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Entrepreneurs

Terminally Lazy?

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Lordie, it’s 12:30 in the afternoon and I’ve not scribbled a word. Have I arrived at end-stage laziness?

Arose late this morning — quarter to six. Shot out the door to meet a colleague and fly across the city to this week’s bidness group meeting.

I’d thought I wouldn’t be there to chair the get-together this morning, because I imagined I was supposed to be surged yesterday, not last Monday. Today I’m not only still kickin’, I’m full of ginger.

Fortunately, I’d foisted the chair’s job on one of the other members, a person who should’ve been a teacher because of her born fluency with human relationships (if only she didn’t have designs on a living wage). We were out of a speaker today, and so she decided each of us would do a mini-presentation about our businesses.

She posed the following questions:

Everyone should be prepared to talk about their first year in business or the current job you are sporting. It would be interesting to hear

1.  What made you choose this business?
2.  What made you choose the business name?
3.  Were the start-up costs what you expected?
4.  What were the pitfalls that you could pass on to another who would be starting a business?
5.  What were some of the first marketing ideas that you tried?

Wow! It was a freaking stroke of genius!

Of the twelve breakfast-group members present, a half-dozen got through this assignment. And it was extremely interesting. As we all sat there listening to the various entrepreneurs’ stories, several of us thought, as by mental telepathy, Holee mackerel! We have GOT something here!

We think we could do an e-book — preferably with a print-on-demand analog — telling the start-up stories of these twelve businesses. And we think it would sell.

At the very least, it would be interesting locally. Some of these folks represent some very prominent Arizona companies. But I think such a book would interest anyone who was interested in starting a business or in launching into a commission-only (or mostly commission-based) entrepreneurial job with a larger company.

Next week, we have a bank manager as a guest speaker. But the following week, the rest of us will tell our stories.

So, whaddaya think?

Would you be interested in reading a short book relating the start-up stories of successful small-business entrepreneurs, complete with advice on what to do and what not to do?

Of Late…

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Haven’t posted for a day or two. Busy couple of days and then last night the damn router went down again and this time stayed down all night. GOTTA get a new router. One of these days…

Meanwhile, a number of developments, all of them positive for a change!

The Mayo surgeon had to loosen her clutches long enough for me to get a grip on my wits, at least in a perfunctory way. As you’ll recall, on the weekend before the last planned surgery, scheduled for a Monday, a convenient case of bronchitis led the anaesthesiologist to intone,”It would be foolish to proceed,” frustrating the surgeon no end. The next fun procedure was scheduled for the 15th of this month.

Subsequently, the surgeon erred in forgetting to have the Mayo’s scheduling department reserve an OR for that date. So the soonest she can try again will not be until after she gets back from vacation, toward the end of this month. That gives me time to get to another doctor at another institution to try to get some fresh insight, and to gather enough strength to put up a fight. Somehow I’ve got to bring a stop to the present cascade of disasters; whether I can remains to be seen, but at least I’m beginning to make out a vague pathway toward that goal.

This is particularly good because a new challenge has developed: As I have begged the staff to just do the goddamn mastectomy and stop torturing me with (presumably very profitable) procedure after procedure after procedure, they have begun to pressure me to get reconstructive surgery. I do not want reconstruction, for two reasons.

1) I’m not in the market for a man, and at my age no one looks at my boobs and so no one is going to notice whether I’m a little lopsided or not. For that matter, at my age no one sees a woman at all. When strangers are staring in your direction, they’re actually looking right through you. What they see is the background behind you.

2) More to the point, especially for older women, breast reconstruction is more complications and more surgery waiting to happen. The autologous procedures now in vogue, where they gouge chunks of flesh out of your back, belly, butt, or thigh and slap them on your chest, are esthetically unsatisfactory IMHO, cause still more surgical wounds for you to have to recover from, weaken the muscles in those areas, and can leave you with chronic back pain, weakness, hernia, and the unpleasant. disabling manifestations of upper quadrant disorder. As for implants: silicone or saline, they have an expected lifetime of about ten years, at which time you get to enjoy still more surgery to have the damn thing removed or replaced.

When I told WonderSurgeon that I do not want reconstruction, she told me I need to “think about it.” In other words, I’m a child who doesn’t have good sense.

Guess which one is fake.

One of my friends chose to go flat after a double mastectomy; she said she never regretted it, and she looked just fine. Obviously, if one side is flat and the other is not, that’s a little more problematic. However, you can get custom-made prosthetics that are a great deal more convincing and comfortable than fake reconstructed boobs (if you’re feeling strong, go to The Scar Project, where you can see artist-quality images that show women with and without reconstruction — warning: this is graphic).

Such a large  contingent of women has decided to go breast-free that there’s even an organization representing them. Interestingly, many of these women describe similar pressure from their medical teams. Apparently people are so convinced that every woman’s self-image is so inextricably invested in her boobs that a woman must be crazy if she chooses not to go through the tortures of the damned for the sake of having a lump sticking out of her chest.

So: I need some reinforcements to put up a fight on this front.

I called to make an appointment with a medical oncologist at St. Joe’s that my gynecologist, who unwittingly plunged me into this mess, has been trying to get me to see. He also has been out of town, and so on the last attempt to get together with him, his staff couldn’t shoehorn me in before the the 15th. Called again, they managed to set up a meeting for the 20th. Hallelujah!  That means I’ll be able to talk with the guy before the Mayo doc can cut me up again and before the craziness makes another spin around the drain.  I don’t know whether he’ll provide enough moral support for me to hold my own, but everyone who knows the man says he’s eminently rational.

So that may be a dim light visible through the black fog.

Yesterday morning the damnedest thing happened. My single all-time deepest-pocketed client, Scott Flansburg — the man who made it possible for me to pay off the mortgage in one fell swoop — has hired a new business manager. He’s looking to kick his business plan up a notch, and he wants someone, namely me, to write new products for him and the like. Said bidness manager tracked me down, how I do not know — probably through LinkedIn — and asked if I would be interested in working with them. They want to expand into e-publications.

Lo! What should The Copyeditor’s Desk be into but e-pubs! I’ve got a slew of formatters, illustrators, and designers who can hire on to help him out, and of course I wrote the book that earned Scott $1.5 million in the first year after publication and $1 million the following year.

Heh. When we say “things are looking up,” we speak in cosmic terms.

Meanwhile, I have two clients who are just wrapping up their books. Both of these guys  have uttered the words “…and how do I market this thing?” Flansburg is a wily sort of a gent, and you can be pretty sure that he would not hire a marketing agent, which is what this guy is, unless the guy had a decent track record. So this is promising: we just may be able to do some bidness here!

If the guy can sell books (and authors), The Copyeditor’s Desk may soon have two happy customers. And that is always good. Very, very good.

And finally, in the God seems to have gotten over Her tiff at me department: I took it into my head to buy a large Talavera-style garden pot for my beloved shady deck. Purchased anywhere north of central Mexico, these things are absurdly expensive, and the place where I chose to buy, Whitfill’s Nursery, is famed for charging through the wazoo for everything. So I walk in there and find the desired vessel, and on my way out my eyeballs land on another design. The actual price of these monsters is $59.99, but someone has scribbled $29.99 on the one I happen to spot.

On close inspection, nothing seems to be wrong with it. Apparently some underling carelessly mispriced it. The kid at the cash register didn’t even blink…so I walked outta there with a BIG, beautiful, gaudy planter for half price!

Obviously, an omen.

TalaveraPlanter

 

A Long Dive off the Deep End?

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On the way home from this morning’s business networking group meeting, my accountant (who also happens to be a fellow networker) and I fell into a conversation about the many quotidian distractions from paying work. I mentioned that a prospective client, who I thought had dropped off the radar four months ago, suddenly resurfaced…assuming I would index her 400-page tome on Anglo-Saxon maritime history at the drop of a hat. Her hat, of course.

And that this would come in the middle of the four-week course I’m teaching, the one that crams 16 weeks of instruction into 18 class days. And that I’d agreed to do it for a pittance — I mean, practically Fiverr wages! — in an effort to hang onto the entity that refers these obnoxious projects to me.

We reflected on the appearance, this morning, of a retired professor of economics who craves advice and help on a projected 400-page+ (typeset!) magnum opus, and who asked what I could do for him.

And that my associate editor, who makes it possible for me to take on these ridiculous projects, will soon be winging her way to China for a business/pleasure trip — smack in the middle of the four-week course and the 400-page Anglo-Saxon maritime indexing nightmare project.

And what a joy the advent of the new, brilliant cleaning lady proved to be, since she relieved me from a full day of tedious housecleaning work, which I then filled by completing a tedious (but paying) project.

And then I said, “You know, the problem with all these editorial jobs and teaching jobs is that they take away from what I really want to do, which is to write my own goddamn books, get them online, and build a micro-publishing house to promulgate future works of my own and of a select few clients.”

• How can I count the ways the prospect of indexing 400+ pages of Anglo-Saxon maritime history makes me cringe?
• How can I say how much I don’t want to fill the month of June with the Campbell’s Condensed Soup version of freshman comp?
• How can I express my delight at the prospect of editing 400+ (typeset!) pages of an economic history of the early Catholic church? (Yesh; that would from origins to 1350.)
• And how much do I want to know how the Okan and A′oan bands, residents of a dire post-Apocalyptic future, get from the sere desert below the eastern face of the Sierras to their home counties and what, if anything, they make of the Sasquatch the young lesbian fur trapper kills in the act of saving Fallon Mayr of Cheyne Wells’s ranch foreman’s life?
• How curious am I about whether the trapper and the foreman get it on?
• And given the choice between indexing, editing, and preparing my own copy for publication, how clearly can I articulate which I would rather do?????

Accountant, as she’s opening the door to climb out of the car and wander off to her own office, says to me THIS:

You know, you are well set. You do not need to do any paying work to live comfortably for the rest of your life, especially considering how frugal you are. It is ridiculous for you to keep doing work you dislike. You could, quite safely, quit the editing business, quit the teaching, and devote all your time to writing and publishing your own books. Why on earth don’t you do it?

Why, indeed?

Writing God a Thank You

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My friend Darin Garcia, whose company K&J Windows installed the new doors and windows I craved after the late, great garage invasion, has come up with a charming new website that I think has got to be unique, or very close to it: Write God a Thank You.

The idea is that members of the social website will be able to express thanks for the positive things in their lives and share it with their friends. From WriteGodAThankYou.com, these messages of gratitude can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Google+, or, if one prefers, users may create private gratitude lists and prayer journals.

Even if you’re not religious, this idea has some interesting aspects. As it develops, quite a few studies have shown that mindfully reflecting on one’s blessings, rather than dwelling on the troubles and annoyances of life, creates an amazing range of benefits. A pair of researchers at UC Davis reported that people who kept a gratitude journal exercised more, experienced fewer ailments, felt better about their lives, were more optimistic, and made better progress toward personal goals than those who recorded hassles or neutral life events. They also found that people who gave thanks daily “were more likely to report having helped someone with a personal problem or having offered emotional support to another.”

As readers who’ve been around for a year will recall, even a skeptical old pessimist can take a few minutes a day to focus on the positive aspects of life. Whatever those might be.

Try it. You might like it.

Entrepreneurs: Crystal Stemberger’s Blogging Empire

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Need a role model? Here’s one for you: a live wire who’s  earning 15 to 20 grand a month in the blogging biz. No, that’s  not a typo: in February she netted $15,600.72; in January, $17,979.04; in December (“best month ever in my 29 years on earth!”), $22,284.31. Of course, we’re speaking of Crystal Stemberger, proprietor of Budgeting in the Fun Stuff. She established BFS a scant two years ago and quickly turned it into one of the top personal finance sites in the blogosphere. Meanwhile, she was building a blogging empire that included an agency that brings together advertisers with bloggers whose sites fit their products. By July of 2011, she found herself in a position to quit her day job, and seven months later, in February of this year, her husband Len joined her full-time in running the business.

Let’s hear what she has to say for herself…

FaM: You started Budgeting in the Fun Stuff with the express goal of finding a way to get off the treadmill. Had you thought of the ad agency idea at that time, or did you conceive of monetizing your online enterprises in different ways?

Crystal: Well, the real reason I started Budgeting in the Fun Stuff was because of a post at Get Rich Slowly about a lady who made $1 million off a business and then hired a housekeeper and a lawn service. She got jumped by the readers, who were all over her saying she shouldn’t be hiring domestic help, that it wasn’t frugal, and she had no business spending her money that way. I thought, “It’s her money, and she can use it as she wants!” It really made me mad that people would presume to pass judgement on her choice to use the income she had earned. So, I started Budgeting in the Fun Stuff to show you can and should do what you want with your money, as long as you manage it responsibly.

FaM: It certainly has come a long way from that beginning. Did you have any idea that you could build such a successful business from blogging?

Crystal: When I started, I didn’t have a goal in mind. I didn’t know how much you could make with a blog. But then I started getting offers from advertisers, and I discovered that I really like negotiating. Pretty soon Budgeting in the Fun Stuff was making good money.

FaM: You started Crystal for Hire in April 2011.

Crystal: Yes. That April Bucksome Boomer asked me to manage the advertising on her site. She said she dislikes negotiating and asked if I would do it for her. I said yes, and now Mr. BFS and I have have 325 client sites!

FaM: I’m with her—I hate arguing over fees. Bet that’s true of a lot of writers and bloggers: if we were good at marketing, we wouldn’t be sitting in our garrets trying to make a living with our keyboards.

Crystal: I had no idea how many bloggers are introverts. But when you think about it, it’s so obvious that it’s a big duhh! I was the other way around. I talked all the time; that was one reason why I started Budgeting in the Fun Stuff. My friends and family sort of wanted me to shut up about money.

FaM: It seems like a natural, then, as a business.

Crystal: There are other ad agencies for bloggers. I didn’t know until I started doing this. But they don’t do what we do. Instead of providing just an ad person, we work for both sides: we make it easier for the clients because they don’t have to do anything, since we answer all of the e-mails, and at the same time we simplify things for the advertiser. Advertisers’ representatives don’t want to tell you much when you’re the person running the blog. But when they go through us, they’ll negotiate based on the advertiser’s budget. I like the ones who will tell us what their budgets are.

And since I make more if the client makes more, even though we appear to be working both sides of the aisle, I don’t think it’s a conflict.

Sometimes I know when an ad rep is lying. My favorite is when they forget they’ve been working with Mr. BFS or me and will try to work with me for another site and they’ll lie about, say, what their client will pay. As far as I’m concerned, all my bloggers have Stemberger as a last name, and every one of them is a member of my family. You don’t cheat my family members.

FaM: So what does a typical workday at BFS look like?

Crystal: I usually work from 8:00  or 9:00 to 4:00 or 5:00; then it’s back to work from about 9:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. On average I put in 12 to 15 hours a day Monday through Thursday.  Then on Fridays it’s only 6 to 8 hours, and on weekends, another 6 to 8 hours if I can drag myself away. I never stop working. Even  seeing things at the movie reminds me of what to do back here. It’s like having a quiet a baby…can’t imagine having kids…having my mind taken over by something else like this would kill me.

FaM: What were you doing before you made your escape?

Crystal: I was a custom forms programmer at a car dealership software company; I was the one who told who told the computer where to put your name address & all that stuff on the forms that you have printed up during a car deal. Half of it was customer service, and  half of it was advanced data entry, and it paid about $35,000 a year.

FaM: When did you realize Mr. BFS could join you in the business? And what was he doing before?

Crystal: We only had that idea about the end of November.

I was getting overwhelmed with 130 or 140 clients. Because I was working 100 hrs a week, I started talking about hiring someone. One day he woke up and said “Could you hire me”? He was a school librarian, so he had the record-keeping experience. He took over the record-keeping and that relieved me of two hours a day, right off the bat. He was doing that after work. When we realized I made $15,000 a month over the previous quarter, we decided it would be worth having him work full-time on the business. Before it took off, we’d only been making $5,000 a month combined from our day jobs.

Now we’re partners. He does the record-keeping and answers clients’ ad e-mails; I do the group ad campaigns and hand-holding. The two aspects of the business reinforce each other. It’s been amazing; it worked much better than I ever imagined. We separated our tasks so we wouldn’t be stepping on each others’ toes—we really don’t even have to talk to each other if we don’t want to.

FaM: How are you planning to deal with Google’s embargo of sites that publish paid links? I understand you recently ran into a rough spot over that.

Crystal: At least 20 of my bigger clients were hit; suddenly their Page Ranks dropped from 4 to 0 or from 3 to 2. It was a difficult time, because it coincided with my grandmother’s passing. This is the first week where things were going along normally. Then our new dog went nuts, but that’s another story.

I think people are overreacting. Not that many advertisers are changing their ways. Because of all the panic and because people tend to succumb to groupthink, I won’t know the consequences of this until the end of April. That will tell us if we hit the $10,000 level. We have to hit $10,000 a month to cover taxes ($3,500), basic savings ($3,000), and our normal expenses ($3,500); we target $15,000 to pay down the mortgage even faster and start saving for a new home.

FaM: Do you think this policy can be challenged effectively? It seems like constraint of commerce…possibly bloggers will get together for a class-action suit someday?

Crystal: No, I don’t think it can be challenged well because it only affects Google Page Rank.

My way of challenging it is to say screw Page Rank; let’s look at other ways to assess sites. I’m pushing MozRank and domain authority, other good metrics. I’ve sold ads on just domain authority alone. You and I have huge domain authority, for example; that can’t be taken away by Google. I want to give Google less credit. Clients with big PageRanks, 3 or 4, will still get the majority of ads, but others will do OK, too. Things will balance out.

FaM: What do you see for the future?

Crystal: I’m going to focus on quality clients. My goal now is not to expand, but to find our core group and stick with that. I started it as a one-on-one thing; I like my customer service and my business model. I think further expansion would take away from that.

Group campaigns are about 10 to 50 people, and I only do a few of those a month. One goal is to teach clients that they must forward the e-mails and letters from advertisers to us. The big money is to be made when people contact you and then we negotiate the best terms. Group deals are just icing.

In our personal lives, we’re already looking at a new house, since prices are so low right now. We can get a 3,500-square-foot house for $180,000! We’re looking for four bedrooms and a big gaming room. Sadly we do not have basements in Houston. Recently we learned that mortgagers don’t want to lend to business entrepreneurs—the “self-employed”—until they can see two entire years of steady income. So if we’re to buy a house before then, we’ll have to pay in cash.

Overall, we’re keeping cash on hand; we could live off our savings for six to nine months. We have $20,000 saved for hard times and $30,000 for the house payoff or for the down payment so far on the new house.

It was time for Crystal to get back to work, so I offered my thanks and let her off the phone.

One thing that our conversation makes clear: quitting the day job is not necessarily a way to work fewer hours. When you’re your own boss, you have the toughest boss in the world. But if you can work smart and you’re willing to work hard, you can make a living in the blogosphere—and then some.

Disclaimer: Crystal serves as Funny about Money’s ad agent.

 

w00t! Guest Post at Planting Money Seeds

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Over at her new blog, Planting Money Seeds, problogger and full-time freelancer Miranda Marquit has kindly published a guest post from Funny, Work Is a Place.

All you who think you’d like to work from home—or who already are doing so—should take a look at it.

😀

Therein lies a tale, one I figured was way too long for the guest post’s purposes. As I’ve suggested at Miranda’s place, when you work from a home office, sometimes it’s not easy to persuade people that you are working.

When my son was little, I had a very active freelance business. To give you a feel for this, one day a friend and I went into a Shakespeare and Company bookstore, and I realized that two of my books and a half-dozen of my various articles were sitting on the bookshelves. They got there because I hustled a lot of business and I made it a point to operate professionally. That last bit included never missing a deadline.

One late October day I was pounding out a story. It needed to move off my desk within a day; meanwhile, another couple of assignments were hanging fire. So I had three assignments that had to be done that week.

Phone rings.

It’s some volunteer mother at the school. She tells me—does not ask, but tells—that I’m to drive a vanful of five-year-olds to a pumpkin patch south of the city for a Hallowe’en outing. And I’m to do this tomorrow.

Understand: I have not volunteered to do anything. This is not a co-op school: we’re paying more than the tuition at the University of Arizona’s medical school send our kid there. I do not volunteer because I’m not the join-y type and because I truly do not fit in with society wives. I make them uncomfortable (that’s probably not the word for it; the actual word begins with b- and ends with -y) and they  make me uncomfortable to the nth power. And even if I were the sosh type, I was working more than full-time as a paid writer.

Sorry, said I, but I can’t do that: I’m working on a deadline and can’t drop an assignment for a client.

She would not take “no” for an answer. She continued to insist that nothing would do but what I had to drop what I was doing (which clearly, in her mind, wasn’t much), pick up a half-dozen kids, and spend the day schlepping them back and forth across the Valley.

I explained what is meant by the term “deadline.” Then I explained that I was working and I could not quit working on short notice, because I had assignments due to my editors.

Now get this: She says, “You can’t be working. I called your home phone number!”

No joke. Then she launches into a diatribe, the gist of which was I was to get off my tail and drive the kiddies to a pumpkin patch. She went absolutely ballistic.

I ended up telling her, not in a friendly tone, “NO.”

LOL! Those were the good old days!

These days, with many people telecommuting or running small businesses out of their homes, attitudes toward entrepreneurs who work at home may be changing.

I doubt it, though. For most people, work is a place, and that place is not in your back bedroom.