Go Green to Find Your Green ($)

No doubt that within the last week you have already had multiple conversations with people about the environment. Some probably think if we don’t stop the path that we are on as a human race, the world will be destroyed for our children. Others might think that global warming is made up by the politicians to lobby for money for various grants. No-matter what side of the fence you are on, taking a stance can help you to find your money maker.

Book Review: Microtrends

What are the small forces behind tomorrow’s big changes?  Microtrends by Mark Penn tries to answer this question.

The book highlights 75 “microtrends” that are the cause of a much larger societal movement.  Though the book doesn’t really connect the dots very well, it does outline some interesting smaller trends that do have some force in today’s society.  The amount of influence that these trends actually have in society is debatable.  However, understanding these microtrends can help you in finding a money maker.

While reading the book, I found that I was in fact part of several of these microtrends.  I am an older gamer, part of a religion that doesn’t allow women clergy, and a part time sun hater.  So what does it all mean?

Penn outlines that a microtrend is defined as 1% of the population.  1% of the US population is still 3 million people.  Imagine you had access to 3 million potential customers, could you make money?

The reason why Microtrends is an important read for finding your money maker is rather simple.  By finding what microtrend you belong to, you have found your target market.  Also, since you are already part of said microtrend, you already have some sort of knowledge related to your target market.  By the invention of the internet, you now have access to your target market with greater ease and cheaper barrier to entry.

Microtrends is not an extremely groundbreaking book.  It does have spots that are rather boring to read.  Some of the microtrends that you don’t belong to can be rather lame to read through.  This is due to the fact that he uses statistics to back up his microtrend.  If you aren’t a fan of statistics, I recommend you only read the microtrends that you have interest in and skip the rest.

Overall, Microtrends is highly recommended as a read to help you to understand what potential money makers you have based on the microtrends that you may belong to.  It should be used to help you to start thinking about other microtrends that Penn leaves out of his book.  By finding your 1% target market, you just need a way to get your product out to those 3 million people.

Microtrends receives a 3/5 stars for lack of keeping you interested through the microtrends you don’t belong to.  However, it is still a must read to get you thinking about your money makers.

Lessons on finding your money maker #1

Finding your money maker is one of the hardest things to do. Today we introduce a new segment called “Lessons on Finding Your Money Maker”. In this segment we will discuss practical ways for you to search out that elusive money maker.

Lesson one is all about tracking the things that you already have that are bringing money in the door. By understanding what you currently have that is making you money, you can put greater emphasis on your current money makers.

The way we are going to do this is by breaking down our current money makers into percentages. I’ve asked one of my co-workers if we can use him as an example. We tracked his money makers for one month. This is what we found:

65% of his money comes from his wage.

8% comes from his commissions and bonuses.

3% comes from the employer match to his 401K contribution.

24% comes from a side project. He has started buying cars and selling them under his uncles car dealership.

Lets break this down. First, his wage is his greatest money maker at this current stage in his life. The goal is for the wage to become a smaller and smaller percentage of your money maker. The reason, if you are like most Americans, your wage is likely paying for all your bills and not leaving much left afterwards.

Next, we have his commissions and bonuses. This is a great opportunity for him to focus on a money maker. If you are lucky enough to have commissions or bonuses at your job, you can ask yourself this question; what do I need to do to increase my commissions and bonuses? This will help you to stay focused on the important things at work and stay away from the time waisting tasks.

For example, my co-worker would routinely answer phone calls from every client. He would then drop whatever he was in the middle of and try to help the client with whatever simple little thing they needed. This sort of distraction would take him away from clients that were ready to bring money in the door that day. The clients that were hot were then pushed to the next day. You can see the trend that would follow. By understanding this, he has decided to send all calls to voice mail. He then checks his voice mail and sorts through them and identifies the ones that are most important. So now the trend has reversed. Clients that are hot are dealt with today and clients that are cold are pushed back until tomorrow. By doing this simple little change, he has entered into his commissions earlier this month than ever before.

Next, we have his employer match for his 401k contributions. He just maxes out whatever the employer is willing to match. In this case 3%. No more, no less. The 3% is free money. He can’t really increase this because he is already maxed out.

Next, we have his side project. At the first of the year, my co-worker decided that his wage alone wasn’t going to be enough to get him to where he wants to be financially. He partnered with his uncle that runs a small car dealership. His uncle would allow him to use all of his resources. In exchange, he would pay a percentage of every sale back to his uncle. Currently, he is averaging one or two sales a month. However, you can see that already he has tapped into a money maker. Even with just a small amount of sales, he is bringing in nearly 1/4 of all his money. Clearly he has an opportunity to focus on this money maker.

This is just a simple example. We didn’t go into his investments, his interest on his savings accounts, or anything in great detail. We simply took a few of his obvious money makers and analyzed them. Even from this simple task, we have outlined two areas where he can put a greater emphasis onto his money makers, his commissions and bonuses and his side project selling cars.

Try this simple exercise yourself and try to single out money makers that you currently have. After you have found your current money makers, start putting more energy and emphasis into them. Remember, your goal should be to minimize the percentage that your wage is bringing in. By doing so, you will see an immediate increase to your net worth.

Your Image, Your Money: Tiger Woods

Have you ever wondered why Tiger Woods has no visible tattoos, no piercings, doesn’t wear hip hop clothing, nor does he have excessive “bling”? The answer is rather simple. Tiger Woods understands that his image is his money maker.

Tiger Woods has earned $100,890,709 in career tournament earnings. However, he has made $668,550,000 in endorsements. So what does that mean? 86% of Tiger Woods earnings come from endorsements, not golf. Endorsements are all about image. Tiger Woods understands that he is trying to sell a product to a middle class male. He’s not selling to the inner city kids.

If it were simply about golf for Tiger Woods, he could dress how he wants to, drive what he wants to, act how he wants to, but Tiger Woods understands that golf isn’t his true money maker. Sure, it got him to where he is at, but keep in mind that the money he has made from golf is only 14% of his total earnings.

We can learn an important lesson from athletes like Tiger Woods. Your image is your money maker. Companies with dress codes understand this concept. They institute a dress code to take away your image. They want you to represent the company, not yourself.

The same can be said for your money maker. You represent your money maker, not yourself. Build your image around your money maker. If your money maker is selling Harley Davidsons, how would you dress? Would you wear a suit and tie? Tattoos or no tattoos?

Tiger Woods sells to the middle class male. That’s why he endorses Buick and not Lamborgini.

Ryne’s Lemonade

Ryne had been bugging his dad for weeks and weeks and weeks to help him build a lemonade stand. Finally, on memorial weekend, his dad drove him over to the local Home Depot to pick up some materials. After a few hours of building, Ryne was open for business. Though he lives on the end of a dead end street, by the end of the weekend, Ryne had made $28, just shy of his goal of $30.

Even though Ryne is not quite a teenager, not yet a millionaire, not a licensed business owner, his parents aren’t Donald Trump or Warren Buffett, we can still learn a lot from his simple story.

Lesson 1. “Ryne had been bugging his dad for weeks and weeks and weeks to help him build a lemonade stand.” Often times when you are first starting up your business or pitching your idea, nobody wants to listen. It takes perseverance on your part to show those around you that you believe in your idea and that you will do whatever it takes to get it up and running. This is important to the success of your idea. If you are trying to get funding or backing for your idea and you just throw away your idea after the first “No, I’m not interested”, you will never be successful in getting your idea off the ground. In contrast, if you can show those that said “no” that you won’t let your idea slip by the wayside and you keep at it, eventually someone will listen and you will get the backing that you need.

Lesson 2. Ryne had asked his dad to help him build the lemonade stand. We all need help. No matter how intelligent you think you are, you need to get help from those around you. Ryne probably knows how to use a hammer, spray paint and saw, but he doesn’t yet have the skills to build something that is square and sturdy. He probably could have figured out how to build the stand on his own, but he saved himself a lot of time by asking his dad to help him build the stand. By saving himself the time it would have taken him to build it on his own, he was able to get the stand up and running and MAKING MONEY in just a few hours.

Just like Ryne, when you are first pitching your idea, surround yourself with people that have done it before. Ask for help from those that have already paved the way in front of you. By doing this you will save yourself the headaches of missing the details. I am a firm believer that most small business fail, not because the product or the idea is bad, simply because it took the owner too long to work through the details and they ran out of funding.

Lesson 3. Ryne lived at the end of a dead end street, but was still able to almost meet his goal. How did he do it? He wasn’t blessed to have a prime location for his lemonade stand. It wasn’t on a busy road, near a local store with lots of traffic, or even by a park on a hot summers day. It was on a dead end street. He did it by telling his friends about the stand. His friends eventually told their friends and their friends told their friends. By the end of the weekend, he had people from all over the neighborhood buying his lemonade with zero advertising dollars.

Often times you may want to keep your ideas secret. Maybe you don’t want people to know what you are planning to do because you are afraid that if it fails, you will be ridiculed. Maybe you have some sensitive ideas that you can’t openly share so you don’t share any of the details of your idea. Whatever the reason that you don’t share your idea, you are only hurting yourself. Eventually for you idea to succeed, people need to know about it. Don’t hold back and share as much of the idea as you can. Pretty soon your idea will gain momentum if your idea really is that good.

There are millions of stories out in the world that are just like Ryne’s. The trick is learning how to spot them and learning what to apply from them. This is what Focus On Your Money Maker is designed to help you with. As we find more stories and you begin to share your comments and stories in your own life, we can all learn the lessons of what it truly means to Focus On Your Money Maker.

Starting Your Own Business?

I was reading one of my favorite finance blogs, Get Rich Slowly, and one of the frequent readers asked a question about getting advice for starting his own business. Though most of the advice was good and sound (ie. read these books…, get a good accountant and lawyer, make sure you have lots of money, etc.), I thought of a time that I had tried my hand in starting a franchise. My comment was as follows:

“One thing that I would mention is talking to a small business owner that is in retail, but not a direct competitor. Ask him if you can come shadow him for a few months to learn the ins and outs of the business. At that point they will probably let you come and work and let you in essence run the business.

“I did this with a franchise that I was looking to buy. I went to the owner in a neighboring town and let him know I was interested in seeing how the business works and he let me come work with him in the evenings. Soon, I could see if it was really a good fit for me or not. Turns out that I lost motivation really quickly because it wasn’t my cup of tea.

“Some business owners might tell you no, but most don’t have a problem letting you learn from them. In fact, my experience is that they want to help and can even get you going with financing and referring you to attorneys and accountants.

“Hands on experience is by far the best solution.”

This is one of the easiest and cheapest ways of finding out if you have what it takes to start your own business. The owner (it just so happens that my brother and I were trying to open a Cold Stone Creamery) let me basically take over his business for him for 3 months. I was in charge of everything from hiring to scheduling to ordering more product. In fact, the 3rd month of running his store, he and his wife took a two week vacation and left me in charge of the whole place.

What I found out was that I didn’t really like working with high school kids as employees. They were to unpredictable for me. They would have all these crazy requests for days off for school activities, they would sneak free food to their friends, and they often times would not show up for their shift without any notice. Not that they were bad workers, just that they were kids and this was not a carrier for them. What that meant is that I had to fill in the blanks myself. I often had to drop everything I was doing and head into the store just to make sure the shift was covered. Though some people can handle this sort of business just fine, I needed a little more stability from my employees.

The best part about this business owner allowing me to shadow him was that I was able to find out that owning a Cold Stone was not right for me and it didn’t cost me a single dime. I gained valuable experience that has help me in other business ventures and I still have a great relationship with the owner. In fact, he has talked to me a couple of times about other business opportunities.

So if you are thinking of starting your own business and have never done anything like it before, I suggest calling some of your local business owners and seeing if they will let you shadow them. It won’t cost you a dime and you’ll be leagues ahead if you do decide to open your own business.

Ask and You Shall Receive

How many times have you heard of someone getting a “great deal” and wonder to yourself, “how come I never get such a good deal”?  Often times I think it is because we refuse to ask for the great deal ourselves.

I can’t tell you how many times I have received a free phone (my latest was a Blackberry Curve that had just been released one week earlier.  Retail=$499), got the price on my internet service down to $19 a month (Retail=$59 a month, savings of $480 a year), got a free upgrade on a rental car, split a $80 cab ride by asking a couple going to the same place as us to share a ride, etc. etc.  You get the idea.

Some might say that you have to be a asshole to get those sort of freebies.  I disagree.  Though sometimes I have had to “talk to the right person” and in order to get to the right person you may need to put on a front, 9 times out of 10 I’ve been able to get the “great deal” simply by asking for it.  The only thing from really holding you back is your own fears and insecurities.  Though I don’t ask for deals on everything, some things you should never pay full price for.  Everything service related you should ask for a better deal.  Medical bills, yard care, or auto repairs for example.  Tangible goods are a little harder, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find good deals.  You just need to be more selective on the ones you ask for and realize that for some things, the best deal is the current deal.

The key to finding the “great deals” is to start asking.  Do it on everything and get into the habit.  You’ll soon overcome your fears and start getting the “great deals” that you never used to get.  Don’t be a jerk unless you have to and remember “ask and you shall receive”.

Book Review: Made to Stick

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath is a book about what causes some ideas to have lasting power and influence while others never make it out of the mind of the creator.

Understanding that we can all learn how to make our own ideas “stickier”, the brothers Heath studied ideas from across history. What they found is that ideas that seemed to “stick” versus ideas that didn’t all seemed to follow the same guide lines. They have an acronym for these guide lines called SUCCESs.

Simple

Unexpected

Concrete

Credible

Emotional

Stories

Any idea that was found to be “sticky” had most if not all of those features. Understanding how we can use the SUCCESs with our own ideas, we to can make our own ideas as “sticky” as we need them to be.

It’s an easy read (simple) and has great stories to illustrate each of the SUCCESs principles.

4/5 stars