Let me first start out by saying that I think it very wise to have a partner or partners.  People that have found good partners are far more likely to succeed in their business goals.  I think a lot of the opposition to partnerships doesn’t come from the institution of partnerships in and of its self (if you can call it that) but from a lack of good partners.

There’s lots of things to keep in mind when selecting partners.

Partner equity

Mark Suster does a pretty solid job on this one so I’ll just send you over to his blog to read his take on Founders, Owners and Prenuptials.

Doing this part right will save you from many uncomfortable meetings and conversations.  You don’t “give” equity, equity is earned.

Getting to know your partner

There are lots of parallels that can be drawn between business partnerships and marriage.  In both you should spend a good deal of time getting to know your future partner to see if this person is someone who you want to be legally joined with.  One big difference is that it’s acceptable to do a background check on future partners while it might come off as a little creepy to do one on that really attractive girl at the coffee shop after your first date.  You need to understand the future partners history, philosophies, goals, past times, habits, strengths, weaknesses.  A good partner can build you up and make you more successful. A bad partner can drag you down and make the partnership/marriage a living hell, not to mention the ways that you’ll pay for your mistakes long after that partnership/marriage has been dissolved. A future partner that tells horror stories about their past partners will probably tell similar stories about you.

In my life I’ve seen the direct effects of choosing bad business partners.  Much of my life growing up was shaped by a couple business partners that really had nothing to do with me.  These were my dad’s business partners.  But because of the choices of those partners I didn’t have many of the opportunities that my classmates did.  This isn’t a blame game, I just want to highlight the power that a partner has to be an influence for good or evil over the lives of those involved with him/her, directly or indirectly.  A partner who understands this power and respects it will be a good partner 9 times out of 10.  A partner who doesn’t understand this concept is almost as dangerous as the ones that do but have no ethics. It’s very clear why those partners should be avoided.

Unfortunately most entrepreneurs make the common mistake of bringing in partners who don’t get it.  This usually happens from not getting to know your partners beforehand or not understanding what to look for in the first place.  They don’t understand what’s involved in being a good partner and don’t understand when they are doing something wrong.  They make this decision out of emotions (which shouldn’t be ignored) rather than weighing the pluses and minuses of the partner.

One big difference between dating and shopping for business partners is that it’s a good idea to completely take emotions out of the picture (if that’s possible) when you choose a partner.  As long as your partner fits well with the company culture you hope to build it doesn’t really matter how well you get along.  If your partner isn’t your best friend that makes so many things less complicated.

Related articles

• 50/50 Cofounders (avc.com)
• Love & Money: Partnership/Co-Founder Deathtrap (businessinsider.com)
• Avoid Business-Partner Purgatory with These Helpful Planning Tips (brighthub.com)

I have never liked Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg because of some of his business decisions.  That said, I tried really hard not to like him today but he really did a great job convincing me that I should like him.  He had really good answers to all the questions, he presented himself really well and actually said a few things that made me rethink the reasons that I haven’t liked him in the past.

And then he did something really interesting. “I don’t really get the chance to sit down next to a senator very often so I’d like to ask you a few questions as well.”  He managed to turn things on Senator Hatch (quite innocently I believe) by asking him things like “What is the government doing to protect innovation and keep the Internet as open as possible?”

I almost thought Hatch was going to answer one of his questions… Almost.

Wow, I have never been so embarrassed to be from the same state as someone else.  I tried counting the times Hatch threw flattery at Mark thinking that would be an acceptable intelligent answer to his question.  “You’re so great. I respect you sooo much. I am really proud of you.  Did I mention how great I think you are? I just want you to be my friend.” Towards the end of the event when Hatch would speak I noticed that a good portion of the crowd just tuned him out and used that time to stop and discuss more intelligent things among themselves.

So if I could offer my two hosts a piece of advice, here’s what I would say. Mark, do more speaking engagements, I thought you were brilliant.  Orrin, just learn one thing please. ANSWER THE STUPID QUESTION!

Related articles

• Hatch hosting Facebook founder on Friday in Utah (thehill.com)
• The Facebook God is Coming to Utah (seo.com)
• Facing Tough Reelection, Senator Hatch Turns to Zuckerberg (socialtimes.com)

About a year ago I got the chance to work with Peter Tennis.  One thing we frequently discussed is how the social landscape is changing the way the world works and how it is becoming so common place to have so much information about any individual available online. It’s like being a public corporation almost. Peter called it your personal brand.

Your personal brand is every bit as important to the individual as a corporate brand is to the corporation.  They used to call it your reputation.  And your reputation was typically limited to people within 2 or 3 degrees of separation for people other than Kevin Bacon.  Information these days travels further faster and can linger in cyberspace forever.

The question isn’t if you have a personal brand. If you are online, you have a personal brand.   The question is how do you develop and manage your personal brand.  Every interaction you have with others online becomes part of your personal brand.  All you have to do is keep interacting like you already are, just with a few rules in mind.

1. Start by planning it.  Make some goals. Identify what things you want your personal brand to be associated with.  If you are looking to advance your career in business don’t focus your brand on sail boats.  Although sail boats are really cool…

2. Get your own name. Your real name.   I’m talking about domain names, online profiles, email accounts,  getting there first is a good way to make sure your not fighting with your literary doppelganger later on. If like a friend of mine, you see someone else with the same name you might have even more work to do if you want to muscle your way to the top.  Or you could change your name.  Maybe just getting in the habit of using your middle initial all the time would be the right move.  If your name is too common or shared with someone too famous, you might want to consider a pen name.  I have one I have been developing for years just in case I want to switch fields later in life.

3. Online profiles. Don’t just reserve the name, develop them. Interlink them. Google loves social networking profiles. Linkedin, Twitter, Disqus, even Facebook. Keep your avatar across all your profiles the same.  Always have an avatar.

4. Watch your mouth.  All this information is public.  Never post something online that could come back to haunt you.  I would probably not hire someone who had created a facebook page dedicated to defaming their former employer.  Probably.

5. Blog. This is your chance to really speak your mind.  You start the conversation.  Blogs are the place to declare the field in which you are an authority.  Should your blog gain a substantial following it could be your ticket to… write your own… ticket.

6. Stay active.  Dedicate some time weekly or daily to managing you brand (updating the blog and answering comments)  Look for blog posts, sites, communities where your comments will create synergy with your brand.  That’s where you want to spend your effort.  It’s okay to spend your time in other places as well, just don’t muddy the waters of your personal brand.  For example I like golf, but I don’t spend lots of time commenting on golf blogs and threads.  I still read them but I don’t want my personal brand to be about golf so I limit my interaction there.  I’m more of a spectator.  However if it’s a business or design blog, I’m there commenting.  Someone else might have just made the same comment but that only reinforces my personal brand.  I’ll agree with them and offer a few points of my own.  Who knows, you may end up sitting next to that person on your next business trip.  What an easy to way to make a good connection.

7. Get creative. You might even want to do PPC on your own name.  As long you don’t share a name with someone famous this can be pretty affordable.

If you don’t like what shows up in Google then you have some work to do.

Related articles

• How to Brand Yourself: An Introduction (entrepreneur.com)
• Twitter 101: What Should I Tweet About? Understanding Why Personal Branding on Twitter Matters (windmillnetworking.com)
• The corporate brand is cramping my personal brand! (smartblogs.com)
• Do You Have a Personal Brand?(quickbase.intuit.com)

I don’t remember what I spent the money on but I spent it.

Did I learn anything about money? It think I learned that spending it is fun. That’s about it.

In high school I got a job at Marie Calendar’s as a cook.  Over the course of 2 years I made several thousand dollars and the only thing I could show for it was a bunch of concert t-shirts, a black guitar (still have it), and a 1981 Ford Fiesta.  Again I learned that spending money can be fun but I honestly have no idea where 90% of it went.

Not until I was in my mid 20s did I realize that I had done it all wrong.  I started thinking about business.  I started reading business books.  I learned a lot about investing in the stock market.  I joined a small group of freelance developers in our first business venture, a development shop.  I sold lots of random things on Ebay.  I designed project after project and even got a few of them started.  I even got serious and founded my own SEO company.  Finally I learned that making money can be more fun than spending it.

I have determined that even though I don’t want my kids to learn it the hard way like I did, that’s the best way to learn it.  So I have given my kids jobs and learning opportunities so that they can learn for themselves how to deal with money. And how to make money.  I also try to give them really bad mistakes to make.

Like a few weeks ago, my daughter wanted to buy a pack of gum. You can get them at Smiths for $.79.  She saw it for $1.09 at Walmart and thought she just had to have it.  But she didn’t have any money with her so I offered to buy it and sell it to her for $2.00 when we got home.

My son is a little older and has had more exposure to earning and spending.  He waited until a little later and had me buy him a big pack of 12 from Costco.  I think his cost him about $.67 per pack.

I have learned some lessons that cost me a few thousand dollars here and there but I know people that have spent 10 and 20 times what I did to learn the same lessons.  I am just hoping I can help my kids learn those same lessons for 10 to 20 times less than what it cost me.

So far it seems to be working.  My daughter has decided that she wants to buy a gumball machine and is currently looking for a store that will let her put it there.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How To Raise Financially Responsible Children (forbes.com)
• You: Teaching children how to manage money (washingtonpost.com)

For those that don’t know, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet have started a movement.  It’s called the “Giving Pledge”.  Basically it’s a call for billionaires to commit to giving away half of their wealth to what ever philanthropic effort they choose sometime during or after their life.  Today the first 40 who were invited to their exclusive planning dinners announced that they will sign the pledge.

So what does this mean for the rest of us?

Most likely it’ll mean that George Soros will continue funding liberal and socialist movements, Bill and Melinda will continue vaccinating children across the world, scholarships will be created, whales will be saved, and trees will be planted.  Mostly good things right? Right.

So what does that mean for me and you? Not too much.  We’re still stuck in this horrible economy.

So I had an idea.  Something that I think most, if not all, of the billionaires who have made the pledge would probably support.  I would like to see them start some sort of funding trust for American small businesses and startups under which the businesses could receive grants or loans that could help them grow their business.  We’re talking about the funds for a restaurant owner to open a second location, for a heating and air conditioning business to buy a couple more vans, for a small startup to hire a patent attorney.   The small business would have to meet certain requirements so that you wouldn’t have a bunch of free loaders exploiting it but I think that would do the most good for the world economy.

Thoughts?

See, I have the tendency to get busy working and living and forget my goals sometimes. Just to be fair though I am doing pretty good on my goal to practice golfing. I even took Jonathan out for 9 holes at good ol’ Cascade. I’ll also say that I’m not doing so great on my goal to hit a 72. And also not so good on the “Sail Across the Atlantic” goal. I had hoped to take sailing lessons this summer but this thing called life keeps getting in the way.

Well I have been trying to be a little more organized (not a bucket list goal by the way) and I actually forced myself to sit down and pick up a good book. Only took me 3 nights of reading before bed to read through “Good to Great” by Jim Collins.

Have to say, thoroughly enjoyed the book. But I find myself asking what kind of business person do I want to be. Part of me wants to manage something great, part of me wants to start something great. But rarely are both done my the same person. There are a few rare examples but for the most part, you’re either good at starting something or keeping something running – not both.

Either way, I’ll be reading Good To Great again. There’s so much relevant knowledge in there. If you haven’t read it and even if you’re not up to your neck in business I still recommend reading it.

Well I couldn’t. So I am attempting to do it in a blog post.  Here goes.

Step 1 – Find something that’s worth $1000/day. I have chosen a business.  Mine is a plan for a scalable online SaaS (software as a service) that will be sold not by me, but by resellers looking to offer something solid on a very flexible pricing model.  I have run the numbers over and over on this one and I see it being quite a bit larger than $1000/day.  I started with about 25 business ideas that could have easily sucked up as much time and effort as this one.  Only 1 or 2 of them even approach this one in terms of monetary potential.

Step2 – Learn as much as possible about managing a business that can pay me $1000/day.  I have resorted to blogs, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  I have found some of the more expert people in various aspects of what I need to do.  I read A LOT from these guys.  And I’ve learned a lot about how I want this business to run and how to market it.

Step3 – Don’t go alone.  I started this out with 2 partners.  We have kept each other on track when it was most tempting to give up or take the short way out. I  think attacking something like this alone is a stupid idea. Don’t do it.

Step 3 – Create a solid plan. I have spent the last year and a half building this thing.  We started out with 2 solid months of planning. Sometimes for several full days each week. (one of the advantages of being unemployed at the time) We analyzed the competition and anything out there that remotely touched our sphere.  I might also add that I have been working in this technology for that last decade.  Part of being able to create a solid plan is to follow one of Warren Buffett’s rules “stick to what you know”.

Step 4 – Be flexible. We have stuck to our plan but not been so blind as to not recognize when we had something wrong and needed to go back to the drawing board, or white board in our case.  We have made major shifts to the project.  But (and this is the most heartening part) our overall strategy has not changed. The marketing and industry we are targeting is evolving into what we need it to be.  Had we launched a year ago, we would probably have not been well accepted because the market wasn’t ready for it.  Now I’d say it has almost been perfectly primed.

Step 5 – Don’t give up. We’re still not done but we’re approaching the completion of version 1.  We have thought we were close before.  We even thought we were done at one point.  Thinking this would have been done toward the end of 2008 and still not having it done by mid 2010 could really suck the spirit out of a lot of people.  I think having the right partners has made us be able to keep going.  Did I mention the importance of having partners?

So I guess there isn’t much else I can really say without showing everyone what this project is.  Well, I’m not ready to show it off.  And I’m not really sure when it will be.  Don’t worry, once it’s ready, that’s all you will be hearing about.  Just stay tuned.

And keep in mind that this isn’t what I would tell everyone else to do, this is just what I have chosen to do.  For some people I would say the best way for them to make $1000 per day is to go to law school and work their way up in a law firm and get to where they can charge $250/hour and work 4 hour days.  That’s just not me.

Good luck.

How have we arrived at a place where anyone in the government feels it is their place to decide how a company makes ends meet?

When the government backs away completely from a market where there is healthy competition between companies, the consumers get a better price and a service level that fits with their expectations.  If an airline wants to charge me for overhead storage, I’m fine with that. As long as my overall travel costs are lower.  I can travel with surprisingly little baggage if it means that I’m going to travel on the cheap.

What’s going to happen in a true free market is that the competition and the market will find the right price points.  And they’ll be fair.

Personally if I were the CEO of an airline, I would set it up when the passenger pays a base fee for a seat on the plane. Then they pay an additional fee for the amount of weight they are bringing on board, including the passenger.  They just walk up to the ticket counter and hop on the scale with all their bags.  That way if someone needs to bring 400 pounds of baggage they can.  If I want to travel with one small carry-on and my laptop, I can. And I’ll get a screaming deal.

All you people who feel you are entitled to sit there in your seat with 3 carry-ons and 4 checked bags and pay the same as someone who is requiring much less of the airline need to move to Europe.

http://www.tompeters.com/cool_friends/content.php?note=010640.php

I had a boss once (Curt Porrit) that told me that “the reason business exists is to make life better for people.  The question then becomes ‘does it make life better for the few at the expense of the masses or better for the masses, sometimes at the expense of the few?’”  When the company was sold and the buying company decided to fire him because he told them when they were making bad decisions, the remaining employees all began to plan their exit.  All out of loyalty to Curt.  A good manager doesn’t get productivity out of his people from fear, he inspires them to be the best they can be and makes them want to do it because of respect.

When I started my own company, I cleaned the bathrooms and did all the office cleaning, I tried to run things like Curt had and for the most part. I think I would have made him proud.  When things got tough, I stepped up and cut my own paycheck and my employees knew it.  After that, I noticed a marked increase in productivity, attitude and office morale.  I knew that I needed my employees and they knew that I valued them.

Unfortunately, there’s more than one way to do business.  I found a good first hand example this last summer. I had always heard of these places that employees hated, places that would give you a pit in your stomach when you thought about going into work each morning. But I had never really seen one. Even ATI was tolerable in comparison.  People who run their business that way can still make their business successful financially but I wonder what is the cost.  Here’s another analyst/consultant who I would say has no soul but who might be as successful as our first example (Norm Brodsky) http://www.entrepreneur.com/startingabusiness/startupbasics/article203238.html Mr, Cloutier’s advice is my perfect example of how not to run your business

I expect that George is in for a big surprise when he dies and finds out that he just wasted his entire existence.

Since we stopped working for Main10 full time and started working on QJuice, we have had some other options for sharing files but still nothing that felt perfect. Until now.

Enter DropBox.com. I don’t remember who showed it to me but I love it. http://www.dropbox.com Use this link please, it’ll get us both some additional storage space.

I setup dropbox on my iPhone, home computer, work computer and my wife’s computer. Transfering files is about the same speed as you would expect but updating is lightning fast. The way they do it (as I understand it) is that they only update the parts of the file that are different. So I update a 30MB file and I have only changed about 50KB worth of its source, the update takes about 1 second. Maybe less. Depends on what Internet connection I am using.

Then it gets better. I can create a shared folder. I can send non-dropbox users a link and they can open the file in their browser. I can also send my friends a link to the shared folder and it shows up in their dropbox. So right now, I have a ton of things notifying me that Peter is saving and updating files in the MonaVie share, Will is updating things in the QJuice share, and Adam has updated a file in the Main10 Share. No one has to send me any files, no one has to use a little thumbdrive, we all just have the latest files.

So jury is still out as I haven’t been able to REALLY test the conflict resolution yet but so far it’s perfect. Yes, perfect. If I could go back in time and join up with a company when they were in startup mode, it would be dropbox. I’ll get around to the conflict resolution test sooner or later. Until then, just go try it out for yourself. https://www.dropbox.com