Wiki

March 16th, 2006

My wife and I have a wiki that we use to keep track of our projects and our business ideas. It’s a great way that we can collaborate anytime/anywhere over the magical global intarweb.

We have a section for each of our active businesses as well as an area that has a laundry-list of all of our potential ideas. Its also a great spot to keep lists of potential domain names.

If you need more info about starting a wiki, wiki books is a great resource. They even have a list of sites that let people create a free wiki. If you want to have a password protected wiki, you could try PB Wiki.

My Wife

March 16th, 2006

My Wife is very supportive. She is always very encouraging and positive when I bother her with my newest ideas. Also, she takes great care of my son and the house. Which is great and it helps me focus on becoming an entrepreneur. She also helps with all my ideas. Thanks Wifey!

Incorporating

March 16th, 2006

I spoke with a lawyer (who is a family friend) the other day about incorporating a parent company for all my business ideas.

She summed up the reasons for incorporating in two ways:

1. The first reason is for liability. For example, if you ran a day-care business, as a corporation, your personal assets would be protected if your business ever got sued.

This first reason doesn’t apply to any of my online ventures. I can’t imagine a scenario where I could get sued. Plus I don’t really have enough assets (yet) that need protecting :) If you want my old car or the home I own 1% on, come and get em.

2. The second reason is for tax/financial purposes. Corporations have ways of doing sneaky things with money to decrease their tax burden. The lawyer I talked to recommended that I talk to a financial advisor/tax person to go over the benefits to incorporating. Sadly she didn’t help me with any of the sneaky things. And no, the phrase “sneaky things” was not the expression she used.

My Financial Starting Point

March 16th, 2006

Right now I am in poor financial shape. I have decent sized debts and little to no savings. Worse yet, my monthly income is just enough for me to tread water. Even though I am being fairly diligent and keeping my expenses down, I am still not able to save money. The biggest reason for this is that my fixed monthly expenses pretty much equal to my monthly income.

Because of this situation, my most pressing short-term goal is to make money. I am focusing my energy on this blog and building businesses to help get myself and my family in a better financial position. It was either this or get a part-time job at McDonalds. Or worse yet, starting to eat there… YUCK :)

No Idea is Perfect

March 11th, 2006

It’s easy to find faults in an idea. You will find them, your family and friends will find them, and if you have a blog, complete strangers will find them for you. ;) For each idea, there are easily hundreds of reasons that they will fail. Worst yet, these faults will arise often well after you are underway with a project. After you start something, you will be given hundreds of opportunities to back out and quit.

So now what? Should you sit and wait for the perfect idea? No, you can’t. If you hold off investing yourself until the “right” opportunity comes along, you will be stymied forever.

So what’s the solution dad?

They key to overcome this negativity is to early on accept that failure is acceptable. It’s perfectly ok to try something out and see if it works. Even if you decide that the idea isn’t viable, I can guarantee that you will not have wasted your time. You will have at least earned knowledge and strength from the experience.

The only real way you can fail is if you don’t give yourself and your ideas the respect and trust required to give them an honest effort.