, winner of the prestigious Best Non-Fiction of 2009 award at the New York Book Festival. As a huge fan of The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, discovering Sam’s story and process-driven approach to business was a godsend.

We took a trip to meet Sam earlier this month. In addition to inviting us into his home in beautiful Bend, Oregon, he took the time to walk us through Centratel , the highest quality answering service in the United States. After only a short time there, it’s clear why. There is positively zero disparity between the words of his book and the person he is, or the business he’s built. It supports the lifestyle he demands and deserves, and is built on sound principles that you can absolutely replicate for the venture that will fuel your lifestyle.

Before you hit play on these videos, let me be blunt: If you…

• have to show up somewhere to earn your income
• consider yourself invaluable or irreplaceable (and view that as a good thing)
• rely on people instead of systems
• have little or no cashflow
• are working day and night to invent the next big thing
• think service-based businesses can’t be automated and provide passive income

…then you need to listen with keen ear and open mind to this interview series.

Part 1: The Systems Mindset

Part 2: An Eye for Opportunity

Part 3: The Fundamentals

Get your FREE copy of Work The System

Sam Carpenter has generously extended a free book offer to everyone reading Muselife. To immediately receive your full PDF copy of Work The System, simply send an email to pdf@workthesystem.com with the word muselife in the subject line. The actual email can be blank. You’ll receive an auto-response with the PDF attached. Simple!

This offer will expire on March 15th, 2010 so get your copy while you can!

Keep reading for…

• Shifting how you think about credibility, barriers and accessibility
• A free, unbeatable resource for directly connecting with the media
• Link to Entrepreneur article (and raw interview responses for anyone interested in the outsourcing/system side of things)
• Next on Muselife

Credibility, Accessibility, Barriers & HARO

The big brands can still make and break you

No matter what industry you’re in, there are always a select few publications that shape the message and conversation within it. Whether on the web or magazine stand, there are those two or three major titles that you look at and lust to be on the inside. In big business, think of Fortune and Forbes. In tech, Wired is king. In small business/startup, think Inc., FastCompany, Entrepreneur and FSB. The list goes on for every vertical you can imagine.

Though it’s clearly a psychological remnant of old-guard media, there’s this undeniable credibility and cachet to getting your name or brand inside a proper publication. As powerful as independent/personal blogs can be, credibility still goes to the most well-known “brands”. If I take the same story and put it on multiple sites – CNN, Huffington Post, Drudge Report, and on some obscure, nameless Wordpress.com blog, following his final season predictions for LOST – your opinion is absolutely skewed based on context. It’s human.

The point? If you want credibility, start by breaking into media outlets that have the power to give it. One major media hit can give you what two dozen guest blog posts may never deliver. Want proof? Go check out the media tsunami that hit Gary Vaynerchuk starting with a producer’s email, inviting him on The Conan O’Brien Show. Sure, they found him, but you better believe you can flip it around and go after it yourself.

Crippling misconception: Inaccessibility

You are always 1-2 connections away from absolutely anyone you could hope to know. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve Twitter’d someone I may once have considered “inaccessible” and gotten a response with their private mobile number and invitation to call. Unless you’re a screaming lunatic trying to get Bono to sign an exposed body part or asking Obama to go shoot hoops, there are no barriers anymore – everyone is accessible and it’s spineless and naive to think otherwise.

The point? This is as true for media outlets & publications as it is for individuals.

Remember: Reporters and journalists have a hell of a job to do.

Tight, inflexible deadlines; editorial review, fact checking, research, and sourcing subject-matter experts. It all takes time. Blogging is simple when it’s your voice and you’re accountable to no one, held to no dates. Journalists deserve respect. They can also use your help…

There’s no magic rolodex on their desk or social network they can tap to get immediate access to relevant insights from credible voices – until now. HARO (Help A Reporter Out) connects journalists & producers to sources. Sign up. You’ll get 2-3 digest-style emails per day, broken down by category. Every one is full of opportunities to share your expertise. The more niche you are, the more you may have to hunt – but remember, it may only take one opportunity to blow up. You’ll see bloggers, primetime TV network producers, print publications, and more. If you want to watch a short, somewhat funny documentary about the founder and how it works, watch this…

To sum it all up: Go after your own press and media breaks. The only real barrier left is your beliefs about how it all works and whether or not you can make it real.

Entrepreneur Interview

Read the published article via the link below. It’s well-written and pulls together a few different perspectives.

Build a Better Business with Outsourcing by Nancy Mann Jackson
A comprehensive guide on the what, when and how to outsource

Raw interview responses

The below is my heavy responses that I thought I’d share in case you want to go deeper.

1. Are more small businesses outsourcing tasks these days? If so, why?

Absolutely, but we’re only scratching the surface. Outsourcing feels intimidating and has long been considered reserved for big business, which has kept many small business owners from leveraging its power. As a small business, you need to focus on your unique strengths and offering, minimizing the time and cost of everything falling outside of that. If you only have a few employees (or none at all), it’s critical to direct your energy and money toward innovation and growth. Progressive entrepreneurs realize the unstoppable power of outsourcing as a force-multiplier to handle aspects of their business that are essential but simply don’t make sense for them to deal with personally. Small business, augmented by a global pool of human capital, can compete directly with the biggest players in their space – and win.

2. What types of tasks are best outsourced?

On principle, you should consider outsourcing any work that does not represent the core value of your business and what differentiates you in the market. Wherever there’s repetition or monotony, there’s potential to reclaim time or streamline. Nearly any task reliant on the left brain is prime for outsourcing: programming, research, accounting and all technical or data work. Creative work, from design to copywriting, can absolutely be considered, but simply requires more attention be paid to the individual you’re hiring.

3. How can business owners find the right contractors for various tasks?

Sites like Elance and oDesk allow you to freely post projects, and sit back while thousands of people compete for the business. Finding a good resource is as simple as selecting the most competitive offer. The risk is low and once you find good providers, you’ll have them available for future work. You can also look where locals gather, on sites like Craigslist or regional job boards.

For creative or design work, crowdsourcing sites like Crowdspring and 99designs provide massive value for your budget. Rather than pay a single designer, you’re presented dozens of approaches to choose from.

4. How can a business owner prepare himself or herself to delegate and work with contractors effectively?

It’s less about logistics and entirely about mindset. Many owners take pride in having the world on their shoulders and their entire organization buried in their mind. Knowing your business is critical, but keeping yourself indispensible is reckless and unscalable. Realize that removing yourself from low-level operations is the smartest investment you can make in the long-term success of your business. Let go of control and check your entrepreneurial ego against the reality of your industry and your value within it. Acknowledge and optimize the underlying systems driving your business, rather than focusing solely on your people. In all but the most creative and unique businesses, you do not need brilliant people – you need refined systems executed by competent people. Don’t let outsourcing intimidate you – people are people, and it’s simply a less expensive, lower risk means of hiring and managing them.

Outsourcing is simply a widening of your talent pool with a willingness to bridge communication and timezone gaps. It isn’t always just about maximizing output or efficiency – it’s about eliminating poor use of time and replacing it with your highest level of contribution.

5. How do you know what is an appropriate fee for a contractor? Are there any resources you can recommend for making sure you’re paying the right price?

“You get what you pay for” is true, wherever you go in the world. Always pay someone what they’re worth, regardless of location but accounting for and leveraging currency differences that often work in your favor. As a principle, value outcomes over hours. If you don’t get the outcome you need, it doesn’t matter how much time your contractor spent along the way. Consider distinct task-based agreements while you’re evaluating new providers, and transition to a fixed-cost retainer once your confident in their ability to consistently deliver.

6. What are the best things (pros) about outsourcing?

Outsourcing gives you on-demand expertise and resources without the cost of supporting full-time, on-site employees – such as overhead, benefits and the need to keep them engaged full-time. It’s shockingly cost effective due to currency and economic differences, which gives you the freedom to experiment and multiple specialized individuals. Handing off work forces you to objectively, ruthlessly and systematically consider your activities and the steps taken to perform them. Defining a process flushes out inefficiency. Timezone differences enable work to get done while you sleep, which can drastically impact your operations.

7. What are the worst things (cons) about outsourcing?

Language barriers and timezones can present a challenge, simply because it challenges how we think of communication and time. Language issues are wildly exaggerated by those trying to justify laziness in clearly articulating requirements and expectations. Clarity in your own communication overcomes any confusion for the person working for you. Timezones create more opportunity than inconvenience, as you can extend your productive hours by handing tasks over to someone during their workday. Assign a task at night, and awake to find it complete and waiting for you.

More than anything, outsourcing forces you to clearly articulate that which you normally just do from instinct and experience. This can be a real ego check when you realize that nearly everything you and your employees do can be done by absolutely anyone.

Next on Muselife

It’s been a quiet month, we know. Lots of travel and interesting projects brewing. The content machine is revving up again.

• 3-part interview series with Work The System author Sam Carpenter, discussing systematic business design and identifying untapped passive income sources. We may even give some things away…
• More videos and interviews around lifestyle design, successful product development/launch, automation and systematic marketing

Stay tuned. Things are about to light up again.

Because it’s a fresh new year, and free is a beautiful word…

To celebrate the close of a year and welcoming of a new, let’s all toast to designing lifestyles worth living. As a thank you for the tremendous support of what we’re doing on Muselife, and to share some of what I’ve learned along the way, go grab a free copy of my book, Source Control. You can read up on it at the book website, but this is the only way to get a copy free. This ends on or around midnight Saturday Jan 2, 2010 so check the end of this post and grab yours while it’s free.

Need inspiration? Check out Tim Ferriss’ Cold Remedy Contest

Check out the 15 video entries over at the 4-Hour Workweek blog’s Cold Remedy contest. They’ll all help light a blazing fire under your ass going into 2010. I’m one of the finalists, and though I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t love to win this thing and have more fuel to jet around filming for Muselife – go with your gut and enjoy the killer stories from each person.

Give me a free copy of Source Control…

As a traveler, you want to be spontaneous. You want to just throw planning and time constraints to the wind while you frolic carelessly through random countries, ducking into a Starbucks every few days to check your Paypal balance and laugh while you count up the orders for that brilliant product you created. Let that dream marinate for a second then wake up.

The raw truth about going mobile with your lifestyle and business: it’s a logistical, technical and psychological hazing that separates the men from the boys (or something more gender neutral, albeit less punchy). It’s never the big things that burn you. It’s the tiny, trivial ones. Your plane won’t crash – your hard drive will. You won’t lose your backpack – you’ll lose your wifi signal. You won’t look around your office and see everyone else that resents their job – you’ll look around the fantastic cafe you’re in and resent all the people having conversations that aren’t about work.

With some simple preparation, management and contingency planning, you can skip all that. You can live your lifestyle design fantasy and never wake up. Define your experience ahead of time, or the surprises you didn’t consider will define it for you.

If you haven’t already, check out my related post on all of this: The Lifestyle Design Intervention (which admittedly skews more towards passionate rant than actionable advice).

(Apologies for the audio quality on this one. Sometimes a mic just doesn’t behave. No worries… content is all that matters.)

All this talk about freelance work, consulting, creating companies – you might be wondering how it all relates back to lifestyle design and turning your income into an afterthought. Simply put: you’ll never do it if you don’t get your thoughts right. Freelance work is almost certainly what you’ll use to fuel your more serious ventures in their early stages. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, unless it consumes every waking hour that should be focused on actually eliminating it with something smarter. Treating yourself as a business gives you an extraordinary feeling of autonomy and control over your time and the opportunities you’re able to pursue. Quitting your 9-5 job to do freelance work is basically a decision to become an employee to as many bosses as you can find. Just because you call them clients doesn’t mean they won’t dominate your time.

To create a symphony that sends chills down spines, you need more than persistence and a little instrument. You need to become the conductor. Be the person that can say yes to any opportunity. Be the one setting the rules, not the one playing by them. Be the CEO or live at the whim of the person bold enough to claim that title for themselves. Your freedom and your time rests on these distinctions. The cost of changing your thinking and elevating yourself above your individual limitations: free. The cost of not doing it: don’t find out for yourself. It’s not pretty.

Mentioned in this video:

• Law of Requisite Variety

We’re specifically talking about streamlining the painful process of finding new clients and projects (a massive timesuck if you’re a freelancer) and the alluring drug called the paycheck. Robert elaborately details his experiments in this blog post. You may be wondering why we’re hitting on freelancing and service-based income. Isn’t the point to eliminate trading time for money and create passive income? The answer is yes, but it’s critical to start from where you are and build yourself out of the inefficiencies that rule your life (something Robert talks about). You shouldn’t necessarily scrap it all and start over. Anything you’re doing poorly is an opportunity to improve and freelance work can nicely fuel your grander plans for a more low-effort income.

In Gestalt therapy , there’s a core concept I love called the paradoxical theory of change, and it couldn’t be more fitting. We can view our current job/business through the same lens we’d view our personal lives…

The more one attempts to be who one is not, the more one remains the same (Yontef, 2005). Conversely, when people identify with their current experience, the conditions of wholeness and growth support change. Change comes about as a result of “full acceptance of what is, rather than a striving to be different”.

If you’ve mentally shifted your mindset but remain enslaved by unquestioned inefficiency and tedious, low-value work, your lifestyle will never match your intentions. Wherever you are, start there and build yourself out of it. The entire experience of liberating yourself, of shifting from employee to CEO, is invaluable. Trying to skip over it will only set you back further.

Some links and resources mentioned…

• Work The System by Sam Carpenter (@workthesystem), an unparalleled exploration of systematic lifestyle & business design
• Source Control by David Walsh (yes, me), an lifestyle-focused approach to outsourcing and intelligent process design
• E-Myth by Michael Gerber, another classic book about building your business as a prototype, enabling scalability and streamlined operation
• MindMeister, a killer tool for deconstructing your processes and understanding what you do to create results
• HeyCraig & AllOfCraigs, two helpful services for scanning Craigslist efficiently

Though it might look a bit sparse right now, Metal Shredder TV will soon be rolling out a ton of video micro-lessons and e-books on different techniques, starting with TapAttack. While his past few muse ideas have seen sales and created an income stream, what matters now is that he’s living what he sells and has the passion to blow it up. He’s got the calloused fingers to prove it. He’s going to have a killer, passionate community because he’s passionate, and his products/content will be world-class because he’s got the expertise. Here’s a promo video to show you what I mean.

Taking something to a large scale doesn’t mean more work, it simply means changing your focus and architecting it properly from the start. LanguageCheat represents one of our muse concepts that we’re taking to that level. What’s yours?

A quick rundown of the conversation…

• Respecting your ideas, respecting your muse
• The Product: Language Cheat
• Where the idea came from
• A few samples
• Evolving a small idea into a big one, without abandoning the muse model
• Business plans & getting investors; defining the details up front
• Going big without getting heavy
• Tell us what you’re working on. What’s your muse?

Here’s a quick rundown of the video…

• Solid advice from Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)
• People want solutions, not information
• Do you have passion? Expertise? Both?
• Why will people buy from you? (Insight from Seth Godin)
• Challenge: Find a ridiculous niche (and a few examples)

If you want to check out the Boston event with Gary, click this link to watch it: NomX3 with Garyvee: Wining, Dining and Signing. The question Seth asked (mentioned in my vid) is at 52:55. Also a question I asked about risk & failure just before it (51:20).

You’ll notice a new face with me in some of these videos. Seth Hosko (@shosko) has been working with me for years and we’re currently running a venture firm called Dangerous Ambition. More on that later.

Some links and shout-outs…

• MindMeister , a killer tool for breaking down your processes and figuring out exactly what you’re doing with your time.
• Source Control, my book on outsourcing and process design.
• RELENTLESS shirt inspired by Relentless Fitness (@liverelentless). Roger is going to be huge in his space – keep an eye on him.