Best & Worst Businesses for a Mobile Lifestyle.

Hannah and I recently did a guest lecture at the University of Virginia. In this 10 minute excerpt, I swear a little, make fun of Bono, and probably piss off small retail shop owners. Deal with it. It’s the truth.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Best types of business for a mobile lifestyle? Products are better than services. I tend to do a whole bunch of service businesses, but products are better than services, because a product you make it once and sell it a bunch of times and every time it makes money. A service? You or somebody you hire, which a lot of times is the case in my case, has to actually be there.

So, as much as you may think that being a rock star or a movie star might be a really great life. When U2 showed up down here put on their little tootie fruity show? Bono had to show up and sing. When you pay your money and go and see U2. Four guys had to fly in from Ireland and put on their little shiny pants and get up there and flop around, but every time they sell a cd they don’t have to do that. It’s a very different model, products versus a service.

The internet is better than physical. If you’re going to sell something, sell it on the internet. Don’t sell it physically. Physically you have to show up and stand around. Physical retail establishments blow my mind. The idea that you have to show up every day at a place kills your mobility right away — you’ve got to open the door at 9:30 and close it at 9:30 (or whatever) and the whole time you’re just standing around just in case someone might want to buy a latte. Just in case. Two hours in the middle of the day, no one comes in? Guess what? You’re still standing there, or somebody you hire is still standing there. It’s just bad for mobility to have some sort of physical storefront or any kind of place that you physically have to go.

Selling information can also be a product, don’t forget about that. If you can create a tutorial, an ebook, some sort of dvd series that teaches something — that is a great product. That’s something that can’t be knocked off by Chinese prison labor. You make some sunglasses and you fire out the back of them (or something) and you think they’re the coolest thing ever (or Crocs for Christ’s sake — what the hell’s with that?) and all of a sudden somebody can knock them off and you know that Chinese prison laborers, or Indonesian school children are making those things for a fraction of the cost and they’re just going to eat your market in six months. Information as a product is a good one

Industry wise there’s no big rule — like don’t do food businesses or don’t do Graphic Design businesses.

Let’s take books for example. Opening a book store can be best or worst. Amazon is a great example of a best case scenario, they sell a lot of product in addition to books, but they sell a lot of product and it’s all on the internet, so there’s no physical store front. Conversely, if you have a small book store in a downtown mall. I feel for you man, I feel for you. You’re still sitting around doing nothing for hours a day, while people wander in “just looking”. Jeff Bezos isn’t sitting round listening to “just looking” he’s building his rocket ship to the moon or whatever crazy shit he’s into — that guy has a fire. Excuse my language by the way, I’m a bit of a naughty boy, sorry if I’ve offended anybody.

Another thing to think about with businesses is micro-entrepreneurship. That’s just a fancy way of saying you do a lot of different things — a little bit of this and a little of that — and that’s really a great way to do business. Rather than thinking “what’s my big idea?”, “what’s that thing that’s going to make me a millionaire?”. Think “what’s going to buy me beer this weekend?”. Scale it down.

Like she said, I do a ridiculous number of things.

Yellowfish is my primary business, no doubt. Pays the mortgage, pays the plane tickets, pays for Fat Jack’s little happy pants and all that stuff. That is a business that generates a six figure income. Over $100,000 a year, for those of you who aren’t good with numbers.

Family Hack is something we started a couple of years ago as a way to just answer questions people would have when they’d meet us. A friend would say “Michael and Hannah just got back from Argentina.”
“Really what did you do there?”
“We just went down for a fun, just hung out for a month.”
“Who watched your kids?”
“We took the kids.”
“But, what about school?”
“We homeschool.”
There were all these questions…
“How do you do that?”

We decided we’d start a website — put up how we did that and that’s how it started.
Now it’s veered into some sort of mishmash of house hold tips, home school articles and all kinds of weird stuff, but that’s how it started. Two years ago it started just as a site with all these sort of little goofy articles about how we live our life and now, as she said, earlier this year the site was peaking at over a million unique visitors a month, it just went crazy. It has steadily grown. That site alone makes a five figure income every year. So that’s another example of micro-enterpenership We have Yellow Fish making a six figure income and Family Hack making a five figure income.

Then I have Campaign Fox, which we’ve just launched very recently (just a couple of weeks ago), which is an email marketing service. My clients can go on, they’re already into email marketing — “hey let’s send an email news letter to our clients”, that kind of stuff. So I said, let’s make that for you, rather than giving business to someone else. We have clients built in, who already want this, and I’m just going to do this myself. So we built this system that they can go in and whey can do their own newsletter, build it themselves, I don’t have to get involved and every time they send it, I get paid. So that’s a great example of a service business that’s actually a product business.

Another one is MacHintsandTips.com. By the way, Campaign Fox makes a four figure income, it’s right now probably generating a couple of thousand dollars a year. It’s just got started and I’m estimating. That’s a couple of thousand dollars. That’s a new Macbook Pro. I like that! I’ll take that free Macbook Pro. Mac Hints and Tips.com — speaking of mac books — that’s a site that I do with a partner of mine. He had ninety-five hundred macintosh hints and tips in a database and I said that is valuable and so, I as part of my fifty percent compensation in the site, designed the site, got the whole thing online, up and working, searchable, keywords and all that stuff tagged and his job is to put tips up on the site. He does all the work on a daily basis, I do all the front end stuff. That’s another site that generates a four figure income.

What else am I doing? AdJack. AdJack is this Youtube for commercials where you can win money. You watch five commercials, you’re entered in the sweepstakes and you can win half a million bucks. That I just own part of. I don’t get any money on a daily basis, but if it goes public and stock prices raises? Boom! If it gets bought by a private investment company, or whatever? I get a chunk. I just built that site for equity (or ownership, that’s just a fancy way of saying ownership).

Again, setting your business goals is important upfront.

Let’s say you wanted to start a bookstore. If you say “I want to be the next Amazon.com”, you’re going to fail. You’re always going to be a failure, even if you have ten bookstores all round the Virginia region and they’re rocking and you have a hundred employees, and everybody’s all happy and you’re voted entrepreneur of the year. If you wanted to be Amazon.com you’re a failure, you’re still a failure, because of the way you set your goal. Lower your expectation. Everyone’s trying to be Steve Jobs for Christ’s sake. Just be happy.

If you decided, “you know what I’m going to open a bookstore, but I just want enough money to buy beer on the weekend. That’s what I want. I want to buy a pizza so I don’t have to cook one night a week”. Go to the Goodwill. Go to the used book aisle, pull off a dozen books, go over and list them as used books on Amazon and you’ll make enough money to buy beer this weekend, you have a bookstore. So there’s a huge range between amazon.com and selling used books on Amazon. You’re still in business.

Don’t get intimidated by this idea that you have to employees and that sort of stuff. I have no employees, not one. Every single person who works for me is a contractor, they’re hired for a specific task. Now I have contractors in my design businesses that have been with me for years, They work almost full time, that’s the way it works. If I slow down one of those contractors doesn’t get work that week, but I’m not out of work.