09.04.10

Week One in the Books

Posted in Entrepreneurship at 10:11 am

…well, kinda. I just concluded my first three days of reporting to nobody and no one. Honestly, I didn’t think it’d feel that much different, as I already worked from home. But it did. In fact, it felt GREAT.

The greatest thing was the lack of distractions. On Wednesday, something [good] came up on one of my sites and I needed to put in a serious 3 hours of grunt work*. I turned the phone off, closed my e-mail tabs, stayed off Facebook, turned off my instant messaging program, dug myself into the cave, and got into the ZONE. No blackberry blinking. No e-mails to care about. No phone calls exploding everywhere. Just pure hustlin’. It was awesome.

I’ll admit it. I hate the phone. Not a good thing for a former sales guy to say, but it’s the truth. With phone calls, you get no documentation, it’s tough to multitask, and there are no benefits of seeing body language. I’ve pretty much had the phone on “All Alerts Off” the entire past three days. I check it at MY leisure. It does not check me. If you want to get a hold of me during “cave time”, you pretty much need to knock on my door.

Another thing is the responsibility factor. I seriously think I just grew up a little bit**. No, I don’t want to play flip cup with the vball crew on Wednesday night. I need my BRAIN tomorrow. I didn’t do this every weeknight in the past, but the fact is that I could afford to. Now, I don’t feel like I can. NOTHING is worth getting a bad night’s sleep right now.

I wanted to start off with a bang by getting into a solid routine. I’m a creature of habit, and the sales job didn’t allow me to properly habitize. Here’s basically what I like to do on a weekday:

1. 7am wake up. Spend a minute looking at messages and e-mails on the phone and get up. No loafing.
2. Get some amino acids mixed with a dash of creatine to hold my appetite off. I’m a morning person and don’t need caffeine at this point.
3. Check yesterday’s sales. If end of the month or around day 15, calculate month-to-date revenues and profit margin.
4. Do e-mails. Both personal and business
5. Check all y’alls boring facebook statuses. What’s that, you’re miserable at work? Poor thing, I really feel for you. Oh wait, no I don’t.
6. Check up on any writing I’ve had outsourced. I will most likely use it three steps below.
7. By 8am, creating content. One rule I have for myself is that I must create at least one piece of quality content for one of my sites every weekday. This blog doesn’t count.
8. Publish and social bookmark that new content.
9. Perform and check on various other linkbuilding strategies. I do much myself, and outsource some. This is part of my secret formula so I don’t share publicly.
10. ~9/10am. I’m starting to get a headache from lack of caffeine, so now it’s time to do my pre-workout formula. I need to add a few more carbs here.
11. Workout. Either surfing, swimming, or CrossFit right now. If a rest day, allow myself some R&R at 11am. Still trying to get back in shape from my post Pier-to-Pier swim layoff.
12. Post-workout shake, shower, then finally eat a real meal.
13. While eating, check news, see how stock trade are behaving, etc.
14. Until 3:30pm, work the “main set”, as we swimmers say. Typically this is hardcore writing or hardcore designing. Phone is off. Good chance I already started working towards this in the morning too.
15. 3:30pm. Naptime. I can tell you when I’m within 20 minutes of 3:30 every time. It’s my natural crash time and I don’t fight it. Good chance I’ll eat something light beforehand, especially if I’m gonna do a 6:30pm swim.
16. 4:30/5pm. Wake up, cook, and do a bit more design/writing. Caffeine optional. This is usually when I can figure things out that were frustrating me during my 3pm haze.
17. After that, start slacking off from work, check relevant message boards for my industry, and take some R&R or whatever I feel like doing. I sometimes swim at 6:30 but like the morning workouts better.
18. 8pm, try to find a good stopping point, and go to a friend’s house, chill out with a movie, TV show, or read. Maybe watch sports and have a beer at the local dive but not too many unless campaigns are REALLY rockin
19. 11pm/12am – Bed.

Maybe that’s too rigid, but that’s essentially what I like on an ideal productivity day. BUT, I could ditch the routine and spend the entire day writing code, or drive down to San Diego to surf and say screw everything.

And now it’s beach time. Volleyball and cooking out. And while you’re technically making $0, my sites will be banking revenues. Can’t beat that.

* Technical lesson learned – Don’t hardcode anything in. I know not to do this in programming, but I had a ton of links and product names hardcoded into a bunch of pages instead of using a redirection plugin. That is now fixed, so it will turn this into a 10 minute job instead of a couple of hours.

** Note that 8 hours after I write this, I will have quite the buzz on. So I’m not totally grown up by any means.

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08.31.10

Two Paths From Here

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Life, The Universe, and Everything at 5:53 pm

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
–Robert Frost

Tomorrow is the big day. My first day as a fully self-employed entrepreneur.

Over the past few months, as I’ve seen this time coming, I asked myself who I was going to be in the foreseeable future. And the more I thought and talked about it, the more clear it became.

I could really see it going one of two ways.

The first way is the easy way. As it stands now, I could very easily live off of the profits from my websites without dipping into my savings. I’d have to watch the expenses, but could easily do 15 minutes of work per day and become a total beach bum. I’d play volleyball, become a better surfer, work out all day, drink cheap malt liquor, and do whatever the hell it is that all of these California bums you see wandering around all day do. Occasionally, I’d get inspired and launch a new web campaign and make it profitable.

The second path is the exact opposite. Go for The Empire. Dominate several tiny niches of the web, then aggregate them into a massive network that feeds into an enormous machine. Attack industries that need attacking, and inform users that need informing. Hire employees, learn social media, and even do “In Real Life” marketing. Buy a fancy house, own a boat, and invest in land – all in cash. Stay healthy, keep racing, and learn some new weapon skills, but occasionally go on some ridiculous international drunken bender and let things coast for the week.

I really could see me doing either for a while. But it’s pretty much one or the other.

And as things become more and more clear, I am pretty sure I know which one it’s going to be. You probably do too.

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08.28.10

Quitting a Job is Hard

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Life, The Universe, and Everything, Written While Drunk at 8:31 am

Wow. Ever since Shit Got Real, I’ve been one busy guy. You’d think it was because I’ve been working on my own business, but I wasn’t. I was transitioning my sales territory to the new guy. It’s kind of funny, but since quitting my job, I’ve worked harder for it than I have for years.

I never realized how many people I’ve met over the past four years, and how hard saying goodbye would be. There are literally hundreds of people that I’ve helped, supported, and have become professional friends with. Their feedback has been incredible – they all support my endeavor but know that the new guy will be better than I was. Honestly, I’m gonna miss nearly all of them.

All of my customers kept telling the new guy how big of shoes he has to fill. Really? I guess I didn’t think I was that great of a sales guy, so maybe I’ll have to write something on how I operated as a technical sales rep, because I guess it worked. In short, my four pieces of advice would be these:

1. SHUT UP, ask questions, and listen
2. Follow up
3. Don’t be a douchebag
4. Delegate anything and everything to the geniuses at corporate.

Customers knew that I wasn’t the guy with all the answers, but they also knew that I’d crack skulls in an effort to get the answers for them. With an incredibly proactive company like NI, skull-cracking usually isn’t necessary, but sometimes it is. And I will fuck you in the ass if you dare downplay me and my customer. I really wasn’t a sales guy OR an engineer, so much as I was a “Resource Manager”. I liked that. It was the closest I’d ever come to being a pimp. Why spend 45 minutes trying to figure something out when I could get someone in corporate to do it in 5? Delegation is key, and something I’m trying to figure out in my own business (and kinda failing at thus far, admittedly).

Everyone says it’s good to not burn bridges. But let’s face it – I will NEVER return to National Instruments, the Test and Measurement industry, nor corporate America in general (unless ClutchWave IPOs – which isn’t part of “the plan”). I’ve made some of the best friends ever at NI, but don’t really care about the professional bridge. No doubt, the NI connection is great, but my gripe is more with Corporate America in general. I don’t want or need back in. So why did I bust my ass transitioning the next guy in when it wasn’t in my personal best interests? Well, in a few words… because I’m one helluva nice guy. I want to leave something better than the way I found it. And I can truly say that I did that.

Anyway, come September 1st, I’m going to wake up and be on my own. I’m nervously excited. I have a plan and I know what I want to do. And I’m gonna do it.

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