11.16.10

If You Like “All” Music, You Like NO Music

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Rants, Travels at 9:55 am

On my last day in Hong Kong, I had the honor of being the worst-dressed person at a Chamber of Commerce business networking luncheon and speech. The speech was about Hong Kong, so I didn’t learn anything applicable to my business, but I did learn a valuable lesson on how I should network.

We sat at a table with other members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. The typical conversation went like this:

Me: Hi, I’m Mike, good to meet you.
Him: Hi, I’m John. (exchange business cards)
Him: Oh, founder of your company. So what do you do?
Me: I run a network of fitness and nutrition websites that helps users find the best information and lowest prices on different nutritional products. How about you?
Him: I’m a consultant.
Me: (…awkward silence…)
Me: Ummm, doing what?
Him: I’m like a janitor. I clean up problems.
Me: (…awkward silence…)
Me: Oh, ok. Well I’m gonna go over there so that I don’t breathe any of your stale carbon dioxide.

Out of the 8 other people at our table, this was basically the jist of 7 of the conversations. By the end, I quickly recognized the futility and simply started talking about my personal travels and how much I liked Hong Kong, as

1. These people didn’t give a shit about Internet Marketing and had no use for me
2. I didn’t own a sweatshop somewhere in China where they could run a Kaizen event, so I had no use for them, and
3. They wouldn’t know a dumbbell or high-protein meal if it smacked them in the face, so they had no use for my web platform.

This reminded me of the time I went to the “South Bay Internet Entrepreneurs” meetup.com meeting. Some guy gave an INCREDIBLE on-site architectural SEO presentation, and out of the 30 people in attendance, 2 others besides myself actually had a clue. The other 27 were wastes of space who were merely looking for easy “Make Monies Online” schemes.

After complaining about the idiocy that meeting, my friend Larry explained it best: “Because REAL entprepreneurs are busy WORKING, not going to lame meetup.com meetings”.

Lessons learned? Just like you need to focus on a niche (and divide that niche by 1000) in your small business pursuits, you need to stay within your niche when socially networking. Going to general business luncheons like this is where you find generally boring people with no specific passion who are generally clueless.

“If you like ‘all’ music, you like NO music”
– Chuck Klosterman

So I need to start networking better within the fitness/health/nutrition industry. I need to meet personal trainers, dieticians, health counselors, etc.

The reason I haven’t been confident enough to do this yet is because PricePlow is what I consider an absolute wasteland of a website*. It’s on my roadmap to fix it all up in a monstrous project, and even though it’s not there yet, now is the time to plant the seeds in my niche so that I have a better social network ready to go when it’s time to rock.

However, I will attend the Affiliate Summit West. These guys might not all be in the health niche, but they do similar things as I do and use similar tools. I don’t care for 99% of ad networks that will be at this convention… but the party will be awesome and I’m going to learn some new tactics.

Besides that, it’s time to stick with my niche and away from these “consultants”, who I still can’t figure out what in the hell they do anyway.

* It’s never easy for a parent to admit the truth in that that their child is stupid, ugly, and fat… but this is the case so let’s not beat around the bush.

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11.04.10

Land of the Free, Right?

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Politics, Rants, Travels at 8:21 am

Throughout my time in “Communist” China, one of the recurring jokes has been how there is often so much more economic and business freedom in China than there is in the U.S.

It sounds counter-intuitive, and small businesses in China definitely have to deal with a lot of hassles and paperwork, but they’re also given a great amount of leeway in terms of how they get to run their operations.

Some great examples of this are in Mike Michelini’s recent blog article titled Maybe I’ve Been in China Too Long. Mike is a businessman who has been bouncing between the US, China, and Phillippines. While I don’t agree with the Healthcare bullet point at all, it’s hard to argue with the other points.

One of the many interesting things I saw in China was a Help Wanted sign at a clothing store that dictated the prospective employee had to be under 5’4″ and 90lbs. Imagine doing that in the States! Every obesity support group in the country would have you in court by the week’s end. God forbid you want someone attractive and healthy modeling your petite line of clothing.

In the US, on the other hand, we have exceedingly aggressive laws and tax codes that have been written by lawyers and CPAs – two regulated industries where you need “certification” in order to enter the industry. This creates a barrier to entry, thus artificially inducing the wage floor. At the same time, since these are the people writing the laws, they write them in such a way that you need to hire one of them to figure it all out – and if you don’t, you’re going to get screwed by someone who does. Land of the free, right?

It’s a vicious circle, and if you’re not one of them, it affects you negatively. Not a day goes by where I don’t respect lawyers less. What am I doing about it? You’ll find out soon enough, but it’s phenomenal to see people such as Rand Paul, who I heavily support, getting elected this week. Rand will fight this kind of nonsense and try to reduce these laws and simplify the tax codes.

In the meantime, we have sticks-in-the-ass like this clown who shut down a 7 year old’s Lemonaide stand in Oregon due to lack of paperwork and licensing. Yes, I know the story had a happy ending, but it should have never have happened in the first place – and WOULDN’T have happened in “highly regulated” China. Land of the free, right?

As for me right now, I’m happy to admit that I’m struggling with the growth of my network. I have several successful projects, but I do nearly everything for every single one of them. The profit margin is great, but it’s time to start hiring other people.

The first thing I want to do is hire a writer. While I love writing, the research and composition takes too much time I’d rather be doing other things (designing, coding, marketing, and surfing, mainly).

Clearly, I want a quality writer who speaks English as his or her first language. But guess what – In the Land of the Free known as the United States of America, you can’t ask or require that English be your first language. That’s illegal become some bureaucrats decided that I need to give everyone a “fair chance”. The best I can do is massage the system and ask backassward questions such as “Do you have any language abilities that would be helpful in doing this job?”. A lot of good that will do.

So I either have to waste my time testing and weeding a bunch of people out (and most likely ultimately arrive at a native English speaker), or I can just say screw it and outsource the service to contractors, who likely aren’t Americans (right now I’m actually working with a British team). I don’t have to pay them benefits that I can’t currently afford, I don’t have to worry about ridiculous Obamacare rules and Welfare policies that may or may not get enacted, and I can stop sourcing to them whenever I want for any reason I choose.

So tell me, who are these laws really helping? Because let me tell you something: Life isn’t fair, and if you don’t meet my requirements, you don’t deserve a “fair chance”. In the real Land of the Free, you don’t have the government make fair chances for you – you make them yourself.

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