Die Broke Blogger

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls ~Joseph Campbell

This month I began blogging on small business and the meltdown on the Die Broke blog, part of the StockTwits network.  My focus is helping small business owners deal with creditors, the IRS, family members and their own inner demons.

What qualifies me for this assignment? Personal experience.

Since shuttering the industrial cleaning businesses in 2007 I’ve continued to deal with creditors (including friends and family), the IRS and a loss of face.  I’ve learned a great deal about financial law, pondered business ethics and done a lot of navel gazing.

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure ~Joseph Campbell

I won’t chronicle the whole debacle here…it will unfold over time over on Die Broke. But I will say that my entrepreneurial “failure” freed me to pursue the writing career I was always told would never be mine.  How?  Janis Joplin’s raspy lyric explains it best: Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

In 2008, with no money to invest in a different company, a dismal job market and absolute loathing of corporate America anyway, I gave myself permission to hang out my shingle as a business writer.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are ~ Joseph Campbell

Fortunately my husband still has a job. The best off-balance-sheet asset an entrepreneur has is someone who lets them bunk in rent free.  Thanks, Matt.

More Joseph Campbell bon mots:

• We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us

• Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself

• I think the person who takes a job in order to live – that is to say, for the money – has turned himself into a slave

• Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

• Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging

• The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure

• The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature

Friedman and The Onion

Faux news I love

Although it can at times be raunchy, overall I love The Onion.   Evidently so does NYT columnist and bestselling author Tom Friedman.

In his recent column he quoted a four-year-old Onion faux story on Chinese manufacturing that seemed to capture American consumption up to last summer.

“FENGHUA, China — Chen Hsien, an employee of Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd., a plastics factory that manufactures lightweight household items for Western markets, expressed his disbelief Monday over the “sheer amount of shit Americans will buy. Often, when we’re assigned a new order for, say, ‘salad shooters,’ I will say to myself, ‘There’s no way that anyone will ever buy these.’ … One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity.”

Friedman, who authored both “The World is Flat” and “Hot, Flat and Crowded” brought it back to reality when he cited Australian  environmental business expert Paul Gilding, who named this point in history,  “The Great Disruption”– when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once.

“When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, ‘What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?’  Often in the middle of something momentous, we can’t see its significance. But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker — the year when ‘The Great Disruption’ began.”

I walk in entrepreneurial circles, where there’s an uptick in the number of people hanging out their shingle, joining multi-level-marketing schemes and trying to turn a hobby into a mortgage-maker.  I honestly believe that all the laid off MBAs, PhDs, geeks and artists in the world today, enabled by social networking sites, will pool their intellectual horsepower and transform the world into something no one can yet envision.

Retooling takes time and takes a toll.

As Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Connecting the Dots

Delivered to your inbox the last Monday of the month

Whether you’re a business owner or employee, no doubt you appreciate the need to network.  If you’re in the Charlotte, NC area Monday 3/9 at 6pm, drop by Connect the Dots, a monthly networking group sponsored by The PR Store .

I’ll be the featured speaker this month, talking about one of the things that gets under my skin: unsolicited newsletters.  What makes so many people think that just because they have my email address I actually want their newsletters?

I posed this question to a group of fellow solo-preneurs, who pounced:

“Everyone else does it so if I don’t do it my competitors get ahead of me.”

“Why wouldn’t they want to hear from me?”

“It’s not illegal, you know!”

“They can always hit ‘spam’ or  ‘unsubscribe’.”

“If I’m not sending out a monthly newsletter I’m not being professional.”

“I can’t afford to send brochures and postcards and besides that, no one opens snail mail anymore!”

“If I send them an email asking them to opt in, half my list will go away!”

When I went on to tell them they could incur a federal fine of $11,000 for doing so, they became frantic.

“No one’s going to turn me in.”

“Can’t get blood from a stone.”

“That can’t be right.”

Since I offer custom newsletter content, templates and management services I have a vested interest in getting the word out about CAN-SPAM compliance.  But so does every business that sends out what’s defined as “commercial email.”

That probably includes YOU.

Hope to see you on March 9 at 6pm.  I’ll be giving away a free newsletter consultation to one attendee.  Hope it’s  YOU!

Ode to Open Source

I had the itch for a better website. With a big speaking event coming up, a newsletter to launch and downloads to offer, I knew there was a better way. Heck, I worked for a dot-com eight years ago, shouldn’t I know how to proceed?

Well, I knew how to begin. Craig’s List, of course. Placed an ad on Craig’s List and elance.com for “HTML & Google Analytics Expert” because I thought that’s what I needed. Whoa, out of the woodwork crawled DotNetNuke, Drupal, Adobe Contribute and base code (ASP) options.    My head swam and bank balance belched.

What’s a Web 2.0 gal to do? I went to LinkedIn and perused the Q&A.  Found an interesting discussion on WordPress as a content management system.  That’s funny, I thought of it as a blog platform.  Dug a bit deeper. Asked a LinkedIn question  whether WordPress was possible or advisable for my specific goals.  Answer, YES.  I admit to being a sucker for most things open source.  I browse with Firefox, get my mail with Thunderbird and now run my site on WordPress.  All part of the wisdom of crowds.

I’m now part of a worldwide community of WordPressers — no Dow Jones Big Brother watching my every move, just lots of friendly worldwide cousins who let me borrow a monkey wrench and tell me how to best use it.

In addition to web searches I dug into my Rolodex (is that a term people still use?) and was referred to Andy at Nuance Labs .  A mutual friend worked with him on his own site and on some nonprofit sites including the Charlotte, NC chapter of Slow Foods.   Anyone into the slow foods movement is likely to be my kind of co-worker.

Of course we met in a coffee shop.  Of course he sports a ponytail and wields a Mac.   Of course he manages me very well — tells me he needs to stay on task and produce the deliverables I prioritized before following me down several rabbit holes of other interesting options.  I assure him I’ll be a “good client,” and let him grind it out.

Then, ON TIME and ON BUDGET he sends me the first peak at my new site.  I almost cry when I see the functionality, the design elegance, and his judicious selection of passages selected from my old site, my LinkedIn profile and other things I’ve written.  “Yes,” I think, “we can be very good coworkers.”

I say to him “Use your Millenial/GenX sensibilities to spice it up” and that’s enough prodding.  He gets it and I get what I’ve asked for.

Bottom line:  LinkedIn’s a gem mine of information. Consider WordPress for your next site.  Nuance Labs is a great web partner.

The Meltdown and Entrepreneurship

I had my own business meltdown in 2008, chronicled briefly in this article in Charlotte Magazine. Since then I’ve taken stock in what’s important, what’s possible and what’s probable for the next chapter in my life.Big thoughts.Although it’s possible that I’m attracting people who are similar to me in their entrepreneurial hard wiring, I have noticed an uptick in the number of people I meet who are considering applying themselves to creating work instead of finding it through an employer. I made my decision long ago never again to be on a payroll. Been there, done that, had the reconstructive surgery.The decision isn’t so easy for most others. Some approach the question with mental calculus involving return on investment and probability which goes something like this:

I have Xwaking hours a week and know that finding a job will take Ymonths and I have Z% chance of making (insert income goal here) with a job versus hanging out my shingle, representing a return on the investment of my time that yields A per hour spent trying to get a job and B per hour going the entrepreneurial route.

On the other hand, if I hedge my bets by trying to get some freelance work on the side or selling crafts on etsy.com while trying to find a job, (insert math equation here).

These are left-brained approaches.

Others, like my friend and lawyer-cum-artist Catherine Anderson, takes the right-brained approach of I don’t care about the money, I’m going to live the life I want to live and I’ll figure it out along the way.

And still others go into self-employment kicking and screaming, perhaps finding themselves technically self-employed by virtue of doing a little something here and there for a 1099 while praying that eventually they can get on someone’s payroll again.It appears that a great many of us will become self-employed by one path or another. I hope the US will radically re-structure itself from the industrial revolution social safety net policies that make self-employment scarier and more costly than necessary.According to Freelancers Union “the independent workforce has grown to 30% of the U.S. population, employment laws have not been asked to adapt.” For example, access to health care, disability and unemployment insurance, unpaid wage compensation, and saving for retirement are much easier to obtain as an employee than as a self-employed worker.Then there’s taxes. Again, Freelancers Union weighs in:

Independent workers face complex and burdensome tax rules. Independent workers pay more taxes than traditional employees because the tax code overlooks them in some instances, and directly targets them in others. Freelancers pay higher social security and income taxes than standard employees. They have limited access to the pre-tax health care financing available to standard employees. Many must keep detailed records, set aside money, and make tax payments each quarter because they don’t have access to a streamlined system of tax payment like payroll deductions from a regular paycheck.

I’m an anti-corporate type, which perhaps overly influences my thinking on this matter, but I think the massive layoffs of highly-educated people around the world, enabled by communications technologies, will lead to a social renaissance that will bypass the corporate hegemon. If you haven’t read Dan Pink’s excellent book, Free Agent Nation, it’s still pertinent. And here’s another blogger’s  take on free agency.Not to change the subject, because there’s a lot to do here in the US, but I don’t think every individual country can come up with its own approach to economic recovery in a vacuum of the rest of the world. The G20 will convene in London this April. Let us hope nationalism won’t get in the way of reforms that will make life livable for us all.