New World Entrepreneurship

October 6, 2009

Adding value is the key to success as an entrepreneur, but how quickly you can drive revenue for your new venture depends on how you view your business.   What’s most important?   What leverage points exist or can be built to quickly grow the business?

Nearly everyday I speak with an entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur about their business ideas.   One thing I often ask is, “What is the easiest way to make money with this idea?”   “How can you create revenue in 30 days or less?”

Granted, I view business from a pretty lazy perspective.   I seek leverage points and areas of Low Hanging Fruit to earn money and provide value very quickly.   I hate the idea that an entrepreneur is suppose to toil for years before turning a profit.   Maybe that’s the way it was at one time, but now… in the new world of Entrepreneurship this is totally unnecessary.

If, as an entrepreneur, you enter into a great business struggle you should know that you are doing it by choice, not by necessity.

So, in your business, what can you do to drive revenue within the next 30 days?

If nothing comes to mind then ask yourself what resources or assets you would need to be able to drive revenue within 30 days and focus with great intensity on creating that leverage point.

You tell me…What assets do you have (or might you create) in order to be able to produce revenue growth within 30 days?

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Posted by matthew

Preparing for dramatic moments…

February 14, 2009

There’s going to to come a time when you, going about your day in your normal routine, are going to find yourself in the midst of a dramatic and perhaps defining moment.  It’ll come quickly and unexpectedly and how you respond in the crucial seconds depends on how you’ve prepared in advance.

Last night, my wife and I were having dinner in a popular area in Buenos Aires.   There were many people out enjoying the pleasant summer night.  It was nice and perfectly predictable…until it wasn’t….

I heard the sounds of the violence long before I saw what was going on. If you’ve never been part of or witness to a serious throw down fight, let me tell you that the thumping of fists on bodies is a unique sound.   When you hear it, you know what it is right away.

I looked first at my wife, then turned 45 degrees to face the scene.  About 30 feet from us we saw two men beating the living shit out of another man.   The victim had been sitting outside the cafe throughout dinner strumming on his guitar.   It was clear he was homeless and just trying to entertain to generate some money from the passing hordes of tourists.   When I noticed him earlier, I figured the homeless guy was either high on something or just plain crazy.   In any case, the guy certainly wasn’t aggressive or acting like a threat.

Two guys in there 20’s beating the shit out an older, crazy, homeless man.  It was a bad scene.

Within a few seconds I was in the middle of it.

What never ceases to amaze me is that we, as humans, have become watchers of events around us rather than participants.   After a min or two, I’d stopped everything and, frankly it didn’t take much.

When it was done… still on the ready, and fueled with a rush of adrenaline, I took a look at the scene around which the violence occurred.

The homeless man was bleeding from the mouth and nose, but standing (remarkably).  The two attackers were still talking shit, making stabbing motions but now retreating.   And around me stood dozens of watchers.   Dozens of capable men, mouths slightly agape…just watching.

Not one of them, man or women did anything (except my beautiful, ballsy wife who was yelling something in spanish I didn’t understand).   Would they have stood there and watched this homeless guy get beaten into a coma or killed?   Would they have watched if, as I tried to intervene, I was overwhelmed?

I think they would have.  Here’s why…

Our lives are so predictable, so normal and relatively easy that we don’t really worry about these moments even though they happen all the time.

I’m a strong believer that if you want to act a certain way in a particular situation, you need to think about it in advance.  You need to prepare yourself mentally before the moment comes, so when it’s upon you… when you are witness to an accident, or see a man roughing up a woman, or a child in a dangerous situation… you don’t stand around like everyone else.   You don’t just wait for the man with the uniform to show up and take care of it.

Instead, you act.

I decided long ago that I would act each and every time I found myself in these moments.   And I beg you… literally… I beg you too to decide to act when the moments come.

Beg you?  Yes, that’s right.  The world needs leaders like never before.  Real leaders, who in moments of need stand up while everyone else remains seated.

You are what you do when it counts.

As a Misc. item;  Many people have asked me about where I own property in argentina.    I actually own property in Cafayate argentina as well as Buenos Aires.

3 Comments | Travel, being a man | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthew

Being Bold in Rough Economy

January 30, 2009

The economy is in deep trouble.   It’s bad now, but this is just the beginning.   There will be fundamental changes in the global banking system, the use of credit and the value of currencies.   It’s going to be rough.

So what do you do?   Wait it out?

I think this is a time to be bold.   Not stupid or careless, but bold.

So, in keeping with my “Be Bold!” strategy I’m still spending money, investing and growing my business.   In fact, I’m working on buying a pretty expensive domain name for a project right now and I plan to launch two completely new businesses in the next two months.

One of my biggest sources of income is selling domain names.  [I'm not talking about ultra-premium names I've kept in my portfolio for years either.   I'm talking about buying and quickly reselling domains for ~$300 each.]    Anyhow…In September of 2008, it really appeared that this part of my business was on a serious decline.   I couldn’t help but only expect it to get worse.

But, As quickly as my domain sales went down, they came back.   Right now, January 2009 is looking like my second best month ever.   How much money did I make flipping domains this month?  It’s a big number, trust me.

So, if I’m selling domains, that means people are still buying.   The world (especially the world of entrepreneurs and small businesses) is made up of innovative people who will strive to survive the downturn.   But more than that, there are many that will “Be Bold!” and take advantage of opportunities and weakness in the marketplace.

Your task, if you want to thrive in this bad economy,  is to serve be Bold by serving the Bold.

1 Comment | Economy, internet marketing | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthew

Bubble Living Kills Opportunity

January 28, 2009

We all live in a bubble. Within our bubble there is familiarity which makes us feel comfortable and, at least in part, content. It’s important to note that men can get use to just about anything and, no matter how objectively unpleasant or objectively desirable your familiar surrounds might be, over time they become what we’re use to; what we’re comfortable with.

It might sound strange that someone living in an Mumbai slum could be as comfortable and content in his bubble as a power broker living in a penthouse in Manhattan, or as a single dad living in a suburb of Chicago. But, it is absolutely true. The psychological adaptability of the human mind is remarkable. The only critical requirement is consistent predictability.

I enjoy comforts as much as the next man, but recognize their place. One cannot flourish without at least regular expansion of the bubble.  And, to truly grow quickly it’s often best to burst your bubble completely.

A bubble of consistent predictability is a hospice for opportunity where she can do little else but wither and die.

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Posted by matthew

Foreclosures continue to expand…

August 15, 2008

According to the website zillow.com 1/4 of all houses sold last quarter were sold for less than was paid. Not only are people dumping their real estate as fast as they can, foreclosures just continue to accelerate. It seems that the government bail out plan hasn’t had an immediate effect on the problem.

If you’re interested in taking a look as some of the many foreclosure listings you can access one of the top sites on the Internet for free foreclosure listings, including foreclosed homes in all 50 states, HUD foreclosures and Washington Mutual REO properties.


3 Comments | Economy, Foreclosures | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthew

High Gas Prices = Mad as Hell!

April 29, 2008

Ridiculous. Yes, $3.50+ for a gallon of gas is ridiculous. If you ever want it to change you need to be mad. In fact, you need to adopt the mantra of Howard Beale from the 1976 film, The Network. If you haven’t seen that movie, you should. It was far ahead of it’s time.

Anyway, Howard a network news anchor goes on prime time TV and loses it. Repeating over and over Howard says, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Upon whom should we direct this anger?  Not the usual suspects, I would suggest.

The oil companies, gas stations, the rich monarchs in the middle east, and the OPEC cartel are NOT to blame. Sure, they’re benefiting from the situation. But, they’ve ALWAYS benefited. And why shouldn’t they? They provide a service to you don’t they?

Think about all the pain in the ass it must be to dig that nasty oil out of the sands of some of the most inhospitable regions on earth and move it half way around the world, processed, refined and delivered to a 24hour pay at the pump service stations on your neighborhood corner.

Considering the convenience of having it delivered to you so smoothly, shouldn’t these guys make some money? Most of us certainly thought so when gas was reasonably priced didn’t we? This is America after all and we don’t mind people making a profit. “But now it’s too much!”, you might be saying.

Recently, OPEC’s president came out and told it like it was. When the dollar goes down just $.01 in value (due to inflation, bad economic policies, etc) a barrel of goes up by $4. A similar thing happens with eggs, milk, corn, gold, copper, beef and just about anything else you can think of.

It’s time we face the facts: Just about everything that matters is getting more and more expensive and the primary reason for it is that the lovely US Dollar is becoming worth less and less.

“A weaker U.S. currency, besides pushing up the price of foreign goods, also drives up the price of commodities priced in dollars, such as oil, which has a big impact on consumer spending by Americans.” according to a recent article by CNN.

So who’s to blame?

Well, we are. Or at least our leadership is. The Federal Government is spending money it just doesn’t have. So what does it do when it doesn’t have enough money? They fire up the printing presses and make more money. Every dollar they print makes the few dollars in your pocket worth less and less. According to ShadowStats.com they’ve been printing a heck of a lot of dollars.

M3 Growth

The sad truth is none of this is going to change. The next president/administration and congress are just going to do more of the same. None of the three jokers now in contention for office addresses the simple fact that the destruction of the dollar is quietly stealing all the wealth of the American people.

And why should they? You don’t care about it do you?

You’re just mad because it costs you too much to fill your gas tank. You want the simple solution. You want to blame some “towel head” half a world away or the big evil oil companies it’s so much easier to blame others for our increasingly desperate situation.

Or even better, you want the government to help you by printing billions more and sending you a check for $600….

Things are going to get far worse until two things happen.

First, We must wake up to the facts. We must sseek out the truth and stop being fooled into simple blame the pathetic man from Salta, Argentina who’s never earned anything for himself or had any job daddy didn’t give him named Juan Esteban Romero or blame the arab thinking. High gas prices are a symptom. They are not the problem.

Second, as Howard Beale would suggest, you’ve got to get mad. Really mad. You’ve got to get so mad that you’ll opening your bedroom window and shout at the top of your lungs, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

2 Comments | Economy | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthew

Flood of People Set To Walk Away From Their Mortgage

April 18, 2008

Panicked by rising foreclosures, banks and the government are willing to do just about anything to stem the tide. More regulations, rules, bailouts (primarily directed to the banks themselves) may slow the reckoning, but ultimately doesn’t the market need to do what the market does?

We’ve discussed this before here… The catalyst to the current economic crisis was real estate and although there are many other fundamental problems with the US economy (debt, trade deficits, weak dollar, etc.), real estate is the primary problem.

The trouble with realestate is that prices went up so much so quickly. Naturally, nobody complains when the market is driving prices up at an absurd rate. When things go the other direction (even falling just 5% so far), regulators and politicians act as though the sky is falling.

The tipping point: Walk Aways (AKA MilkWalkers)

Fact is things can, and probably will, get much worse. Right now, a number of market forces are doing their thing… correcting the market and driving down real estate values. These forces squeeze even the non subprime homeowners. Putting their biggest “investment” in the red.

Adopting the Milk And Walk Strategy

Underwater on their homes, reasonable, responsible homeowners must ask themselves if it’s worth sticking it out. At some point, more and more homeowners who could afford to pay their mortgage will simply stop. They’ll stay in their home not paying the mortgage for as long as they can. And when the bank says they need to leave, they’ll just walk away. This Milk and Walk strategy is shockingly effective. As more people discover it, it’ll become widespread.

In fact, I know two people that are doing this right now. One hasn’t paid a mortgage payment in 11 months. He’s still in “his” home that he “bought” two years ago for 2,500,000. He’s stalling the bank through a variety of strategies. At the end of the day, he’ll simply walk using a years worth of mortgage payments to fund his future rental home.

Barriers to Milk Walking…

As prices plunge there’s only a few things keeping people from pulling the plug on the mortgage payments and voluntarily going into foreclosure.

  • Future Prices Psychology: If the homeowner believes that things are bad now and only going to get worse, they’re far more likely to stop paying, milk the clock on the bank then just walk away. Each individual does what they think is best for them and their family.
  • Social Stigma: If homeowners think they can cut their losses and walk away from a bad investment without being looked down upon by other people they’re far more likely to do it. There might still be some negative view of people who walk away from their debts, but more and more it appears that homeowners are being cast in the role of victim. This makes it far easier for them to walk away from the “injustice of unscrupulous brokers, banks and appraisers.” As more people turn to a Milk the clock then take a walk strategy, others will follow in greater and greater numbers. The “social proof” that Milking/Walking can be done and that others are doing it will cause numbers to increase massively.
  • Availability of other options: Homeowners truly struggling probably won’t be too picky about the housing they’ll be in after they decide to walk, but better heeled homeowners will. If there are good rental housing options at reasonable prices then these folks are much more likely to make the decision and pull the plug. Given the available inventory of unsold homes on the market, I’m guessing many will have to be converted to rental. If this happens then these “MilkWalkers” might be able to walk away from a mountain of debt in their old home and actually UPGRADE to a better home as a rental saving thousands of dollars along the way.

Quite frankly, if this trend picks up I don’t see what can stop the downward spiral in the economy. It could be bloody. The trillions of dollars “lost” in this scenario would make the losses to date look like a rounding error. I think if the trend picks up, government officials might step in with a carrot and stick approach to solving the problem perhaps going to the extreme of making it a crime to walk away. That would certainly be a frighteningly high level of government intervention in our “free markets”, but so far they’ve indicated they’ll do just about anything.

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Posted by matthew

Three Percent of Homes To Go To Foreclosure

April 16, 2008

Shocking information from Pew Center shows that 3% of homes will face foreclosure in the next three years.   It’s  far worse in some states like California which is projected to have 1 in 20 or 5% of all homes turn into foreclosures.   No, doubt the dream of home ownership has been shattered by recent economic twists and turns.

What about those that don’t go into foreclosure?

Plummeting real estate values will dominate the landscape as more and more homes are seized by banks and liquidated at far lower values.   Neighborhoods likely will deteriorate.   “Wealth” will be destroyed.   If PEW is right, it looks like those on CNBC who predict we’re at a bottom are very wrong

The credit crisis started in housing and will continue to expand as housing values continue to deteriorate.   Until we reach a floor in real estate values, how can we not see continued erosion of the credit markets?

I think the cycle of pain is just getting started.

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Posted by matthew

Smart Cars hit Iowa

April 15, 2008

Driving around Davenport today, I saw two different eco friendly cars.

One was the long awaited “Smart Car” (see below). A young couple (probably about 30 years old) drove this into a local shopping center. I guess since they saved so much money on gas they wanted to apply that savings to some consumer goods.

Earlier in the day I saw an even smarter car driving down River Drive in Davenport. Since it was going the opposite direction, I didn’t have a chance to check out exactly what brand it was, but it appeared to be like the one below, a 3 wheeled Electric Condor II.

Incidentally, the Condor II does look way more economically interesting than the Smart car. It’s 100% electric costs about as much as the Smart Car and gets up to 80 miles on a single charge.

I think this is going to be a huge trend (as long as credit for new cars is easy to come by). It’s not so much that people want to do what’s economical (especially in the case of the “smart car”). Let’s face it a new car, even a ’smart one’, isn’t economical. How long does it take you to recoup your outlay. Financing, depreciation, etc. etc. Especially since the “Smart Car” gets only 32 MPG!

Also, It’s not so much that the environment is the priority, rather it’s that Green is cool. And people always want to be cool. Being seen in your Smart car is like being seen in a Porsche. It strokes the ego in exactly the same way, but for different reasons. It’s always nice to show how much better you are than those around you. Green is the new cool brand.

3 Comments | Economy | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthew

Real Estate Market Near Bottom, Not Even Close

April 4, 2008

It’s difficult to see any upside to the US real estate market. Unless of course you’re a buyer. Last month it was reported that foreclosures are up a staggering 60% from the same month a year ago.

Even worse it was recently reported that housing prices have a long way down to go. One expert (The CEO of Fannie May, no less) predicts that housing prices have only fallen 30% as far as they will go. That means the pain has only just begun!

Hard to imagine real estate prices falling another 70%, but one things for sure, it’s a rough time to be a seller.

On a personal note, we recently sold one of our (non-investment) homes in Asheville, NC. We bought the house about two years ago, near the market peak. We sold it for about 20% less than we paid. Like many sellers, we were happy to have sold the domain even at a loss.

1 Comment | Foreclosures | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthew

A Firetruck, Spiderman, Coca-cola and a Rooster.

February 20, 2008

We spent much of the day driving from Salta to Cafayate Argentina. About lunch time we stopped at a teeny tiny town called La Vina. It’s difficult to imagine even 100 people call this place home. We all shared a not-too-bad pizza at the only cafe.

Total cost about $3.

In the back of the cafe there were a bunch of kids playing and Max quickly made some friends. It’s funny how kids are pretty much the same every where you go partially due to the influence of US consumerism. Notice the boy holding the rooster which ran to show it to Maxim. He’s wearing a Spiderman shirt. The girl holding the coke bottle (wearing the winnie the pooh shirt) and max holding a firetruck. The firetruck belonged to the boy holding the rooster.

A Firetruck, Spiderman, Coca-cola, Pooh and a Rooster.

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Posted by matthew

Inflation is our friend!

January 23, 2008

If you don’t subscribe to http://dailyreckoning.com/, you should. It’s free, funny and a much needed bit of financial common sense. Today, Bill Bonner republished a portion of an old SNL skit.

Dan Akroyd pretending to be President Jimmy Carter on Saturday Night Live and 30 years ahead of his time:

“President Jimmy Carter: Good evening. On Tuesday, we Americans will have the opportunity to exercise our role as citizens in a free democracy. Yet, only a third of the eligible voters will actually cast ballots. The other two-thirds are, in a sense, very lucky. Because they do not know what’s going on.

“Last week, I delivered a message on inflation. Since then, the dollar has dropped in value, the stock market has sustained record losses, and the whole Dow price index increased 0.9%. In other words, our economic system is screwed, blued and tatooed! We just have to face the fact that there is simply no way to fight inflation in a capitally-intensive, highly-technological, conflict-riddled, anything-for-a-thrill world of today. That’s why, tonight, I want you to try to look at inflation in an entirely new way: Inflation is our friend.

“For example, consider this: in the year 2000, if current trends continue, the average blue-collar annual wage in this country will be $568,000. Think what this inflated world of the future will mean – most Americans will be millionaires. Everyone will feel like a bigshot. Wouldn’t you like to own a $4,000 suit, and smoke a $75 cigar, drive a $600,000 car? I know I would! But what about people on fixed incomes? They have always been the true victims of inflation. That’s why I will present to Congress the ‘Inflation Maintenance Program’, whereby the U.S. Treasury will make up any inflation-caused losses to direct tax rebates to the public in cash. Then you may say, ‘Won’t that cost a lot of money? Won’t that increase the deficit?’ Sure it will! But so what? We’ll just print more money! We have the papers, we have the mints. I can just call up the Bureau of Engraving and say, ‘Hi! This is Jimmy. Roll out some of them twenties! Print up a couple thousand sheets of those Century Notes!’ Sure, all these dollars will cause even more inflation, but who cares? Everyone will be a millionaire!

“In my speech last week, I said that America would have to undergo an austerity program, but since this revolutionary new approach welcomes inflation, our economy will be free to grow, and we can spend, spend, spend! I believe the watchwords for the ’80s should be ‘Let’s Party!’ And in that spirit, I’d like to say, ‘Live, from New York, it’s Saturday Night!’”

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Posted by matthew

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