The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich - Expanded and Updated

common practice. Why do so many commercials state “allow three to four weeks for delivery” if it only takes three to five days for a shipment to get from New York to California? It gives the companies time to manufacture product and use customers’ credit card payments to finance it. Clever but often against the law.

41. This applies to Sherwood and not Johanna.

42. How did I come up with the most successful BodyQUICK headline (“The Fastest Way to Increase Power and Speed Guaranteed”)? I borrowed it from the longest-running, and thus most profitable, Rosetta Stone headline: “The Fastest Way to Learn a Language Guaranteed.^(tm)” Reinventing the wheel is expensive— become an astute observer of what is already working and adapt it. I keep a folder of all print and direct mail advertising that compels me to call a number or visit a website, and I use www.delicious.com to bookmark websites that convince me to provide my e-mail address or make a purchase.

43. Sherwood includes shipping and handling prior to the final order page so that people don’t finalize the order just to confirm total pricing. He wants his “orders” to reflect real orders and not price checkers.

44. If you are rolling out after a successful test or building a large e-mail database, tools like www.aweber.com in the resources are better at scaling.

45. Keeping in mind that 100 specific terms at $0.10 per click will perform better than 10 broad terms at $1.00 per click, the more you spend, and thus the more traffic you drive, the more statistically valid the results will be. If budget permits, increase the number of related terms and daily expenditure so that the entire PPC test costs $500–1,000.

46. This is a checking account for receiving credit card payments.

47. Set this up using services detailed at the end of this chapter and the next.

48. See the online bonus chapter on www.fourhourblog.com to understand all of these terms in context. Search “Jedi Mind Tricks.”

49. “Paper trading” refers to setting an imaginary budget, “purchasing” stocks (writing their current values on a piece of paper), and then tracking their performance over time to see how your investment would have done had it been for real. It is a no-risk method for honing investment skills before putting skin in the game.

11. Income Autopilot III. MBA—MANAGEMENT BY ABSENCE

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

—WARREN G. BENNIS, University of Southern California Professor of Business Administration; adviser to Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy

Most entrepreneurs don’t start out with automation as a goal. This leaves them open to mass confusion in a world where each business guru contradicts the next. Consider the following:

A company is stronger if it is bound by love rather than by fear…. If the employees come first, then they’re happy.

—HERB KELLEHER, cofounder of Southwest Airlines

Look, kiddie. I built this business by being a bastard. I run it by being a bastard. I’ll always be a bastard, and don’t you ever try to change me.50

—CHARLES REVSON, founder of Revlon, to a senior executive within his company

Hmm … Whom to follow? If you are fast on your feet, you’ll notice that I just offered you an either-or option. The good news is that, as usual, there is a third option.

The contradictory advice you find in business books and elsewhere usually relates to managing employees —how to handle the human element. Herb tells you to give them a hug, Revson tells you to kick them in the balls, and I tell you to solve the problem by eliminating it altogether: Remove the human element.

Once you have a product that sells, it’s time to design a self-correcting business architecture that runs itself.

The Remote-Control CEO

The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.

—HENRY WARD BEECHER, U.S. abolitionist and clergyman, “Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit”

RURAL PENNSYLVANIA

In a 200-year-old stone farmhouse, a quiet “experiment in 21st-century leadership” is proceeding exactly as planned.⁵¹Stephen McDonnell is upstairs in his flip-flops looking at a spreadsheet on his computer. His company has increased its annual revenue 30% per year since it all began, and he is able to spend more time with his three daughters than he ever thought possible.

The experiment? As CEO of Applegate Farms, he insists on spending just one day per week at the company headquarters in Bridgewater, New Jersey. He’s not the only CEO who spends time at home, of course—there are hundreds who have heart attacks or nervous breakdowns and need time to recover—but there is a huge difference. McDonnell has been doing it for more than 17 years. Rarer still, he started doing it just six months after founding the company.

This intentional absence has enabled him to create a process-driven instead of founder-driven business. Limiting contact with managers forces the entrepreneur to develop operational rules that enable others to deal with problems themselves instead of calling for help.

This isn’t just for small operations. Applegate Farms sells more than 120 organic and natural meat products to high-end retailers and generates more than $35 million in revenue per year.

It is all possible because McDonnell started with the end in mind.

Behind the Scenes: The Muse Architecture

Orders are nobody can see the Great Oz! Not nobody, not nohow!

—GUARDIAN OF THE EMERALD CITY GATES, The Wizard of Oz

Starting with the end in mind—an organizational map of what the eventual business will look like—is not new.

Infamous deal-maker Wayne Huizenga copied the org chart of McDonald’s to turn Blockbuster into a billion- dollar behemoth, and dozens of titans have done much the same. In our case, it’s the “end in mind” that is different. Our goal isn’t to create a business that is as large as possible, but rather a business that bothers us as little as possible. The architecture has to place us out of the information flow instead of putting us at the top of it.

I didn’t get this right the first time I tried.

In 2003, I was interviewed in my home office for a documentary called As Seen on TV. We were interrupted every 20–30 seconds with beeping e-mail notifications, IM pings, and ringing phones. I couldn’t leave them unanswered, because dozens of decisions depended on me. If I didn’t ensure the trains were running on time and put out the fires, no one would.

The Anatomy of Automation

THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK VIRTUAL ARCHITECTURE

Splitting the Pie: Outsourcer Economics

Each outsourcer takes a piece of the revenue pie. Here is what the general profit-loss might look like for a