An Investment With Great Returns

In the past several weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time with John Kremer’s 1001 Ways to Market Your Books which is a terrific collection of ideas and resources. Of course, I’ve been through this before so it’s not unmarked territory for me.

 When Making a Living Without a Job came out originally, I wasn’t nearly so experienced. Much of the promotion was spearheaded the first time around by Gilly, my Bantam publicist. This time, I have a publicist, too, but I’m generating a lot of promotion myself.

 Last week I recalled a valuable lesson I learned when I was a new author. I was contacted by a public relations firm in Minneapolis that specialized in author promotions. I talked to one of their agents on the phone who then sent me their brochure and price list. Although they promised spectacular results, I was not at all convinced to use their services.

 Months later, I sat down and totaled up what Gilly and I had done and then, using the pr agent’s price list, totaled what it would have cost to have them do the same work. Any guesses? My low-end estimate was $20,000. Obviously, our sweat equity was valuable.

 Sweat equity is an old real estate term describing an investment of time. Sweat equity is the capital of the DIY movement and it’s equally popular with small business startups. In fact, when I look at the stories of some of my favorite businesses—Ben & Jerry’s comes to mind—sweat equity is a recurring theme.

Derek Sivers is a case in point. The founder of CD Baby, Sivers has gone on to other endeavors, but credits his willingness to invest time for much of his ultimate success. In fact, he blogged about it and said, “I can’t remember anything in my last 20 years of running my own business that really felt like hard work! Was it hard work finding band members, scheduling rehearsals, or trying to book gigs in the college market? Not really. It felt like an extension of the creative process of making music. Was it hard work answering thousands of CD Baby e-mails myself for the first few years? Not really. It was good to hear what people were thinking, what problems they were having, and felt great to solve them all.I could see how these things would seem like hard work, but when it’s your company or you’re so filled with love for what you’re doing, it doesn’t feel like work.”

 Of course, sweat equity isn’t just about saving money: it’s also a way to master every aspect of your enterprise. In order for that to happen, you must believe that investing your time and energy is worth the effort.

 If you do decide it’s worthwhile, you’ll be in good company. As Seth Godin points out, “Bootstrappers built this country, and they continue to make it great. Virtually every business—from IBM to the local dry cleaner—was bootstrapped, usually by people with far less smarts, less money, fewer connections and less  vision than you have right now.”

So get busy. The sooner you invest, the sooner you’ll be seeing a return.

The Commitment Test

There’s a foolproof test for commitment that goes beyond any verbal claims of commitment: look at your calendar and your checkbook. Are you spending your time and money in ways that back up what you’re truly committed to? It’s only when you bring your spending into alignment with your dreams that good things begin to happen.

 If commitment is an on-again off-again thing for you, or if you recoil from the notion altogether, I’d like to suggest you adopt an idea from the no-nonsense Barbara Sher. She asks her students to make “a temporary permanent commitment.” The brilliance of Sher’s idea is that she reminds us that making a commitment doesn’t mean we’re stuck forever with the things we’ve committed to. For many of us, that’s a huge relief.

 When we make a temporary permanent commitment, we give it our all for a limited period of time. I like the idea of dividing our dreams into 90 Day Projects where we focus on making progress in small, manageable ways day after day. During this time, immerse—don’t dabble. Treat it as a permanent commitment. At the end of the 90 days, take inventory. Want to keep going? Or have you had enough? If the answer is, “I’ve had enough,” then design projects for the next 90 days. And so on and so on and so on.

 Commitment gives us direction, but it doesn’t guarantee ease.

 So take another look at your calendar and checkbook. Do they mirror your commitments? Do they mirror someone else’s ideas about how you should be spending your life?

 Remember, too, that making a commitment is just step one. It means nothing unless it’s backed up with concrete action.

Live Long and Prosper

Longevity was the furthest thing from my mind when I started my first business 35 years ago, but when I do an inventory of those years, it’s obvious that creating things with a lengthy life span has been part of the process. Nobody is more surprised than I am that Winning Ways newsletter is in its twenty-third year of publication. Or that Making a Living Without a Job has never gone out of print since 1993. Not all projects have lasted so long, but the things that have are the real core of my business.

 

Although I’ve been busily promoting and hand-selling for the past twenty years,  there are some other aspects to my entrepreneurial life that are also longevity factors. These are things that I think have made all the difference and kept me moving forward. They’ll help you, too, no matter what the current age of your business.

 

Passion and Right Livelihood are essential. According to the Buddhists, who coined the lovely term “right livelihood”, there’s a simple test to know if your work qualifies. That test is this: the work becomes more, not less, interesting the longer you do it. Avoiding boredom is only possible if passion is present. Best of all, practicing right livelihood keeps pulling us in the direction of mastery, urging us to learn more, do more, be more.

 

Understand cycles. Every business in the world, no matter how big or how small, goes through cycles. Down is followed by up—and vice-versa. It takes a year or two of entrepreneurial effort to discover the particular patterns inherent in your business, but once you do, you can work around them. For me that’s meant learning what times of year are most conducive to scheduling seminars and then using the down times from that profit center to work on creating new projects. Cycles also teach us about financial management, if we’re paying attention.

 

Willingly defer gratification. I have advertising whiz Bernice Fitz-Gibbon to thank for teaching me this one. In her marvelous autobiography, Macy’s, Gimbels and Me, she wrote, “It’s smart to defer gratification. Be willing to take less at first in order to have much, much more later.” I believed her and discovered she was absolutely correct.

 

Stay focused on the big picture. There’s a temptation to declare failure when a project disappoints or, even, falls flat and fails. However, too many new entrepreneurs confuse a project with a dream. Know the difference.

 

Evolution is your friend.  Anyone devoted to preserving the status quo shouldn’t embark on the joyfully jobless path. I constantly remind folks that the business you start out with isn’t the business you end up with. If you’re doing it right, you’re growing and changing and your business is a reflection of that. It’s equally important to make wherever you are in the process as exciting a place as possible. Now.

 

The real key to longevity was expressed perfectly by Paul Harvey whose broadcasting career spanned seven decades. He once said, “I hope someday to have enough of what people call success so that I’ll be asked, ‘What’s your secret?’ to which I’ll reply, ‘I pick myself up again when I fall down.’”

 

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If you want more longevity-enhancing tools, join me for one or more of my upcoming teleclasses. We open on Wednesday, October 14 with The Thrifty Entrepreneur: Doing More While Spending Less. That’s followed by Outsmarting Resistance on the 19th and A Beginner’s Guide to the Seminar Business on the 21st. Can’t attend in person? You can still sign up and receive the audio download for any of the classes.

Don’t Avoid Your Best Stories

Although I’ve been to New York more than a dozen times, most of those trips blur in my memory—except for one. That standout journey was the one my friend Georgia and I made several years ago. We arrived about the same time as a huge snowstorm rolled in. Thinking that a little snow and sleet was no match for two intrepid Minnesotans, we set out to visit places we had been eager to see. After we stumbled into Tiffany’s while I attempted to clear the sleet off my glasses, we realized that our visit was mostly going to include our hotel room. That was just the beginning of a trip that was loaded with unexpected adventures.

 

Then there was the time I got stuck in the middle of an Italian train strike and ended up spending hours stranded in Bologna where I hooked up with a delightful family from the Philippines. Both the father and mother were entrepreneurs, as was the eldest of their four children. Hours later, when we parted in Venice, we hugged each other and the father said, “We will always think of you as Auntie Barbara.”  And I will never forget the Delgado family.

 

Every traveler has stories of plans gone awry, of course. These are often the stories that we entertain our friends and families with when we return from an adventure. Sometimes they’re funny, occasionally heroic, and almost always they’re memorable.

 

The same is true for entrepreneurs. We screw up. Things don’t go as planned. We have disappointments. We lose a contract. So what?  

 

A woman once shared her frustrations with me as she was launching a new business. After I listened to her story, I said, “Imagine a movie that goes like this: Janet started a business and it was instantly successful. It would be boring to watch and it’s boring to live.”

 

There’s been a lot of chatter on Twitter recently from folks who are clinging to jobs that they loath. While they’re dithering, they’re avoiding collecting great stories of their own, stories they’ll be telling their grandchildren someday. Of course, if predictability is a higher priority than surprise and delight, they need to keep doing what they’re doing.

 

So let’s review the wise words of the fine storyteller Paulo Coehlo: Too often we decide to follow a path that is not really our own, one that others have set for us. We forget that whichever way we go the price is always the same: in both cases we will pass through both difficult and happy moments. But when we are living our dreams, the difficulties that we encounter make sense.

 

They also make the best stories.

7 Simple Ways to Make it Easier for Someone Else

 

 

One of the major reasons it gets easier and easier to start a business is because of the generosity of folks who are already doing it. Every day I see entrepreneurs sharing information and encouragement with others who are coming along behind them. Still, new entrepreneurs often think they have nothing to contribute. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Dennis Hopper says in the movie Crash, “You’re either a roadblock or a short cut.” 

 

Here are some ways to spread entrepreneurial spirit and provide a shortcut for others.

 

Be a model in the world. Proudly share the joys and rewards of self-employment. Almost daily I see a Facebook or Twitter post sharing a story that ends with, “I love working for myself.”  You don’t have to be a missionary, but don’t hide it, either.

 

Patronize small businesses. It’s not always an easy option, but make the effort to support the community that you’re a part of. Take a look at the work Becky McCray is doing on behalf of small town businesses at SmallBizSurvival.com.

 

Adopt a protégé. Even if you think you’re still a novice, you’re bound to have already learned things that would help a beginner. Don’t be surprised if you’re the one who learns the most.

 

Be a micro-lender. My favorite organization is Kiva because you get to choose the entrepreneur who receives your loan. It’s a real joy to help a business grow in a far corner of the world and it only take $25 to get started. Once a loan is repaid, you can take your money back or loan it again. 

 

Start a local Meet Up group. Homebased businesses can be invisible to their neighbors. This is a great way to connect with other entrepreneurs in your own backyard.

 

Help a kid. Volunteer to talk about entrepreneurship at Career Day at your child’s school. Or become a Junior Achievement volunteer. There’s nothing like a living role model to show that there’s an alternative to getting a job.

 

Attend Tribal Meetings. Retreats, seminars and workshops designed to help you make your business better are happening all over the place. The connections you make may be as valuable as the information you receive. And, of course, you may have information that solves a problem for another attendee.

 

If you want to see entrepreneurial support in action, join me for Follow Through Camp, coming up on November 6 & 7. Arrive with an idea. Leave with a commitment.

 

You Can’t Grow a Business if You Refuse to Grow

About the time I was planning to move to Las Vegas, a workshop participant named Pat Egan suggested that I should meet his mother. Like me, she had grown up in a small town in Minnesota, was an author, entrepreneur and enthusiastic traveler. Now we live in the same part of Las Vegas and Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse has been a favorite lunch companion ever since.

 

On Saturday, Sharon stopped by to give me a copy of her upcoming book (out November 2), Calling All Women: From Competition to Connection. It’s a terrific book of advice and inspiration gleaned from her years of working with people around the world. 

 

The reason I got an advanced copy is because Sharon had invited me to write the foreword. As I reread what I had written, I realized that I was talking about something that’s equally important for entrepreneurial success, although it’s not much discussed in conventional business books. Here’s a bit of what I have to say about that overlooked part of the journey.

 

Long after my formal schooling had ended, I first encountered the term “personal growth.” Up until then, I had assumed that once I reached adulthood, I had finished growing and that was that. I was immediately fascinated by the implication that growth could continue. Those two little words carried hope. The end of dead ends. Stretching. Discovery. Becoming. Wider horizons. Beginnings. 

 

Despite my eagerness to explore, it was difficult to find materials and teachers that could help me on my journey. At the time, both books and seminars were written by men, for men. Apparently, women were either unteachable or disinterested. I decided to ignore the lack of attention to my gender and adapt ideas and concepts from the existing material. Although I operated in secret, I came to think of myself as a card- carrying self-help junkie. 

 

Books and seminars were only the beginning. The real work was done in my day-to-day life, but the real work is never done. There’s always another path to explore. As time went on, the notion of lifelong growth took root and I simply assumed it was something that would be a daily part of my life. I came to see that the rewards of such a pursuit were greater than I’d realized. Actively pursuing personal development not only adds another dimension to life, it may, in fact, prolong it. “People don’t grow old,” says Deepak Chopra. “When we stop growing, we become old.”

 

So what does it take to keep growing yourself? One prerequisite for success is a willingness to change. Recently I came across an article I had written about change. I pointed out that change comes in two different packages and it’s necessary to tell them apart. There’s Imposed Change, which is the kind we can do nothing about. Taxes get raised, fashion designers insist we stop wearing willow green, or road construction makes travel difficult. On the other hand, there’s Instigated Change. That’s the kind that we think of as improving our lives because we have chosen it. Best of all, we can instigate change at any  time we want. 

 

Why does personal growth matter in running a business? Quite frankly, our business grows or stagnates in direct proportion to how much growth or stagnation we’re allowing into our lives. Our own business is also a terrific laboratory for putting what we’ve learned into practice. As Paul Hawken points out, “Being in business is not about making money. It’s a way to become who you are.” 

 

How wonderfully synergistic!

29 Reasons to Love the Joyfully Jobless Journey

 

When Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, “How do I love thee, let me count the ways,” she wasn’t talking about her life as a poet, but we’re borrowing that idea anyway.  Our list isn’t nearly as poetic as hers, but it’s every bit as passionate.

√ Control over time. Self-bossers are more likely to plan their work around their 

bio-rhythms, not a timeclock.

√ No supervisor. Being self-directed builds confidence and maturity.

√ Imagination stays fit. Our creative spirit is like a muscle and needs frequent workouts to keep it in top operating form. 

√ Office can be anywhere. We get to decide if we’ll work at the beach, in our RV or in our home office. 

√ Time for creative excursions. Knowing how important it is to gather ideas all the time, we work frequent jaunts into our schedule and let ourselves be inspired.

√ No rush hour traffic.

√ No fast food. Not only do we save money but eating healthy is easier when we have time to prepare good food.

√ A more balanced life. Smart self-bossers begin by figuring out what’s important to them and find ways to spend time on the top priorities which include not working too.

√ Lifelong learning. Having experienced jobs where continuous learning was not valued, we now design our own curriculum of formal and informal learning. 

√ Pet friendly office. Fluffy and Fido can be part of our staff.

√ Custom-tailored benefits. While we have familiar benefits like health insurance and vacation time, self-bossers might give themselves other benefits like weekly massages or exciting sabbaticals.

√ Constant personal growth. Our businesses call us to keep growing and discovering new talents and wisdom.

√ The coolest friends. Entrepreneurial souls tend to be fun and fascinating. Building a personal network of such friends is a joy.

√ No office politics.

√ Great tax deductions. Our tax system favors the very wealthy and self-bossers. 

√ No dress code. Whether you’re funky or conservative, your wardrobe won’t be decided by a memo.

√ A variety of work. We resist doing the same thing day in and day out and our businesses reflect our love of different activities.

√ Learn talent management. Self-discovery leads to finding our biggest assets and making the most of them.

 

√ Be a positive role model. When we follow our dreams, we set the best example for our kids and others who we don’t even know are taking inspiration from our lead.

√ Longevity. Yup, we’ll probably live longer and happier lives by honoring the promptings of our hearts.

√ Master crowd control. We can go to the movies on Tuesday afternoon or bank when there’s no line. Not only is this efficient, it eliminates a lot of stress.

 

√ Practical mental health. Do you think it’s healthier to spend time problem-solving or complaining? Entrepreneurship, by its very nature, enhances mental health.

√ Meet fascinating people. As our businesses take us out into the world, we begin to encounter new and interesting folks we’d have never met any other way.

√ Feed our adventurous spirit. What others call uncertainty, we see as a passport to a rich life that keeps our curiosity busy.

√ Learn personal responsibility. If our parents and schools didn’t teach us this vital lesson, our businesses certainly will.

√ Naps.

√ Unlimited financial potential.  We get to decide our money goals and create ways to reach them. What a lovely notion.

√ Harmony. Self-bossers are more likely to live in alignment with their deepest values. 

√ FREEDOM. 

 

WHAT WOULD YOU ADD TO THE LIST?

Building a Hothouse for Your Dreams

New month, new theme. For October, the theme is Let’s Review. We’ll be looking at some success basics that may be overlooked when we get busy growing a business. And lest you think basics are boring, I couldn’t agree less. 

 

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Dreams are extremely fragile—especially in their early days. Your dreams need to be nurtured and surrounded by support. Here are a handful of easy ways to get your dreams off to a great start.

1. Passion must be present. While a dream may be born in passion, it’s up to you to keep it alive. If you’re half-hearted and lukewarm about them, your dreams will never come true. One way to keep passion high is to spend a few minutes every day visualizing the successful completion of your dream. How does it look, smell, taste, sound, feel? Allow your vision to keep pulling you forward.

2. Take good care of the boss. It doesn’t matter how great a dream is if the dreamkeeper is too tired or uninspired to bring it to life. Sometimes the easiest things to do are also the easiest to overlook—like drinking plenty of water and avoiding toxic people. Dreamkeepers have an obligation to create the healthiest and most balanced life possible.

3. Make your workspace a place that inspires you. Whether you work on a beach with your laptop or in an extra bedroom in your home, make it inspiring as well as efficient.  Burn incense, play classical music, have a tabletop fountain, and/or cover your walls with art or an inspiration board that pictures your dreams. And if you’re sitting on a beach, pick one with a great view.

4. Take responsibility for staying inspired. There are three ways to run a business: Inspired, Uninspired or With Occasional Flashes of Inspiration. You can identify those things that inspire you and expose yourself to them frequently. Whether it’s music or the words of a particular author or the company of another entrepreneur, know where your Inspiration Well is and go to the Well often.

5. Create your own Hall of Fame. Ask a successful actor or musician who inspired them and they’ll probably answer quickly. Ask a would-be entrepreneur the same question and you’re apt to be greeted by a shrug of  the shoulders. If you’re going to succeed, you need to be inspired by real people. Read biographies or interviews of successful people and pay attention to the philosophies they share.

6. Be open to being inspired at all times. You never know where a great idea or solution to a problem will come from. Carry a notebook with you at all times so you can jot down ideas as they occur. If you spend a lot of time driving, you may want to carry a voice-activated recorder to capture your thoughts. 

7. Collect entrepreneurial friends. There’s almost nothing more rewarding than spending time in the presence of kindred spirits who can add their own creative ideas and encouragement to what you’re doing. Cultivating such friendships will be one of the best investments you can make.

 

8. Change the scenery.  Daily routine may be efficient, but it also dulls the creative spirit.  You can counteract that  by taking a field trip or creative excursion at least once a week. Take your laptop to a coffee shop, visit a museum or walk in a Japanese garden. Challenge yourself to come up with new backdrops that feed your soul.