BUSINESS ADVICE THREAD

Turning word of mouth into online sales is the holy grail. Lower overhead as an online vendor and free (not counting great product/ exceptional service off course) advertising. If you can swing this, 100% your own website. Don't get fucked on the shipping though. Charge for everything, including time licking stamps.

True for the shipping, also thanks, you're right it's probably better having my own site.

Any book recommends? Your post reminds me of the E-Myth Revisited, which has helped clarify some concepts for me as I'm systemizing my approach to what I do.

actually i own that book lol. they gave it out at our company when i got license to sell insurance. The trouble i have with business books they are extremely circumstantial. If you run a brick and mortar its entirely different than running an online or SaaS business.

couple takeaways
- capital is always more valuable than sweat equity
- partner with someone in the industry. dont try to start from the ground up it takes way too long to build all the relationships needed to be successful quickly.
- b2b is easier. going after 1 sale @ $1K is easier than 1000 sales @ $1
- pivot. pivot. pivot. this means fail frequently. The sooner you fail the sooner you can move to success. Launch a business and not get a good response? Launch again.
- dont underestimate networking. biggest sales pipeline in all industries.
- most importantly dont give up

i know its super cliche but Art of War is probably one of the more valuable ones. Pay for a copy the extra annotations that explain the context of each passage. this book helps distinguish strategy from tactics, critical for survival in business. Another book i consult regularly is the Yi Jing. while not business related it helps to clear the mind and set intentions

Its always better to have your own website, even if it's only 20% of your dales.
It's important to have a presence outside of an amazon store.

i mentioned partners, but probably more important then the idea itself is who you partner with to do business.

its actually more like marriage. once you commit, youre attached for life. so choose wisely.

I'm a sole operator of an ecommcerce biz.

I doubt I will ever need to do a b&m type of deal. With that in regard, I don't think I will ever consider hiring anyone, the whole liability of employees sounds like a train wreck on the back of your mind daily.

At what point did you decide that you absolutely need employees? Physical, mundane labor?

If I ever had to hire people I'd look for part time kids and would rather just try to train them and be flexible with their bullshit. Wouldn't expect a full 40 hours but rather get 20 good hours out of them a week. Anything else would be freelancers/agencies/etc. that I would be happy with filtering out on my own and building a relationship with. Even if it technically costs more I'd rather pass on the liability of hiring, payroll, etc.

random stuff i read

alan watts
ralph waldo emerson
frank lloyd wright
buckminster fuller
arthur c. clarke
henry david thoreau
enrico fermi

hiring is about scalability

when you hire its to increase your productivity. ideally you would hire someone to replace a function that you already perform so you can spend your time doing something more profitable. heres an example, i hire someone to mow my lawn for 20 dollars because i can make 150 an hour working my job. i would lose money by not hiring someone.

that said, as you mention, there is great risk involved in hiring. great liability. when i hire for a brick and mortar i found that theres less accountability with contracts so i moved all the contractors to W2 for a couple reasons:

- its easier for accounting. i was spending too much time on calculating how much to pay contractors on each transaction.
- more accountability. employees must clock in and are more accountable with transactions.
- tax liability, for my employees they have less exposure to sticker shock at the end of year when they owe thousands of dollars
- benefits. i can provide benefits and retirement
- legal protection, my speculation is if you hire someone as W2 you have more protections in labor disputes vs taking someone to small claims court in civil case.

I plan to provide high quality technical training for devops, Wes Bos style. I know networks, cloud and am a developer. Quitting wageslaving in a couple months to do this full time, I live a very low expense lifestyle, need 1k mo recurring to not look for a job again. I'm developing a lightweight reactjs based training platform, dont want to go on pluralsight or udemy or others. The plan is to have some free content on youtube, free 30 days 30 challenges with the specific tech site and then funnel people based on the mailing list, reddit and fb ads to my paid content.

Haven't read AoW since I was a teen. Will reread.
Thanks, my dude!

One thing I'd like some advice is keyword research - it seems google's keyword tool lowballs search counts on purpose. I know some really really hot keywords right now and it shows 1000-10 000 monthly searches worldwide, that cant be right. Anything worth using for such competition and ad research? This whole SEO/seo tools scene looked scammy to me ever since 2004 or so.

Makes sense.

I've been considering purchasing a smaller blog that has been pulling good organic traffic into a niche that doesn't generally produce the best revenues for just basic banner advertising. I have other ideas to make money through ecommerce and the seller does more back end coding stuff as a freelancer so she checks out as to why she doesn't want to keep working on the site.

I'm going to be using freeeup/upwork to slowly build a pipeline of article/blog writers to keep the organic traffic/seo momentum going so that I can properly monetize myself without having to worry about getting content up. It shouldn't cost no more than $10 to get a quality piece of content up if I work on finding quality clientele.

Could I ask you for some general advice on hiring? Did you find more value in finding someone that's done the stuff before and paying a premium for their quality or is not too big of a challenge taking a chance on someone newer and grooming them.

For example, there's some people that have $5-$7.50 hour rates. Even if I have to spend sometime editing and critiquing their work a little I think it'd be a better investment after we build a relationship on what I expect instead of going after someone for $15+ a piece.

You could try to cross reference the google adwords tool with their trending tool to get an idea of what kind of traffic a phrase normally brings versus what it peaks out at. I haven't used that stuff in awhile, but the google adwords tool seemed the best way to get a general idea. Unfortunately, the spread on their estimates is so huge sometimes, you can refine it down to exact phrases though to get a better idea of what the organic traffic should pull on page 1 (and then deduce what your % of the cut would be)

sounds like a good plan.

hiring is tough, heres what i know;
- hire someone ready to work, you shouldnt have to sell them
- watch out for basic spelling mistakes or sloppy resumes
- have multiple rounds of interviews. this will prequalify them and prove they are trustworthy, on time etc.
- write the job specification and hire someone specifically with those skills. like the old saying, "if the shoe don't fit". i.e. dont hire a backend dev to do front end work etc
- limit the scope of work. while its nice to have someone who does everything you do, its unlikely they can and will let you down. keep the responsibilities very tightly defined

to answer your question specifically, i like training new people and educating them on business functions. this lends itself well to hiring someone with little experience, but it takes time. if you dont want to train someone, and dont want to wait for a few months for them to learn, its worth paying a little more. but, if you hire someone with more experience they are harder to train.

also, its a straight numbers game. we pay indeed to constantly get new applicants. even though we are not hiring this lets us have a small groomed list of individuals to call when we are ready to expand

Don’t chase a niche you think will boom. Find a niche you know (or are interested in and can learn) and that is undersold/underserved in your market. Clever ideas are a dime a dozen. The world always needs unoriginal but useful products if you can deliver them cheaper/better.

and what about dropshipping? is this real just meme now ar you can make some bucks if you find good product? I saw on reddit that people actually making money

I run a Chinese Takeaway and need to boost sales. What can I do to maximise sales?

if you hire someone, you have to be ready to fire them

Global collapse upon us
Starting a business

Good luck, I'm waiting it out.

I don't think existing in the present society and planning for other stuff are mutually exclusive.
>I'm not going to shower anymore because someday Yellowstone will erupt.

think about developing multiple sale pipelines. print, tv, radio, internet. groupon is low hanging fruit but the customer quality is low (because they want deals). With food people use google maps. Google provides a business portal to manage your business location on maps, you can run ads directly from this portal that will prioritize you in maps searches. ive had pretty good luck with that over normal adwords. they also recently launched business "posts" that will aggregate on your google search results. you can feature dishes, specials, etc

generating foot traffic is only half the battle, keeping people coming back is entirely different.

nice

printed leaflets with -5% coupon distributed by students around your area. To save some money go on fiverr or make it by yourself on canva.com

Thanks for the tips guys, will prove useful.
Especially that google stuff.

Thank you very much.

I will go towards the 'training' route as I feel that I'm giving them guidance just as much as I'm giving them a payment, for about half the price of the hourly rate.

But if I need to scale fast and immediately finding a specialist with a very specific talented skill set will allow me to go vertically like you mentioned earlier.