THE BEST TIMES TO SEND E-MAIL
You’ve suggested people check e-mail only a few times a day. Here’s a twist: I reply to e-mails when it’s convenient, but I time it to arrive when it’s also convenient for me. In Outlook you can delay e-mail delivery to any time of day. For example, when I return e-mails at 3 p.m., I don’t want my staff instantly zinging me responses or clarifying questions. (This also prevents e-mail chats.) So I hit send, but it’s delayed to arrive later in the evening or at 8 A.M. when my employees arrive the next day. This is how e-mail was meant to be! It’s mail, not a chat service.
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14. To leverage global pricing and currency differences for profit or lifestyle purposes.
15. Information technology.
16. Don’t call it a problem if you can avoid it.
17. No one can argue with your feelings, so use this to avoid a debate about external circumstances.
18. Notice how I take “you” out of the sentence to avoid finger-pointing, even though it’s implicit. “Normally, you make priorities clear” sounds like a backhanded insult. If this is a significant other, you can skip this formality, but never use “you always do X,” which is just a fight starter.
19. Take a little bit of the heat off with this. The point has already been made.
20. “Before I forget” is a great segue to the closing compliment, which is also a topic shifter and gets you off the sensitive topic without awkwardness.
9. Income Autopilot I.
FINDING THE MUSE
Just set it and forget it!
—RON POPEIL, founder of RONCO, responsible for more than $1 billion in sales of rotisserie chicken roasters
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Renaissance Minimalist
Douglas Price was waking up to another beautiful summer morning in his Brooklyn brownstone. First things first: coffee. The jet lag was minor, considering he had just returned from a two-week jaunt through the islands of Croatia. It was just one of six countries he had visited in the last 12 months. Japan was next on the agenda.
Buzzing with a smile and his coffee mug in hand, he ambled over to his Mac to check on personal e-mail first. There were 32 messages and all brought good news.
One of his friends and business partners, also a cofounder of Limewire, had an update: Last Bamboo, their start-up poised to reinvent peer-to-peer technology, was rounding the final corners of development. It could be their billion-dollar baby, but Doug was letting the engineers run wild first.
Samson Projects, one of the hottest contemporary art galleries in Boston, had compliments for Doug’s latest work and requests for expanded involvement with new exhibits as their sound curator.
The last e-mail in his inbox was a fan letter addressed to “Demon Doc” and praise for his latest instrumental hip-hop album,
He smiled again, polished off his dark roast, and opened a window to deal with business e-mail next. It would take much less time. In fact, less than 30 minutes for the day and 2 hours for the week.
How much things change.
Two years earlier, in June of 2004, I was in Doug’s apartment checking e-mail for what I hoped would be the last time for a long time. I was headed to JFK Airport in New York in a matter of hours and was preparing for an indefinite quest around the world. Doug looked on with amusement. He had similar plans for himself and was finally extricating himself from a venture-funded Internet startup that had once been a cover story and his passion but was now just a job. The euphoria of the dot-com era was long dead, along with most chances for a sale or an IPO.
He bid me farewell and made a decision as the taxi pulled from the curb—enough of the complicated stuff. It was time to return to basics.
Prosoundeffects.com, launched in January of 2005 after one week of sales testing on eBay, was designed to do one thing: give Doug lots of cash with minimal time investment.
This brings us back to his business inbox in 2006.
There are 10 orders for sound libraries, CDs that film producers, musicians, video game designers, and other audio professionals use to add hard-to-find sounds—whether the purr of a lemur or an exotic instrument—to their own creations. These are Doug’s products, but he doesn’t own them, as that would require physical inventory and upfront cash. His business model is more elegant than that. Here is just one revenue stream:
1. A prospective customer sees his Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising on Google or other search engines and clicks through to his site, www.prosoundeffects.com.
2. The prospect orders a product for $325 (the average purchase price, though prices range from $29–7,500) on a Yahoo shopping cart, and a PDF with all their billing and shipping information is automatically e-mailed to Doug.
3. Three times a week, Doug presses a single button in the Yahoo management page to charge all his customers’ credit cards and put cash in his bank account. Then he saves the PDFs as Excel purchase orders and e-mails the purchase orders to the manufacturers of the CD libraries. Those companies mail the products to Doug’s customers—this is called drop-shipping—and Doug pays the manufacturers as little as 45% of the retail price of the products up to 90 days later (net-90 terms).
Let’s look at the mathematical beauty of his system for full effect.
For each $325 order at his cost of 55% off retail, Doug is entitled to $178.75. If we subtract 1% of the full retail price (1% of $325 = $3.25) for the Yahoo Store transaction fee and 2.5% for the credit card processing fee (2.5% of $325 = $8.13), Doug is left with a pretax profit of $167.38 for this one sale.
Multiply this by 10 and we have $1673.80 in profit for 30 minutes of work. Doug is making $3,347.60 per hour and purchases no product in advance. His initial start-up costs were $1,200 for the webpage design, which he recouped in the first week. His PPC advertising costs approximately $700 per month and he pays Yahoo $99 per month for their hosting and shopping cart.
He works less than two hours a week, often pulls more than $10,000 per month, and there is no financial risk whatsoever.
Now Doug spends his time making music, traveling, and exploring new businesses for excitement. Prosoundeffects.com is not his end-all-be-all, but it has removed all financial concerns and freed his mind to focus on other things.
What would you do if you didn’t have to think about money? If you follow the advice in this chapter, you will soon have to answer this question.
It’s time to find your muse.
THERE ARE A million and one ways to make a million dollars. From franchising to freelance consulting, the list is endless. Fortunately, most of them are unsuited to our purpose. This chapter is not for people who want to
