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A few months ago I posted that I one of the goals in my bucket list was to read 1000 books.  And well, I promptly stopped reading.  Shame on me.

See, I have the tendency to get busy working and living and forget my goals sometimes.  Just to be fair though I am doing pretty good on my goal to practice golfing. I even took Jonathan out for 9 holes at good ol’ Cascade.  I’ll also say that I’m not doing so great on my goal to hit a 72.  And also not so good on the “Sail Across the Atlantic” goal.  I had hoped to take sailing lessons this summer but this thing called life keeps getting in the way.

Well I have been trying to be a little more organized (not a bucket list goal by the way) and I actually forced myself to sit down and pick up a good book.  Only took me 3 nights of reading before bed to read through “Good to Great” by Jim Collins.

Have to say, thoroughly enjoyed the book.  But I find myself asking what kind of business person do I want to be.  Part of me wants to manage something great, part of me wants to start something great.  But rarely are both done my the same person.  There are a few rare examples but for the most part, you’re either good at starting something or keeping something running – not both.

Either way, I’ll be reading Good To Great again.  There’s so much relevant knowledge in there.  If you haven’t read it and even if you’re not up to your neck in business I still recommend reading it.

A Friend asked me the other day what I would do if I had been challenged to make $1000/day.  I think he was half expecting a short answer.  And I tried to figure out how to put it into 140 characters or less.  Not that it was on twitter, just that 140 is a nice round number.

Well I couldn’t. So I am attempting to do it in a blog post.  Here goes.

Step 1 – Find something that’s worth $1000/day. I have chosen a business.  Mine is a plan for a scalable online SaaS (software as a service) that will be sold not by me, but by resellers looking to offer something solid on a very flexible pricing model.  I have run the numbers over and over on this one and I see it being quite a bit larger than $1000/day.  I started with about 25 business ideas that could have easily sucked up as much time and effort as this one.  Only 1 or 2 of them even approach this one in terms of monetary potential.

Step2 – Learn as much as possible about managing a business that can pay me $1000/day.  I have resorted to blogs, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  I have found some of the more expert people in various aspects of what I need to do.  I read A LOT from these guys.  And I’ve learned a lot about how I want this business to run and how to market it.

Step3 – Don’t go alone.  I started this out with 2 partners.  We have kept each other on track when it was most tempting to give up or take the short way out. I  think attacking something like this alone is a stupid idea. Don’t do it.

Step 3 – Create a solid plan. I have spent the last year and a half building this thing.  We started out with 2 solid months of planning. Sometimes for several full days each week. (one of the advantages of being unemployed at the time) We analyzed the competition and anything out there that remotely touched our sphere.  I might also add that I have been working in this technology for that last decade.  Part of being able to create a solid plan is to follow one of Warren Buffett’s rules “stick to what you know”.

Step 4 – Be flexible. We have stuck to our plan but not been so blind as to not recognize when we had something wrong and needed to go back to the drawing board, or white board in our case.  We have made major shifts to the project.  But (and this is the most heartening part) our overall strategy has not changed. The marketing and industry we are targeting is evolving into what we need it to be.  Had we launched a year ago, we would probably have not been well accepted because the market wasn’t ready for it.  Now I’d say it has almost been perfectly primed.

Step 5 – Don’t give up. We’re still not done but we’re approaching the completion of version 1.  We have thought we were close before.  We even thought we were done at one point.  Thinking this would have been done toward the end of 2008 and still not having it done by mid 2010 could really suck the spirit out of a lot of people.  I think having the right partners has made us be able to keep going.  Did I mention the importance of having partners?

So I guess there isn’t much else I can really say without showing everyone what this project is.  Well, I’m not ready to show it off.  And I’m not really sure when it will be.  Don’t worry, once it’s ready, that’s all you will be hearing about.  Just stay tuned.

And keep in mind that this isn’t what I would tell everyone else to do, this is just what I have chosen to do.  For some people I would say the best way for them to make $1000 per day is to go to law school and work their way up in a law firm and get to where they can charge $250/hour and work 4 hour days.  That’s just not me.

Good luck.

So the government is toying with the idea of regulating airline prices.  Just because one airline wants to start charging extra for your carry-on luggage.  Now a Senator from NY thinks he can figure out the fair market price that airlines should charge for various fees.  How can he think he can possibly have a clue what the real cost of goods are?

How have we arrived at a place where anyone in the government feels it is their place to decide how a company makes ends meet?

When the government backs away completely from a market where there is healthy competition between companies, the consumers get a better price and a service level that fits with their expectations.  If an airline wants Continue reading

I read a lot of business columns. Most of the time I find wise people with good advice.  Like this guy.

http://www.tompeters.com/cool_friends/content.php?note=010640.php

I had a boss once (Curt Porrit) that told me that “the reason business exists is to make life better for people.  The question then becomes ‘does it make life better for the few at the expense of the masses or better for the masses, sometimes at the expense of the few?’”  When the company was sold and the buying company decided to fire him because he told them when they were making bad decisions, the remaining employees all began to plan their exit.  All out of loyalty to Curt.  A good manager doesn’t get productivity out of his people from fear, he inspires them to be the best they can be and makes them want to do it because of respect. Continue reading

I have a friend that is taking a class on guitar making and he is making his own custom acoustic guitar.  I have the honor of designing the head for him.  A relatively small task but an important one.  And I was thinking about it, “How would I love to build my own guitar?”  Man, that would be my pride and joy.  But really, I don’t have the time for it.  I have chosen not to.  Am I missing something that is more valuable to me that what I have chosen? I don’t know. I think I’m right but only time will tell.

I also recently launched a photoblog.  How would I love to carry my camera with me everywhere and find one fantastic shot every day. I am also getting all the equipment for my own darkroom donated to my cause.  I just hope that I’ll have the time to develop a handful of photos each month.  There’s nothing like watching your print come to life in the developer.  I always over-expose and carefully watch my developer times.  Then yank and into the stop bath.  Most of the time it turns out with a little bit more contrast.  I love the contrast. Continue reading

A while back I designed a site for DLXEasyBackup.com. In fact, they haven’t changed it as of today. It’s been about 6 years now. They offer an online backup service, Kinda similar to mozy.com. It’s quite simple really, they are just running an install of Novell’s iFolder. A fine little product. In fact, I started using it not long after I designed it. I had 50 MB of storage and I could share the account with my other computers so that I could easily transfer files to and from all my computers. Later Will started using it when we started Main10. That worked pretty well. But it still wasn’t everything it could have been. And it wasn’t free. Eventually we set up our own file server and stopped using the iFolder.

Since we stopped working for Main10 full time and started working on QJuice, we have had some other options for sharing files but still nothing that felt perfect. Until now.

Enter DropBox.com. I don’t remember who showed it to me but I love it. http://www.dropbox.com Use this link please, it’ll get me some additional storage space.

I setup dropbox on my iPhone, home computer, work computer and my wife’s computer. Transfering files is about the same speed as you would expect but updating is lightning fast. The way they do it (as I understand it) is that they only update the parts of the file that are different. So I update a 30MB file and I have only changed about 50KB worth of its source, the update takes about 1 second. Maybe less. Depends on what Internet connection I am using.

Then it gets better. I can create a shared folder. I can send non-dropbox users a link and they can open the file in their browser. I can also send my friends a link to the shared folder and it shows up in their dropbox. So right now, I have a ton of things notifying me that Peter is saving and updating files in the MonaVie share, Will is updating things in the QJuice share, and Adam has updated a file in the Main10 Share. No one has to send me any files, no one has to use a little thumbdrive, we all just have the latest files.

So jury is still out as I haven’t been able to REALLY test the conflict resolution yet but so far it’s perfect. Yes, perfect. If I could go back in time and join up with a company when they were in startup mode, it would be dropbox. I’ll get around to the conflict resolution test sooner or later. Until then, just go try it out for yourself. https://www.dropbox.com