Josiah Mackenzie

I don’t like most businesspeople.

Too many corporate types that I’ve met are exchanging their whole personality, life, and relationships to be “professional” and advance their careers. I do, however, love meeting people who turned their hobby into a business and love their “job.”

I call these people accidental entrepreneurs: people who view business simply as a way to fully live out their passion.

This past week I had the opportunity to meet and talk with two people that vividly reinforced this concept for me.

The first was an elderly barber. Last Tuesday I was looking for a new hair stylist, unhappy with my current one’s service. Several sources pointed me to one man as “the best” in my town. When I called to make an appointment, he said he couldn’t make one now because he was attending a customer’s funeral. Okay. When I first arrived at his shop, I was somewhat taken aback by its humble appearance and his quiet manner. But as soon as he began cutting my hair, I knew I had hit gold. After some prodding, I learned he founded two beauty colleges and owned hair salons throughout California. He went on to share his success secret: build a small, extremely loyal customer base and provide unbelievable service. The kind of service that earns a spontaneous big tip, instant customer loyalty, and future referrals.

The second was a well-known travel personality whose multi-million dollar empire began out his love for European travel as a college student. While I’ve been a fan of his practical budget travel advice for a long time, I’ve only recently begun to appreciate his work as an entrepreneur. Watching him on TV, you may not realize the amount of work he puts in to be the best. But talking to his staff reveals his passion for team building and obsession with excellence. Though he puts in an extraordinary amount of work, hearing him talk makes it obvious he loves every minute of it.

These two examples only reinforced my belief that success comes to people who love their work. Starting a business only for the money or to enter a hot industry puts you at a disadvantage.

That’s why my business nirvana is not a 4 hour work week or passive internet income. Instead, my dream is to turn my passions into a business that I would gladly work in 15 hours a day, 7 days a week — and love every minute of it.

For the young guerrilla marketer, Facebook presents a great opportunity to share your message with more than 30 million people. This article explores 8 specific areas you can use to promote your business.

Profile
The websites section of your contact information is an obvious place to list your business websites, but the Facebook profile provides more opportunities than that. Write about your business in your activities, about me, interests, and work sections. Allow clients to get to know you personally.

Status Line
This feature allows Facebook users to show their friends what they are doing. Examples include “Nick is studying hard” (ahem) “Katie is getting ready for a roadtrip”, and so on. Not only do these updates appear on your profile, but also in your mini-feed and the newsfeed for all of your friends. You can use this space to share what you’re doing and your website URL. It’s a non-obtrusive way to get the word out.

Photos
Take pictures of you with clients, at company events, and receiving media coverage - then post them to a photo album. People love to see photos of what you’ve been doing, and this can be a great way to keep in touch with prospects.

The Marketplace
Several of my colleagues and I have successfully used Facebook’s regional marketplaces as a way to draw attention to our companies. You can post as many free ads as you like promoting your services. These ads are generally more effective than other free classified ad sites on the web.

Posted Items
This is where you can you can add value and build relationships with potential clients. Post links to educational content you find. Post videos and media describing your company’s services. You can even configure Facebook to automatically import entries from your blog.

Flyers
Facebook flyers offer the enterprising college entrepreneur a low-cost method of reaching a school’s population. They often cost between $5-$20 per day, a worthwhile investment and time saver (no flyers to print and post throughout campus). The limitation is that you can only post flyers to your school’s network.

Groups
Groups are a great way to meet people with similar interests. You can create a group for freelance professionals, for example, and meet people in the industry. You can also use the discussion forums in groups to share your services with those that need them. Don’t spam, though!

Applications
Facebook applications are a newer feature that allow developers to create extensions for Facebook. Innovative companies have introduced thousands of people to their offerings by creating an app that people want. These apps often don’t sell directly, but are related in some way to what the company offers. For example, one of my favorite apps, a ‘Where I’ve Been’ map, feeds into people’s desire to brag while advertising a travel agency.

The nice thing about Facebook is that it monitors your profile for changes and automatically announces them to all of your friends. Whether you update your status or add a website URL, you can be sure it will appear in your friends’ personalized newsfeed. While some have protested this intrusion of privacy, I suggest you take advantage of it to remain visible to your contacts.

While Facebook provides many promotional opportunities, don’t use it to send unsolicited marketing messages. Spamming gives your business a tarnished image, and you risk being banned from the site. Facebook provides enough ethical ways to promote your business, there is no need to resort to underhanded tactics.

Don’t have time to do all this yourself? Profit Factory can help:
http://www.theprofitfactory.com/internet-marketing

The other day I was looking over my portfolio of business ventures, and noticed something remarkable.

One niche website that I assembled on a Saturday afternoon years ago has consistently earned me hundreds of dollars each month since it was launched — with absolutely no involvement on my part. I spend nothing on advertising (time or money), and have no affiliate program or joint venture in place, yet the orders roll in. It is truly an automated hands-off cash cow. I have other websites like this, but with less dramatic results.

Conversely, there are other ventures in my portfolio that represent months of around-the-clock work and thousands of dollars of investment. One of these projects hasn’t earned me a cent and the other two just broke even (excluding my ‘pay’). Nothing like that to crush your ego.

This ‘disproportionate return on time investment’ is something I’ve noticed in other areas of my life as well. My goal is to discover the common traits in each of these over-performing endeavors and repeat them in the future.

I’ve noticed something strange this year. A large number of my young entrepreneur friends and contacts are either working for someone else or participating in internships this year. People who used to write about how they would never work a 9-5 job are doing just that now. What’s happening?

For many of these young entrepreneurs, myself included, starting a business was easier in the past. With parents or college loans to fall back on, we could afford to work on business ventures that provided no immediate cash flow — just for the experience. Now, with the realities of rent, loan repayments, and a myriad of other payments setting in, many of these would-be businesspeople are jumping ship to something more stable — at least for now.

Is this good or bad? I don’t think its necessarily bad. It’s helpful to look at your long-term life goals. If working for someone else will give you experience, contacts, and more imminently, cash, to reach those goals, then it is a good option. You don’t have to look hard to find horror stories of people who got into serious financial trouble by refusing to work when their situation required it.

With this in mind, highschool and college entrepreneurs reading this should realize a couple things.

First, as soon as you move out on your own, you’re going to need cash. Lots of it. If you’re building a business, make sure your company can provide you with adequate cash — right now — rather than at some point in the future.

Second, as you’re focusing on cash liquidity, maintain a long-term mindset. You don’t have to accomplish all of your dreams in the next 6 months. There’s a difference between being ‘realistic’ in the size of your goals, and being realistic about the time frame it takes to accomplish them. Given the right amount of time, you can do nearly anything.

Companies looking for profitable product ideas need to know that thousands of those ideas are available to them, free for the taking–if they establish a method to collect them. This article will discuss ways you, as the organization leader, can set up a system that causes a perpetual stream of valuable ideas to flow your way.

There are three primary groups of people that hold the majority of your best undiscovered ideas. By encouraging frequent communication with these people, you will be able to profit from their insight.

Group 1: Your Customers

These are the people using your product the most, and they are the ones with the most to gain from a product improvement. Put customer feedback forms everywhere you can. Encourage customer dialog by making it clear that you value their input, and will make any necessary change they suggest. Establish an incentive program. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship: they get more efficient products, and you get higher profits.

Open the idea floodgates by making it easy for your customers to get in touch with you.

Netflix recently did a great job of setting up an incentive program for its movie recommendation feature when it offered a prize of $1,000,000 to the person who could think of the best way to boost online movie rentals. This has the potential for outstanding success: with a prize that large, many will be interested in participating. By drawing many participants, Netflix improves the odds that the winning idea will earn them much more than 1 million dollars in profit.

Group 2: Your Employees

Since those working for you are in continual contact with your customers, they often can provide valuable insights into what people want the most. To get quality employee feedback, make it known that providers of ideas will not only see their ideas implemented, but will profit from ideas that profit the company. By doing this, you also retain people that would have otherwise left the company to form their own business.

Open the idea floodgates by making it easy for your employees to suggest new ideas.

Take a look at a story published this week by BusinessWeek. The Starbucks Loyalty Card was the brainchild of a Starbucks employee. Since its introduction in November 2001, the Loyalty Card has earned over 2 billion dollars for the company. Are you beginning to see the value of listening to your employees?

Group 3: Your Network

People with stake in your success, such as joint venture partners, can be another tremendous source of free ideas. Tap into your network and try to find these people. Spend time discussing your situation, and ask for their honest thoughts on what you’re doing right and wrong. Ask them how they think you could improve.

Open the idea floodgates by talking to people in your industry that are familiar with your situation.

As you work to grow your company, make sure you take advantage of these free ideas. All it takes is setting up some simple systems to collect the ideas, and then developing a process for turning the ideas into reality. It’s a small price to pay for the rewards you could receive.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time developing a comprehensive mission statement, skills analysis, and long-term career plan.  (Thanks to Michael Simmons for his advice on this)

After much thought and research, I’ve decided that my long-term business goals include forming two investment companies.

Company #1: Business Acquisition Company
My objective with this company is to purchase small businesses that demonstrate a solid business model and have established cash flow.   I believe I have developed a unique method for acquiring these businesses, but that will have to remain secret for now.    This company will be located in the Boston area.

Company #2: Real Estate Investment Company
Again, there are an abundance of real estate investment companies out there today.  My success will lie in acquiring properties in a small, yet profitable niche I have discovered.  This company will be located in the southwest US, most likely Arizona.

While there may appear to be nothing revolutionary about these ideas, I believe the way I approach them is unique.  With the right amount of investment, I expect to become profitable within 2-3 years.  Right now, I’m seriously considering taking a year or two off of school (after returning from my year overseas) in order to build these companies.

I’ll be posting more on these as time goes on, but I just want to encourage you reading this right now to take some time to do some long-term strategic planning.  You won’t become anything you are not becoming today.

This past Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the Extreme Entrepreneurship seminar in Lexington, Kentucky. It was one of 10 stops for the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour hosted by Michael Simmons and Sheena Lindahl.

Needless to say, the content was excellent. In addition to hearing Michael and Sheena speak, Ryan Allis and Doug Fath also gave interesting presentations on how they built their companies. It was very inspiring to hear their stories, and ask some questions on how they achieved success.

If you live or go to school in the eastern US, I would highly encourage you look at the Extreme Entrepreneur tour schedule for the rest of this fall. I can guarantee you’ll love attending an event, and come away fired up to take action in your own life.

Q: What is Walamu? How does it work?

A: Walamu.com is the fastest and cheapest way for college students to get things done. It’s basically Craigslist meets college. We are all about simplifying the college experience for students whether that means allowing them to buy or sell something on campus, find out where their sociology class’ study group is being held, or find a ride back home. Users can sign up if they have a college .edu e-mail address and post in either the marketplace or the classifieds. The marketplace allows users to sell items they no longer need and the classifieds is for announcements such as study group sessions, parties, available jobs, roommate requests, and more. Now students can come to one place instead of rushing to the bookstore or flipping through the newspaper and this saves students a lot of time and hassle. One thing is for sure- no matter how big get we will always be about simplifying the college experience.

What gave you the inspiration to launch the site?

I noticed that college students around me were spending a whole lot of time trying to do mediocre everyday things, when they could be have been doing college stuff. I saw kids waiting for their textbooks to arrive from Half.com two or even three weeks into the semester (myself included). These students could have gotten the same books from students on their campus in a matter of days. I also noticed students spending way too much time because they had to rely on their friends to find possible roommates and students having to go through multiple sources to find out where study groups were being held. Let’s face it- with 200+ new faces in the class it can be a bit intimidating finding the right people to study with. Walamu simplifies all this by creating a portal for each college where students can go to minimize the time needed to get through these mediocre tasks and allows them to actually live the college experience instead of just worrying about it.

How did you develop the site?

I had to hire a web developing company. I’m still learning how to do all that .

In terms of the site itself, I wanted it to be as simple as possible for users to use and minimize the number of pages users would need to click through to find the information they need.

Looking back at the development process, is there anything you would have done differently?

Definitely. Something to remember is that when you’re hiring a contractor to do develop your product is that you have to act in a way to create some sort of self-acting motivation for your developer to complete the project with the extensiveness, accuracy, and promptness you would like. You have to keep in mind that if your contractors aren’t working like you’d like them to, it’s probably your fault and not their’s.

What is the best thing you did during your “pre-launch” time?

The best thing I did prior to launch was getting some hype going, both locally and on the web. I realized it was important to get out there, even if my product wasn’t ready, and let people get an idea of what Walamu can do for them. I also put a well-planned marketing strategy for the new school year so as to be ready for when we launch and beyond.

How do you plan on spreading the word about your service to students?

Our core marketing strategies is one that consists of total guerrilla marketing tactics including word-of-mouth, PR, outrageous flyers, and some sort of viral campaign (still working on that one). However, since Walamu intends to grow organically from where it is located right now, word-of-mouth, Facebook, and some crazy flyers will likely be key marketing tools. Being at college means tons of opportunities to network and naturally people want to know what you’re up to so I could always put in a little plug about Walamu . Of course that is not going to bring us the kind of growth we are aiming for, but it’s never a bad idea to let people know what you’ve been working on. As we improve our product and cater it to the feedback of our local audience, we will certainly rely on marketing tactics that carry much more weight.

To see Walamu in action, click over to Walamu.com

This article first appeared in my Young Wealth Weekly ezine. Make sure you’re signed up!

Bootstrapping means to start and grow a business using as little cash as possible. For many young entrepreneurs, cash is scarce — making bootstrapping an essential skill. It allows you to be free from the unneeded pressure of outside investors.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when starting a web-based business.

Tip 1: Know a little bit of everything

• Know the basics of programming. At the very least, you should be able to edit your own HTML webpages. Bonus points if you understand more advanced languages such as Javascript and PHP. Even if you end up hiring someone else to do the programming, you’ll be able to converse intelligently on what needs to be done.
• Know the basics of graphic design. Creating basic images, buttons, and banner ads isn’t really that hard. And with many graphic designers charging upwards of $75/hour, it’s a skill you need to know as a bootstrapper.
• Know the basics of website development. Be able to assemble an HTML webpage and basic website. Understand the fundamentals of page linking, site structure, and publishing your pages to the web.
• Know the fundamentals of web promotion and internet marketing. There’s a ton of free information on the internet that will teach you core marketing principles — things like pagerank, linking, keyword placement, and generating traffic. All it takes is a time commitment on your part to learn it.

You can always call in the experts when you have a large, time-consuming task, but you can save loads of money by doing the little things yourself. In Benjamin Franklin’s words, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”

Tip 2: Take advantage of internet-only free (or low cost) advertising
In many respects, entrepreneurs on the web have a big advantage in marketing over their brick and mortar counterparts. There are so many free or low cost marketing options available that there’s usually no need to spend massive dollars in an expensive campaign.

Some examples?

• Niche. I know you’ve heard it so many times before, but are you really doing it? Concentrated marketing to a very specific niche can save you lots of time and money. From what I know, it’s much easier to position yourself as a small niche expert on the web. By reaching a global audience, you can afford to have a very narrow focus.
• Blog. Maintaining an informative blog brings new visitors to your website, encourages linkbacks, and most importantly, positions yourself as an expert in the market. People buy from those who have helped and taught them.
• Linking. Ideally, your content will be so interesting that hundreds of people will voluntarily place one-way links to your website. But that’s quite rare, and most likely you’ll have to spend some time contacting other websites yourself. The best type of linkback you can get is from a website in a complimentary industry — such as a graphic designer linking to a printing company. Not only will that type of link increase your search engine position, it will also reach your target audience of potential customers.
• Articles. Writing articles and submitting them to databases such as eZineArticles can drive massive amounts of traffic to your site when others re-publish them with links to your website. Again, I’ve found that article distribution is much faster and easier on the web than with print publications.
• Viral Marketing. On the web, it’s relatively simple to set up a system where your customers can tell others about what you do. If done correctly, this method of marketing can increase your site traffic exponentially.

Tip 3: Joint venture with others
Making joint venture deals on the web is easy. You can discover, contact, and negotiate with people quickly through emails and web searches. Most likely, you’ll be able to find someone you can exchange skills with. Need a fresh website design for your consulting firm? Find a graphic artist in need of your marketing services, and you’re all set. No money is spent, and everyone wins.

Tip 4: Use freelance websites to locate independent contractors
Sites such as Guru.com and Elance.com can be a great resource while you’re bootstrapping. The service providers are usually talented and reliable, and the cost you pay is generally a fraction of what you’d pay elsewhere. In some of my past projects, I’ve only had to pay 1/4 of the price for programming and graphic design that my competitors were paying. As with any independent contractor, be sure to check their testamonials and work portfolio before proceeding. Unwary entrepreneurs can loose time and money by selecting the wrong person for the job.

By using the web to launch your business, you already have the advantage of low overhead costs. Exploit that by using the tips above, and you’ll be able to keep costs very low.

I’m looking for business networkers and young entrepreneurs to interview. In return for me asking a couple questions about your business, you will receive free publicity to my large audience of young entrepreneurs.

If this sounds interesting, please email me: interviews (at) youngwealthweekly.com