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

High Frequency Trading in Jobless Recovery

I follow an outstanding lineup of financial professionals and traders on Twitter. I learned about some of them through Stocktwits, which describes itself as “a social, stock microblogging service.” Stocktwits now offers a free desktop with more functionality than TweetDeck.

StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data – using Twitter as the content production platform – and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.

While I’m not a trader or active investor, I enjoy the intelligent conversation of Stocktwits gurus like @aiki14 @Dasan @iron100 @ekanters @gregormacdonald @nelderini and others from around the world.  They’re quick to extrapolate from a world event to its effects on global economies, individual sectors and stocks.  (Note: follow Charlotte hometown favorite @kevinmhughes as he gains national notoriety).

Truckers and retirees now stock jockeys?

I thought my world view was skewed by my Stocktwits exposure to trading, where lots of folks new to trading and investing subscribe to the charts and advice of experts.  But then I saw an article on un-employed and un-retired people going into trading for the lack of other employment opportunities.   The next day The Daily Show ran a segment on the topic. Hmmm, something’s afoot.

I appreciate that there’s money to be made trading. But all the trading in the world doesn’t feed people, clean the environment or find a cure for cancer. And, as Samantha Bee points out in this piece, it’s not as easy as promoters would have us believe.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Cash Cow – High-Frequency Trading
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

Writing prompts for financial professionals

• What tax considerations to high frequency traders & rookies overlook?
• If you’re a financial advisor, how do you advise would-be traders to allocate their overall portfolio in consideration of high frequency trade risks and returns?
• Review the different software products needed to pursue a career as a trader.
• How long does it take and how much do you need to lose before you figure out whether this career is a good fit for you? What’s the total investment, considering hardware, software and mentoring services?

Next Q: Personal vs Professional Blog?

Continuing my series of answers from questions asked at the CPSE meeting 6/18/09.

Q: When should you have a personal blog and when should you use a blog professionally?

A: (From the perspective of a self-employed/solo-preneur who asked it) This can be a delicate balance.  Find your voice somewhere between “faux big business” and the emerging “my-life’s-an-open-book” ethos.

Set the tone with your bio

Here’s a Twitter follower’s bio, (@ex-wirehouse) which sets the stage for the voice he uses in his blog posts and tweets:

“One time Infantry Officer, longtime wirehouse veteran. Currently Principal and CEO of Andover Equity Investment Group LLC an independent asset management paractice,successfully focused on absolute return investing. Proud husband and father of 7 year old twins. Discplined trader who is constantly humbled by the markets. In no way should this even remotely be construed to constitute investment advice, more aptly a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

When you go on to read his posts, you’ll see that he blends strong professional views with a heavy dose of humility, just as his bio suggests he would.

For something a bit more traditional, here’s my bio.

Find your voice

Let’s say you’re a baseball card collector, you love all things about the sport but your paid work is interior design.  How to get into the new media groove?

You might talk about the parallels between project management and third base coaching or dealing with a difficult customer with a personality like Ty Cobb’s.  This makes you a REAL PERSON, infuses warmth into your posts and will probably garner you a following of other baseball lovers.  Wow, imagine having a client roster full of other people who love the game — that’s the potential of your new media voice.

Next post:  What to put in print/online

Friedman and The Onion

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.”

Endorsements & Recommendations

In this Web 2.0 world, clients and colleagues recently asked if they could endorse the work I did for/with them on my blog.  Brilliant thinking!

Thanks!

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.