Business entrepreneurship | Funny about Money

Paper!!!

April 4, 2017 by funny

Wads and wads and wads of paper… Am I the only sheeple who’s sick & tired of having piles of paper inflicted on her? Paper physical and paper virtual, makes no difference: it’s all time-consuming, annoying, goddamn clutter.

Every April, I have to file an annual report with the Arizona Corporation Commission for The Copyeditor’s Desk. What this really is is an excuse to extract $45 from you. To distract you from the reality, they blitz you with pointless paperwork, which you now have to fill out online.

The annual report entails plodding through four pages of pointless questions, all of which are the same pointless questions posed last year. The pointless questions never change.

Their pointlessness aside — there’s really no reason to ask most of the questions in the first place, and there’s certainly no point in posing them over and over and over and over, once every year that your company is in business — because they’re endlessly repetitive and pro forma, all the ACC really needs to do is ask you “has anything changed since last year.” But this would absorb about 20 seconds of your time — as opposed to half an hour or so — and would consume only one line of electronic copy. As opposed to making you click through page after page after pointless page.

Once this exercise is completed, you have to — or rather, if you have a brain in your head you will — download and print a lengthy PDF showing what answers you made and attesting that you filed the document and ponied up 45 bucks. You also will download and print the receipt for the 45 bucks.

Stash this in your already bloated file folder, and then move on to the next exercise in futility: You’re also required to write and keep the minutes of your corporation’s annual meeting. Nevermind that your board of directors consists of one (1) person: you’re still required to meet with yourself and record what you said to yourself.

Interestingly, you’re not required to file this silly document with the state. But you are required to write it and keep it on file…in perpetuity.

Honestly. The amount of paper that comes into this place, whether for business or personal matters, defies belief. You could, in theory, store it to disk… But who wants to trust that a computer will not crash or a hacker will not hack when it comes to documents that the government or some insurance company requires?

Okay, so much for that rant. Now to emit some paperwork of my own…

Image: Depositphotos, © gemenacom

Pricing: Is it all in the presentation?

February 5, 2017 by funny

We all know the prevailing folk wisdom to the effect that if you price something a penny or two less than a round number, buyers will perceive the cost as less than the actual price. So, let’s say you need to get $15 for your Advanced Digital Doohickey to pay your workers, cover your store’s overhead, and take home a few pennies as net income. You’ll sell more A.-D. Doohickeys if you price them at $14.99 (or even $14.98, such a DEAL!) than if your price tags read $15.00.

Sounds stupid, is stupid. But apparently it works, because everything you see everywhere is priced a penny or two below a round figure.

But…are people really that stupid? Well….

So a couple weeks ago, I decided we should revise our rate schedule at The Copyeditor’s Desk. We’ve been charging a page rate that ranged from three or four bucks a page to $15 a page for the truly unintelligible.

It struck me, after much cogitation, that it would be easier and fairer both for us and for our clients if we charged a per-word rate.

The page rate had proven problematic in several ways. To start with, Microsoft in its infinite changeability has “updated” Word’s page margins from one inch top and bottom and 1.25 inches left and right to one inch all the way around. Since our rates were calculated on the old default, that translates to about a 10% cut in pay for us. So when I tell a client $X per page, I have to make sure we’re talking about the same page size. Changing their page layout, naturally, is off-putting: it looks like I’m trying to extract more than the job is worth.

And we often find prospective clients submitting copy set in 10.5- or 11-point type with half-inch margins. Interesting, isn’t it? You want me to help you get your dissertation accepted so you can get a cushy academic job instead of working in a rice paddy or a kibbutz, but you think it’s OK to cheat me.

A word rate obviates both those problems: no more figuring out whether the manuscript fits our parameters, and no more arguing over the length altered by the font size. It’s easy for everyone to agree on the number of words, and no hard feelings are generated.

So I changed our billing from $4 to $15 per page to 2 cents to 6 cents a word, depending on the copy’s difficulty and technical level. I calibrated the word rates so they would equate to the similarly sliding page rates — the truth is, on the lower end the word rate adds up to a little less than we were earning per page.

But here’s what:

When people see a price tag of pennies a word, even though the cost adds up to the same as the page rate, they don’t even blink.

And m’dears, the work is pouring in the door. I can freaking not believe it.

Apparently, two or three cents a word looks like pocket change, whereas four bucks a page translates mentally to an extra-large latte for each page. The price is the same. The attitude to it: night and day. Or, from my perspective…day and night.

How amazing is that? Apparently it really is true that people’s perception of how much something costs depends on how the price is presented.

Do you mentally translate the cost of a $14.99 doohickey to $15? Or do you think of it as costing around 14 bucks?

How to Keep Your Business from Ruining Your Personal Finances

November 3, 2016November 1, 2016 by funny

Starting a small business can be exhilarating. That is until you realize that the customers are the real boss and you have mixed your personal and business finances to the point where you don’t know where ends and the other begins. Don’t worry! You are not the first small business owner who has ended up in this situation and you won’t be the last. The key to overcoming the problem is to first admit one exists and then take steps to correct it. As such, I want to go over some simple advice on how to keep your business from ruining your personal finances.

Decide on a Corporate Structure

If you are like millions of small business owners, you probably started out with an idea and built everything up from there. This works great early on, as you need to flush out what it is you are trying to do. But once you are up and running you need to decide what type of corporation you want to have, and file the necessary paperwork to make it official.

Not only does this force you to separate your personal and businesses finances, it also helps to shield you from personal liability if your business hits a bump in the road. Another advantage of registering your business is that it opens the opportunity to set up lines of credit in the name of your business, but more on that later.

Pay Yourself Last

A common mistake many small business owners make is to pay themselves first. I am here to tell you that this approach puts the cart in front of the horse. Instead, you need to set up an emergency fund, then pay your employees, and then your suppliers. If you are fortunate enough to have any money left over, then it is time to take a salary or dividends out of your company.

During lean times, you are the one who will get cut first. While this hurts, it is the way it should be. After all, you are the one taking the risk, not your employees or your suppliers. So, get yourself into the habit of paying yourself last, this will ensure your business has enough money and will keep you from using your personal credit to keep the business afloat.

Establish an Emergency Fund

The goal of any business is to make sure that it is profitable and sustainable. One of the first steps to achieving this is to make sure you have enough cash on hand to meet the changing needs of your business. You should set up an emergency fund from day one. This is what you need to collect first. These funds should be kept in a separate account and you should set clear guidelines when you can access them as the money is there to make sure you have the financial freedom to react to emergencies as they occur.

Establish a Line of Credit

If you are trying to run a business on cash alone, then you know how difficult it can be to manage your cash flow. Even in a restaurant, you need to buy supplies today for sale tomorrow. Paying cash for these supplies will only help you to dig a hole which you can never get out of.

As such, you need to consider alternative forms of funding, these can include credit cards, venture capital, crowd funding, private mortgages or a line of credit for your business. While they can all give you some financial backup to cash, none have the flexibility and terms of a line of credit, which allows you to borrow some or all of your approved amount and pay it back right away as you can without penalty.

There are lots of places that offer these lines of credit, however, banks are probably not the answer. Due to a variety of reasons, including excessive regulations, bad or no credit and the need for collateral, 80% of small business loan applications are turned down by banks. Instead, you need to work with a lender who specializes in loans and credit lines for small businesses.

Get Insurance

Even if your company is incorporated and you have an emergency fund as well as access to a line of credit, a catastrophe could come and knock you off your feet. Just ask the thousands of small business owners who were wiped out by hurricanes Katrina or Sandy. Some of these businesses were profitable and well-run, but they lacked the coverage needed to survive a natural disaster.

I realize insurance is an added expense, but having the right amount of coverage is well worth it. This way you can insure your equipment, your inventory, even your facility against loss. Here is a great article from Forbes which outlines the types of insurance every small business owner should have.

Set up a Personal Retirement Plan

Your business is your retirement plan, at least this is the case for most small business owners. However, you should not fall into this trap or you will end up working for your business for the rest of your life. Instead, sit down with a financial advisor and set up a personal retirement plan. You will be glad you did and it will help you to ensure that your business does not ruin your personal finances.

The Amateur Videography Jamboree

October 19, 2016 by funny

Imagine a video of this critter in action... — Imagine a video of this little guy in action…

So I hired one of my former students, an audiography major with some video training, to help create the video application for the $20,000 business grant I imagine the Boob Book might be eligible for. He came over and recorded interviews of a couple women who have had encounters with breast cancer (one has recently learned she has a recurrence), and then went off to work on the results.

The plan was for him to come back and record me doing my pitch. However, knowing the kid has a full-time job (40 hours a week, can you imagine? horrors!), I figured it would be hard for him to squeeze in another recording session and do the editing job he’d set for himself in his spare time. To help out, I decided to use the Mac’s considerable video recording capacities to record my 90-second blabfest, and then he could splice what he has into that.

Well. The first effort was OK but not great.

Next thing I know, Connie the 18-Wheeler is in the offing. She’s in town for a couple of weeks, and she offered to use her iPhone to try to record a better rendition.

This was really pretty awesome. I can not, for the life of me, memorize 90 seconds worth of spiel anymore. Back in the day, when I was a young pup, I had a photographic memory. In high school and college, all I had to do was go over class notes and textbook copy a couple of times, and it was seared into my brain like so many PDFs. Literally, on a quiz or mid-term, I could see the page in my mind, right down to the page number. To answer a question, all I had to do was call up the page and read it. Cheating, no doubt…but it did work to extract a Phi Beta Kappa key and a $30,000 graduate school grant. 😉

That skill now gone with the proverbial wind, Connie decided we should record just a few sentences at a time. Since the pitch is very short, any given paragraph consisted about two or three utterances. Her idea was to move the camera angle back and forth for each new statement — there were five of them, by the time we broke the last graf in two.

Not a bad idea: it turned out that I can memorize three or four sentences, if asked to regurgitate them within seconds after going over them a dozen times. She also coached me in speaking as though I were speaking rather than reading from mental PDFs.

The result was five clips with lag time at the beginning and end of each. Putting those together in a sane way required me to learn to use iMovie.

At first it looked TOTALLY overwhelming. But thanks to the Tyro’s Treasure Chest That Is the Internet, I managed to identify and find guides to the tasks that needed to be done: trim out the blank spaces at the beginnings and ends of each clip, blend the clips together, add a title at the front and a list of our contractors at the end (by way of making it look like we’re a real entity…we are, but we’re pretty ghostly), and even add transitions between the clips to lend a little logic to the shifts of angle. Since we’re a publishing and editorial company, I used page-turn transitions.

The result is certainly not professional, but neither is it awful. By the deadline, we should have something acceptable to submit to the contest.

And…my but that was enlightening.

The Mac comes with some surprisingly sophisticated software. There are two video programs in this thing, both of which can be used to edit videos. It looks like iMovie can do a lot of stuff, such as add a sound track (music!) in the background and do a number of special effects. I think. With some practice and exploring, one could have a lot of fun with this stuff.

And create all sorts of marketing videos, eh?

What would you think of some cooking videos? Shorties, they’d have to be…but something simple would be easy to record with an iPad or iPhone and a couple of tripods. I could post them on YouTube and embed them on FaM pages, or on the P&S Press blog. Or both, for that matter, since embedding a video is not the same as typing identical copy into two posts. Hm.

And what if I did readings from Fire-Rider? Would you sit through that? Or how about a reading from one of the many essays I wrote during about my mis-spent youth? Or gosh…maybe even the poem that Puerto del Sol published…? Classic hikes in Arizona? Heh…would you watch one or more videos of a hike down the North Rim of the Grand Canyon? That’s something to see, for sure.

Would you be interested in watching stuff like that? Would you find it more interesting than a written blog post? Less interesting? The same?

Anna’s Hummingbird: Wikipedia, PaloAltoNorvig, Creative Commons.

DUCK! New Incoming Cockamamie Idea!

July 23, 2016 by funny

Alas, I seem to be constitutionally prone to coming up with new schemes. It must be a congenital thing…

Did I mention the idea of trying to give presentations at the local independent bookstore by way of getting the word out? The plan is to talk about how to put together and produce a self-published book.

It gets better.

On reflection, I recalled a friend of mine, one of the former firm wives who went back and got an MBA and a CFP and set herself up in business as a financial adviser. She specialized in working with women on retirement planning.

By way of hustling customers, she started doing a short community service course at one of the community college campuses, “Retirement Planning for Women.” Yes. That’s one of the things community colleges do, in the continuing ed department: they offer “community service courses” for the general edification and entertainment of the public. These things don’t carry any college credit, and they’re very short and low-key. And therefore easy to prepare and present.

Well. Why not a community service course on Self-Publishing Your Book?

Mwa ha ha!

First off, if these people are duly impressed, at least some of them will want to buy my books (obviously, they won’t know about Roberta’s emanations). Second…I just happen to have enough content around, thanks to an entire journalism textbook (emitted through a real publishing house) and two blogs to compile a whole new book on writing fiction & nonfiction, blogging for fun and marketing, and how to enjoy the (largely unpaid) “Writing Life.”

Last night I tossed the things into a Wyrd file, copying & pasting madly, and came up with 83,830 words — and that’s without an introduction.

Well, holy maquerel. A typical trade book is 80,000 words.

It’s fairly inexpensive to put one of these things together, as long as you neglect to count the value of your time. I could produce such a book in print-on-demand format, offer it at half-price to people who sign up for the course, and still make a small profit on it. More to the point, though, the thing could direct its readers to Plain & Simple Press, the font of all my non-naughty self-publications, and also itself list everything I have for sale right now.

The copy is in hand. It needs a lot of revision and massaging. But…I think if I sat down and worked hard on it, I could put the thing together in less than a month. What a piece of cake!

I could also take it (along with my other opuses) to proposed public presentations.

There are a lot of good reasons to self-publish a book other than a pie-in-the-sky dream that you’ve written the Great American Novel and all that remains to make you rich and famous is to get it in the public’s hands.

Companies can make good use of print-on-demand technology for customer education, employee training, and marketing. Doctors, dentists, and veterinarians can profit from custom-made books for their patients; ditto lawyers for their clients. Genealogy hobbyists and self-published books: a match made in heaven! Nonprofits can use an inexpensively produced print-on-demand book for fund-raising or publicity. Local history groups, archives, and small museums: print-on-demand is perfect for gathering information to preserve for future generations.

That’s the kind of thing I’d emphasize: what practical things you can do with a self-published book, whether it’s in electronic or print-on-demand format.

I’ll bet I could sell that idea. And with it, I could sell books.

How Failure Can Turn to Success

May 9, 2016May 7, 2016 by funny

They say failure can help turn your losing experience into a successful endeavor. That’s becoming evident from the publishing enterprise, which so far has been a total flop. On the surface, what I learned from that is not to try to sell anything unless you have some very strong marketing skills and are willing to spend uncountable hours using them. However, something far more positive is coming out of it.

For the past two or three months, I’ve had more work than I can handle. People are lined up at the door trying to get me to edit their golden words or advise on publishing them. And one of my clients has hired me to help him self-publish a memoir that he intends not for the public but for family and friends.

Yesterday I mocked up three draft covers for his book. One of them turned out looking pretty darned nice. Another would be even better if the quality of the image were better — it has a couple of flaws, one of which probably resulted from dirt on the lens and the other of which appears to be a data issue. We’re using his images, taken with a variety of cameras over 40 years. I dare not post them here, since they are his images and since he has no intention of making this book available to the general public. Too bad…it’s an entertaining narrative.

As I reflected at Plain & Simple press, there are any number of good reasons to use print-on-demand or e-book technology other than trying to trying to publish a best-seller. In fact, trying to publish the Great American Novel is the worst of all possible reasons.

Well. No. Probably trying to get rich selling smut on Amazon and B&N is worse. 😀

One of several things I learned a-sailing the Amazon (and falling off the edge of the earth) is how to create a nice-looking paperback through print-on-demand technology. As we scribble, I now have the skills and tools take a book all the way from manuscript to print. And that process can be modestly lucrative.

Three projects like the one I’m working on now would recover all the losses I’ve enjoyed in the book publishing enterprise.

I’ve also learned of a Mac app that allows you to create really attractive .mobi, ePub, and iBook e-books fairly simply. I may try this on the client’s MS just to see what happens. If it can handle images (not an easy trick), then I would be able to offer e-book formatting of fairly complex documents, too. This would further enlarge the opportunities to make a profit helping other people publish their projects.

I would never advise a client to spend a lot of money self-publishing what he or she imagines is the Great American Novel. But if the person has a good reason to create a book-length document for a business, for a nonprofit organization, for patients or customers, or for family and friends, self-publishing can be an economical and relatively easy way to fulfill certain specific needs. And if you’re just a hobbyist — and you know you’re a hobbyist — writing a book because you get a kick out of writing and would like to see your results in print is surely no more expensive than skiing or four-wheeling. As long as you understand what you’re doing and don’t imagine you’re going to get rich (or, probably, make a profit), I’ll even help you publish your novel.

Does this experience generalize?

Evidently so; otherwise we wouldn’t have those chestnuts to the effect that you have to fail before you can succeed.

In learning how to lose money, you learn how not to lose money. With any luck at all, you may learn how to make money. This is an underlying principle of all the “personal finance advice that can fit on a notecard“: if you get into debt, you can learn not to get into debt; if a bank screws you, you can learn to use a credit union; if you’re not earning enough, you can learn ways to earn more.

Some errors, of course, are not so easily rectified: fail to save enough for retirement and you won’t have a second chance. Text your way up the wrong way of a freeway off-ramp and your next success will be a Darwin Award.

But most of the time you do have a chance to learn something — and profit from it.

What “failure” have you turned into a success, dear reader?