Private Victory [dot] com

Tools I Use to Make Money

I'm a believer that you are more important than technology when it comes to having a successful business. Sure, technology is great, but it can also be a huge distraction that can take you away from your business. Rarely do you need the "latest and greatest" to make money.

Here are the tools I use most often...

COMPUTER HARDWARE:

My main computer is an iMac with a 20" screen, which is plenty large for what I need. My previous iMac had a 24" screen and using it was like sitting on the front row of a movie theater, so I decided to keep things small for this one.

I replace my main computer every two years, not because of improved technology, but because I make a living from ideas that are stored on my computer, I work my computers hard, and I want one that won't fail on me.

I've been using the same keyboard for 10+ years. It's loud, full of dirt, and it says "Macally" at the top left. It looks like it was made for one of those candy-colored iMacs, which is, I think, why I purchased it.

I use a Kensington Expert Mouse (which is really a trackball).

I use a Samsung Chromebook for writing, not because it's a great computer, but because it has less destractions than other computers I own. 

I have a Blue Yeti to record things with. (NOTE: This is not for the radio show.)

COMPUTER SOFTWARE:

For my new book, I'm using Google Docs. For other writing, such as sales copy, I use Open Office.

To talk to the Big Boss, I use Skype.

For blogs, I use TypePad.

For email, I use Mailplane.

For password management, I use 1Password.

For task management, I use Things.

I use Arq for backing things up.

Pair is my main webhost.

OTHER HARDWARE:

I read books on a Kindle and listen to them on an iPod Touch.

SERVICES:

I use Elance to find new people.

I have a Vonage phone that isn't plugged in.

I have a mail drop at The UPS Store.

What $3/hour Can Do...

If you're still having problems getting over the fact that people are willing to work for $3/hour, read this letter, which I got from a data entry worker in the Philippines whom I found via oDesk and was being paid about that much...

Hi Sir David,

You are most welcome. I am very very much happy today for this opportunity.

Sir David, I just want to share this things to you although It seems personal but I just want u to know your company really help me a lot for my family and my siblings. I was been displaced last February 2009 as a Production Supervisor of an Automotive industry which is due that the company decided to closed the company. I have been searching job online and as very fortunate and accepted to do your project despite being new to Odesk and doesn't have experience an online job.

I am being honest, I have four jobs on Odesk, first the is Research on businesses on North Queensland, I had been working with this client about 1 month, but due to his credit card expired so Odesk hold the project, last July. I had been email my client about the project but I had no reply. I have another research job from an Australian client but the last time I work with him was last September, he said he had been busy with other things but he is keeping me for his projects, he allotted me 14 hours per week but until now I still didn't get any updates with the project. My third project was Craiglist poster, i had been working around 1 hour with this client since the assignment started, the reason is, Craiglist required to have a verified US phone number, my client told me he will take care of it but until now I didn't hear from him anymore despite my emails.

Your assignment is the only active in which I devoted my time. And I am very very glad for this opportunity.

I can be a researcher, i know how to use excel, powerpoint, I am studying now how to do SEO, and other internet marketing, some basic programming like html, css. I can also be a virtual assistant. I have some knowledge about social media networking since I am a member of some of them. I am very much willing to be trained and would very much love to continue working with your company.

Thank for this 11th batch to do.

Thank you very much.

Anne

$3/hour is a good salary in many parts of the world and there are people, like Anne, who need the money. If you're in need of services such as data entry (or any of the things she mentioned, which are common on oDesk), I encourage you to put some people to work.

Firing People (Not Always Easy)

If somebody is doing a poor job, or not doing anything, I have no problem letting him go. It gets a little tricky when you have somebody who is doing an excellent job, you've developed a friendship, and something in the business changes to where you no longer have need for his services.

This happened last week with a worker we'd had for about a year...

The project she was working on wasn't making a lot of money, but it was making enough to pay for itself and, since proving quality jobs is one of my goals for this company, we kept it going. Unfortunately, something beyond our control with product distribution changed and we had to pull the plug. :(

Tried everything we could to find a new position for her, but at this time, it just wasn't possible. One day you're on a project you think will last for a while and the next you're closing it down.

Let her go with a nice letter and a bonus, because it was her work that has allowed us to expand in the last year, and got this in response...

Hi David,

I understand the situation. It's been nice working with someone like you and honestly, you're one of the nicest clients  I have worked with. Thank you for being a good employer; likewise, I also hope we could still work together soon.

If I can help you in any way, just send me a message.

I wish you well. Take care!
Bianca

So now I'm on the lookout for ways I can get this woman back into the fold! :)

The Meeting

NOTE: This post is part of Wendy Week, where I talk about my personal experience of outsourcing and the "behind the scenes" stuff involving finding, hiring, motivating, and working with a key person...which in this case is my key person, Wendy.

Well, it's the final post of Wendy Week... This one is about the first time I went to meet her in person.

I've had a lot of workers over the years. Many have been local, so I've met them before hiring them. Others have been "virtual" (somewhere other than local) and I have never met any of them with the exception of chance meeting with a writer whom I ran into at a conference.

Wendy lives in one of my favorite cities (Toronto) and I travel a lot, so I thought it was a great excuse for me to fly up there and meet her in person. After a few months, as she was doing more and more work for me, I suggested this.

She wasn't into it. Too nervous. Like it was a date or something...

Eventually, after 18 months of working together, I convinced her to agree to the trip. But after waiting that long, I was getting a little nervous too!

Agreed to meet in front of a muffin shop. I remember this, because I told her that we didn't have muffins in the US and kept asking, "What's a muffin?"

She bought it, by the way. :)

Anyway, I saw her standing in front of the muffin shop, walked up to her, and that was that. We had talked so much on the phone and worked on so many projects together that it wasn't weird at all.

I'm not sure how this happened, but I ended up staying at her house while I was there. I guess we weren't nervous about anything other than the initial meeting...

Strangely enough, I recognized some of the places in her neighborhood and it turned out that I had stayed in a hotel down the street before. Weird.

So now we travel back and forth a few times each year. No problems. It's always a good break, even if we're working, to do it from somewhere else.

When I hired her, I had no intention of ever meeting her in person. And I never would have guessed that I'd stay at her house when I travel to Toronto. Even if I know somebody well, I get a hotel, because I like the privacy and freedom that comes with it and I don't particularly care for people staying at my place when they come through Nashville.

But I feel comfortable at her place, just like I feel comfortable with her running my business. Having these experiences with her has helped me to trust other people, which has been an issue for me in the past. At one time, I was the "if you want something done right, do it yourself" type and that kept me from growing my business in the early years as fast as I could have. It's also kept me from having more quality personal relationships, since trust is a big part of those as well.

I've posted the Wendy Week stuff not only because I have great respect for this woman, but because I think the relationship I have with her, from how it started, to how it's progressed, shows that it's possible for any business owner to bring in great people who can help run things. For a long time, I saw it was possible for other people, but had no idea how it would (or could) happen for me.

What you've read is how it happens...in weird ways that you couldn't have imagined.

Seriously, would you ever imaging that you'd hear a caller on a talk radio show, contact her, and that she's be running your company?

And I'm sure it can get a lot more weird than that, so good luck in however it happens for you!

NOTE: Wendy isn't the only person I have working for me. Since "outsourcing" and people management seems to be a popular topic here, I'll continue to share interesting (and hopefully helpful) stories as they come up.

Now Look What You've Done!!

NOTE: This post is part of Wendy Week, where I talk about my personal experience of outsourcing and the "behind the scenes" stuff involving finding, hiring, motivating, and working with a key person...which in this case is my key person, Wendy.

Any time you hire people, you take the risk that they'll make mistakes. And "The Big Boss" has been no exception...

For one, she came over to my house to do some laundry and broke a knob on my dryer. I had to go to Home Depot and get a new knob (from a stove) to replace it. So now my clothes dryer looks like a stove... The back of the knob is also held on with duct tape, so you have to be really gentle.

When she broke it, I told her, "WENDY!! THAT'S COMING OUT OF YOUR PAYCHECK!!!"

Ok, I didn't really say that, but it's actually what she suggested, because that's the kind of person she is. If she messes something up, she wants to fix it.

But you can't get caught up in little things like an appliance knob...

How about the "big" stuff though?

We hired a writer to do some work for us a few years ago. Everything she handed in looked fine, so Wendy paid her and that was that...or so we thought.

As it turned out, the content she provided was plagiarized from a well-known author. And there was no way to get the money back.

So what do you do? Learn from this mistake and move on. In the end, the $1200 we lost was a cheap price to pay for the lessons learned.

Paranoid Business Owners

NOTE: This post is part of Wendy Week, where I talk about my personal experience of outsourcing and the "behind the scenes" stuff involving finding, hiring, motivating, and working with a key person...which in this case is my key person, Wendy.

Hiring somebody to run your business, especially if you or your family are counting on that business, is much like trusting somebody with your life. Somebody with that much control can make you or break you.

If you look at various online message boards for entrepreneurs, such as Warrior Forum, you'll often see new business owners giving out advice for hiring your first employees. Many of these people suggest using a service like oDesk, where you'll not only be able to work with non-US workers, some for as little as $3/hour*. I think this is good advice.

However, one of the reasons people love oDesk is that you're able to monitor workers via a built-in "big brother" style software that takes screen captures of workers' computers, to make sure they're on task when they say they are. That, I think, is bad advice.

Here's why...

For one, the reason you hire people is so you don't have to do the work yourself. Although you may be handing work over when you hire somebody, you're adding to your workload by constantly watching them do it.

Secondly, if you can't trust somebody, why are you working with them at all?

I'm all for verifying work, but monitoring employees to make sure they're working every single minute they're on the clock is a waste of time, especially when you're paying them as little as $3/hour. And you can't scale it.

On the flip side though, a mistake I've made is to give employees too much responsibility too soon...

A great example of this is when I was doing some live event production. It's a "cash" business, so within days after hiring a worker, without doing any kind of verification of references, I had her dealing with thousands of dollars in cash.

Big mistake... She ran off with it and I never heard from her again.

So needless to say, when I brought on Wendy, I had reason to be a bit nervous about trusting people with sensitive and valuable information, such as passwords and bank account numbers.

Because she came on as a customer service person, the only thing Wendy had access to was the support desk. If somebody needed a refund or there was a billing issue, I would take care of that work myself.

That's a pain in the ass! Again, why hire somebody if it's going to mean you still have to do work?

So I eventually gave her limited access to the merchant account. She could refund people and stop billing, but nothing else.

That wasn't enough though! I still had "work" coming through.

Eventually, I gave her full access to the merchant account. And then, one site at a time, full access to everything else. 

If she wanted to, she could...

• withdrawal all my money
• change payment information, so money is routed to somebody other than me
• cancel client billing
• email all my customers and tell them to fuck off
• delete products from the database, so nobody can buy them
• change what we charge for products, so we lose money on each sale

Or any number of really nasty things...

Bottom line is that she could really do some damage, if she wanted to. Yes, I could protect myself from that happening, but as I mentioned, I didn't hire her so I'd have more work for myself.

So far, so good. Almost five years and no problems.

If you've been burned in the past, I encourage you to "get back on the bike" and try it again. For the most part, when you trust people, they'll show you that they're trustworthy. That doesn't happen 100% of the time, but it happens 99% of the time. Having been ripped off, I can tell you that losing a little money is much better than living a life of paranoia, so I encourage you to err on the side of trust.

*NOTE ABOUT $3/HOUR WORKERS - In some places, this is a very comfortable salary and workers being paid this have a very nice, middle class standard of living.

Never Trust a Man Who Hasn't Made Payroll

NOTE: This post is part of Wendy Week, where I talk about my personal experience of outsourcing and the "behind the scenes" stuff involving finding, hiring, motivating, and working with a key person...which in this case is my key person, Wendy.

There's a saying that says, "Never trust a man who hasn't made payroll."

And there's a good reason for it...

When you have somebody working for you, you're responsible for them. That can be a lot of pressure. Imagine hiring somebody, for example, with a wife and kids, who is counting on you to make good on your promise of paying them. It's almost like you're also hiring the wife and kids, because they're counting on you to make good on your promise just as much.

This was a hot issue for me, in part, because Wendy wasn't my the first person  I'd ever hired to work for me...and I'd had problems making payroll in the past.

For example, about ten years ago, I had a couple of instances with another business I had where things got really bad really fast. Because of this, not everybody was paid...and it was a bad feeling.

Then there are the other issues, which you can justify, but can still leave you feeling bad, such as when people flake on you or otherwise don't do what they say they're going to do. How do you handle something like that? Something like where you've got 50% of a project done, which might as well have been zero, so it will do you no good, but the guy who did it is expecting to be paid 50%.

Lots of grey areas when it comes to payroll... Even so, it can be uncomfortable when something doesn't work out as it should.

Because of a few incidents involving workers I'd hired in the past, at the time I met Wendy, most of the people I was hiring were overseas, where I didn't have to see the results of my actions should something go wrong. I didn't actually hire anybody specifcally thinking like that, however. My conscious reasoning in going overseas was simply cost, which made things a little easier for me to swallow.

Beyond that, something else that helped me get used to feeling good about hiring people was the majority of people I hired at the time did work on a per-project basis, with money being delivered after 100% of the work was completed. These workers, as well as the hourly people I had, were paid via an escrow service, which kept both of us honest.

So, needless to say, I had a few things to get over when deciding to make the decision to bring somebody else on. I think this is common and, if you're dealing with it, I suggest starting with an online service like oDesk, which has plenty of great people available and will manage payment and billing for you. Then, should you need somebody locally, you'll have some experience with hiring people that will allow you to (hopefully) be more successful than you would if you started with no experience.

It's important to note that Wendy is not local to me. In fact, she's not even in the same country. She works out of Toronto and I'm in Nashville. The fact that we speak the same language, we're only one time zone apart, and just a couple hours away via plane can make a huge difference though when it comes to the feeling the pressure of hiring somebody.

By no means am I saying a worker in the Philippines or India is any less valuable than somebody in the US or Canada. I've hired dozens of people from each country and have had amazing experiences as well as started great friendships because of it.

My point is that somebody closer to home, when you speak the same language and don't have the communication barriers, such as time zone issues, can make what you're doing seem more "real" and put more pressure on you. Plus, you have the fact that workers in the US and Canada, because of our costs of living, will cost you more.

Happy to answer any questions you have regarding sticking points you have around hiring people. Feel free to ask you question below or send me a message via Twitter.

How We Met...

NOTE: This post is part of Wendy Week, where I talk about my personal experience of outsourcing and the "behind the scenes" stuff involving finding, hiring, motivating, and working with a key person...which in this case is my key person, Wendy.

The date was October 9, 2006. I know because she never lets me forget it.

Today, I can say that it was an important date and definitely the start of something life-changing, but at the time, it was just another evening. I was working from home and decided to listen to a talk radio, since my radio show as pretty fresh and I thought listening to other talk radio hosts would help me to become a better host myself.

Found a show about new age stuff, specifically psychics and mediums. Had been exposed to that type of work in the past and even worked as a psychic at one point, so I checked it out.

At the very end, a woman called in and asked about the business of being a psychic. She had been doing it for years, but was looking for a way to expand. As growing businesses is what I do, I perked up.

At the end of the call, the host says, "Give us your website so we can send you some business."

She did...and I typed it in my web browser.

The site was ok, but I had some ideas to make it better. Wrote her a quick email that said, "I'm a marketing guy. Have some ideas on how you can get more business."

That started the conversation...and within a couple of weeks, I had hired her to do customer service for my company. It wasn't a position I was looking to fill, but I was having problems with customer service at the time and made me an offer to take over that aspect of the business for me. 

She wasn't looking for "customer service" work, but because she was looking for somebody to mentor her in business and marketing and working with me in that capacity would enable her to have that.

Three lessons here...

1. Find a Problem and Solve It - The relationship started and kept going because we each found a problem and made an offer to solve it.
   
   
2. Be Nice and Help People - You never know who you'll be helping or what they'll be able to do for you.
   
   
3. Be Open and Say Yes - I'm sure it was crazy to get an email from some guy claiming to be able to help solve a problem (and willing to do it for free), but that's exactly what happened and what she said "yes" to and nothing would  have happened had she not done that.

It's Wendy Week!

Five years ago, I started working with a woman out of Toronto named Wendy. She started out doing simple "customer service" stuff for me, but it was quickly obvious that she was able to do more than that, so that's just what I got her doing.

Today she runs the show.

But it wasn't that easy...

I get a lot of people asking me how I hire, motivate and otherwise work with great people, so, for the next few days, I'm going to be posting details about that, specifically around Wendy, the woman I refer to on here as "The Big Boss."

What to expect...

• The Unusual Way We Met
• Why I Didn't Trust Her at First
• Why I Trust Her With My Life Today
• Finally Meeting in Person (After Working Together 18 Months)
• How I'm Helping Her Set Up a Competing Business

In short, this is the "behind the scenes" info to finding, hiring, motivating, and working with a key person.

If there is something specific you want to know about this subject, reply here or send me a message on Twitter.

Thank You, Ladies...

A CEO of a Fortune 500 company pulled into a service station to get gas. He went inside to pay, and when he came out he noticed his wife engaged in a deep discussion with the service station attendant. It turned out that she knew him. In fact, in high school, before she met her eventual husband, she used to date this man.

The CEO got in the car, and the two drove in silence. He was feeling pretty good about himself when he finally spoke: “I bet I know what you were thinking. I bet you were thinking you’re glad you married me, a Fortune 500 CEO, and not him, a service station attendant.”

“No,” she said, “I was thinking if I’d married him, he’d be a Fortune 500 CEO and you’d be a service station attendant.”

 

Nobody does it on his own. We're all where we are because of help from others. There is no such thing as the "self-made man."

Thanks to Wendy, Wendy, Andrea, Theresa, Bianca, and Satti for allowing me to do what I do!