Making money on the internet is a thrilling experience! I am being completely honest when I write earning $1 in a new area can be just as thrilling as earning $8,000. The reason being, by the time I achieve any real high earning success I had to put some serious effort in developing a method to generate it.

I can not count how many times I have worked on some new internet idea where I inadvertently made a few dollars during the development stage of a much bigger idea and foolishly I had never stopped to see where the few bucks where coming from.

This lack of experience on my part to not stop and recognize what was going on during a development stage has undoubtedly cost me a fortune in potential earnings. Hindsight being what it is, today I kick myself for not taking the time to optimize a process or developed a system to recreate the efforts it took to generate those single internet dollars that have floated my way.

I’ve been talking to a few of my entrepreneurial friends and I am starting to believe many of us have the inherent tendency to overlook the low hanging fruit while on our quest to change the world.

I believe the preconceived expectations we set upon our self’s hold many of us back from achieving our real goal which is independence. As I continue to put the pieces together in developing myself to become a more sophisticated Entrepreneur I am starting to believe in an important element to real success.

We must seriously learn to take the time stop and recognize the small accomplishments we achieve along the path of our greater goals. There’s a saying, the adventure is not the destination it’s the journey.

The entrepreneur should shoot for the stars and dream big. Just make sure you take the time to stop, recognize where you at and optimize what’s currently working for you.

If you’re anything like me then chances are the number of things you have to do this week are overwhelming. I have new ideas popping in my mind all the time and I am continuously targeting new areas of opportunity. Upon targeting the new opportunities and before jumping on anyone of them I try to decide what will be most profitable and feasible.

I have found I have a personal method for they way I test both potential profitability and feasibility. I start testing by scoping out the competition currently active in the market place. (If you are first to market then this does not apply).

I spend a great deal of time studying my potential competition. This is extremely important to do as early as possible. I am sure most of the things I look for are quite common such as understanding their pricing model, their distribution approach and customer support (if there is any).

In addition to all that, I spend a great deal of time figuring out how much they spend on marketing. If they seem to be placing significant emphasis on television spot buys and the company has been around for a few years then chances are they have figured a working model. In this case, the barrier to entry has been raised and unless I can figure out a different way to market to the same type of customer this may not be the project for me.

As soon as I have a clear understanding of the marketplace and the practicality of marketing I then look to see if it is feasible to build the product / service.

As an entrepreneur my hands are all over the place so the skill sets I need to employ change rapidly. Over the years I have become a huge fan of outsourcing. Although managing such a diverse group of people can be difficult I find I can get tasks completed relatively quickly and inexpensive.

When building the idea I found the best thing to do is to break everything down into modules. This usually means I am standing in front of several whiteboards drawing diagrams with arrows pointing all over the place.

My objective is to break down every object on the board to be its own working unit. Then, once I have a clear understanding for how that unit works I define the required skills set to outsource that unit to.

Then, the project turns from me developing a new idea to building it and managing my new team. As soon as every team has completed building their units, I begin marketing the product / service as soon as possible.

With all this work to do, one has to be very careful with choosing the projects to build and the projects to pass on. Some projects can take as quick as a few months to build and others I have been involved in can take a few years.

So the question is, What Should You Be Working On?

I have a very close friend who is probably the greatest Entrepreneur I personally know. He seems to just get it. While having our normal chats on Warren Buffet, J.D. Rockefeller and many other titans of industry, I once asked him that very question. With all there is to work on, how does one choose what to pick to insure they did not miss the real opportunities?

His response was almost poetic. He said just imagine yourself ten years from now. Now that you are 10 years into the future imagine you are looking back onto yourself today. What opportunities are available today for which you would kick yourself in ten years for letting it pass you by?

Since he shared that little piece of entrepreneurialism wisdom with me it has changed my life. I have found that little advice has given me a tremendous amount of focus and anxiety relief. By thinking this way, I am sure what I am working on is the right play.

My advice to you, give it a try!

Dear France, this is my first personal letter to you so please excuse my western capitalistic American arrogance. I thought it was about time I said something regarding the state of your affairs. Seriously, what in gods name are you doing to your country? Your are a global power for Christ sakes, start acting like it. Get your house in order or my generation will be forced to disregard everything you have to say on global policy.

It is not okay three fourths of your young students want to become civil servants because it promises them a life time of security! Is this what your citizens are protesting about?

Have you not learned anything from history. Capitalism has proven to work pretty well. We all understand it may not be a perfect system but at least three fourths of our American youth aren’t growing up with the intention of securing jobs with the United States Postal Office.

You are a country with such great potential. Look towards parts of your private sector as they have produced some thriving global businesses. I even use many of your products on a daily basis.

There are some things you need to work on ASAP. First, tell your country folk communism is not that great. Yes, it offers security but be honest with them. Explain to them your Debt to GDP ratio is not in check and in a few years your country will go broke with this welfare policy. Then you will be stuck with a bunch of lazy country men who wont know how to sell a free loaf of bread to a starving person.

Start with the young! Feed them Happy Meals (in proportion of course, you don’t want to start looking like us fat Americans). Tell them all about the legendary tales of Sam Walton, Howard Schultz and Ray Kroc. You are already buying cloths from Wal-Mart, drinking our coffee and eating our burgers! At least educate them on the wealth these entrepreneurs created for them self’s and the enormous amount of job opportunities they created for this planet.

Lastly, what the hell are you doing cutting your work hours down by 5 hours a week? You think now is the time to let everyone work 35 hours a week? Seriously, don’t you know anything about the work ethic in India and China?

I don’t know France, we have some serious concerns about your behavior. I am starting to think you belong on the short bus.

As far as conspiracy theories go, I find this one interesting.

While having dinner last night, a good friend of mine and I were discussing 9/11. He said to me there is no evidence any plane hit the pentagon. I immediately let out a surprised laugh as I thought his comment was pure nonsense.

So in response to that comment I said; “Easy enough lets jump on the internet. I bet I can find thousands of images of a plane hitting the pentagon. There are dozens of CCTV’s which caught images of the plane hitting the pentagon.” I also said with the utmost confidence, “I remember seeing images of a plane hitting the pentagon.”

We went up to the home study and I jumped on Google, MSN and Yahoo. I pecked at the computer for images of 9/11. I ran a search for 9/11 pentagon, 911, 911 images.

I looked at all the pictures and did not see one image that showed a plane hitting the pentagon. I thought this was really strange. All the images I am looking at are from the cameras that took pictures of the crash, but not one image of a plains tail, engine passenger seats… Nothing looked like a massive plane crash. Not even skid marks!

My friend then said to me, remember the crash over PA? I responded to him in anger, “what about it”. He said not one body was found. There was no blood. I shook this off as pure conspiracy crap and pecked away at the internet. But I found nothing on any of these three major search engines to show proof a plane hit the pentagon.

For a moment I felt dizzy. After about 10 min I said out loud, “have I been the one drinking the Kool-Aid”?

So I woke up today with the need to figure out what the hell was going on. There was this huge issue about Google allowing China to censor images. If you do a Google search on “Tiananmen square” in China, the images are not what you would get if you did that same search in the US. The funny thing about censorship is you dont know your the subject of it unless your exposed to it from a new prospective.

I hunted around much more and I came across this video called “9/11Loose Change” by Phil Jayhan and Korey Rowe. The video made several points that have got me thinking. To be honest, some of the points seem so obvious it makes me wonder what the hell is going on. When I first watched Fahrenheit 9/11 I just laughed. It was so bad because all the connections were just a stretch. But this film I saw today has made some solid points.

Why did the FBI confiscate all the CCTV footage from the hotels, gas stations and other surrounding buildings to the pentagon? What’s to hide? I want to see the images of a plane hitting the building. I’ve seen the WTC images a billion times, let me see these images.

Why is there no debris that resembles a massive crash? It could not have all burned up, could it? There have been dozens of airplane crashes over the years and they all seem to have one thing in common, the disaster site looks like a freaking plane hit it. Where did the plane go that hit the pentagon? Where were the bodies of the passengers in the PA crash? Why are there official reports from coroners that there are no bodies in the crash site?

And this is my favorite point the video make… Oh man, this is just laughable if this is true.. None of the black boxes were found, right! This is because there was so much damage and burnt rubble and just catastrophic debris from two of our nation’s largest buildings crashing down on the streets of NY. Well lucky for us, in the midst of all the violent wind that was caused due to the explosions and violent force of heat, one of the terrorist’s passports flew out of the
plane and landed into the streets of NY. A FBI agent found the passport which lead them to confirm who one of the terrorist who died in the attack.

I am not making this up. I have no clue if this is true or not. The video has cited sources for this information. God I sure hope this is not true.

A part of me feels ashamed for even considering there is anything going on other then what I and the American public have been led to believe. Then again, I know only to well someone has to drink the Kool-Aid. I think I will start a new category in my Blog called Kool-Aid for things like this.

New Years resolutions for most people are usually the typical ones we all have come to expect. You know, stop smoking, lose weight, exercise more, and perhaps read more.

Well a few years ago one of my New Years resolutions was to cut down on the time I spent preparing for all the unknowns regarding a new business and to setup shop as quick as I could to begin transacting.

For all you MBA’ers out there you’re probably shaking your head in disgust as this defies all business fundamentals such as do your research, write a proper business plan and plan for the unexpected. Yes these are all sound principles but to me it seemed to defy the entrepreneurial method for which you’re starting out with very little capital, you have to pay rent, and your credit cards are all maxed out. More importantly, you’re pumped up about the new opportunity and you see clearly how you can make money in it right away.

When I came up with that New Years resolution, I had been thinking a lot about my approaches to the various businesses’ I had started, co-founded or contributed to in someway. Over the past decade plus, I had experienced starting projects with zero preparation and very little start-up capital to raising seven figures and managing projects that required me to setup relationships with international manufactures and large financial institutions.

By the way, I tend to refer to new businesses as ‘projects’ because I do not believe it deserves the classification of ‘business’ until it actually starts to function properly.

What I started to realize was going the route of writing a business plan, going through lawyers to review contracts and the raising large sums of money for extravagant business concepts is not a great method for the hungry entrepreneur. In fact, I believe it stifles it.

Here is a good example.

About 13 years ago (when I was 18) I started my very first real company. Although I was taking 4 hours of college courses every morning and working a full time job from 4pm – 12 midnight I saw money making opportunity and I jumped on it.

While working my night job I met a guy who had a warehouse of products he wanted to dump fast. It was nothing illegal; it just was not a big enough money maker for him.

After talking with him for a bit, I went down to the warehouse, saw the products and felt it could be great money for me. So I spent several weeks of my minimum wage paychecks and purchased as much of the products I could with no real defined business plan.

I had a gut feeling I could sell the products for 3x what I bought them for. I told the manager of the company I was working for in the evenings about what I had going on –on the side and he liked the idea so much he became my first real business partner. We filed an DBA, formed a partnership, got a business license for the city of Los Angeles, rented a 200 sq foot office, got phone lines, new computers and used desks. It was super exciting.

Since my partner was also a full time manager at our real job his time was also limited. So we both agreed to meet at 12:30pm and work till 4:00 Monday through Friday. I basically attended 4 hours of course work, rushed to the office (which I rented around the corner from my college) and we went to work.

The funny thing is, we were so busy buying all the things we thought we needed to get the business setup we never really had any idea how we were going to off load our products.

So I made my first big marketing decision. I purchased a mailing list of all businesses in the United States. We both went to work creating really tacky brochures that we printed on our inkjet printer and began printing hundreds of brochures and labels. I remember that piece of junk printer breaking down every 10 sheets or so. It was amazing we actually did it.

I thought we could market our products to businesses on the other side of the country since the original guy who I purchased the products from most likely saturated our area. What we did not take into consideration was the cost of postage. So we both had to wait until we got paid again which wasn’t until another few weeks before we could buy the needed postage stamps to mail the stuff out.

We finally got the money, bought the stamps and mailed out the brochures to everyone that was on our target list. Several days went by with hearing nothing. We just kind of sat there in our office playing on America On Line and doing homework. This was a very nerve racking experience. But our office neighbors used to come by and chat with us. They called us super entrepreneurs and some of them even offered us money to help us out, but we never considered taking a dime from them.

Then the greatest thing happened, we got our first phone call (that was not a cold call). After that first call, many calls came in. It took a few days after our first few calls to get our sales pitch down, but we sold our entire inventory.

Too make a very long story short; this is the part of the story where I say having a little business experience could have helped. We could not accept credit cards and no one trusted us to write checks, so we had to send every order with Cash on Delivery with net 60 terms.

It took nearly 60 days to see a return on our investment. But we purchased more goods, tried again and we were able to sell all of the new products we purchased. Unfortunately, net 60 strained our cash flow to much. We decided to shut down.

Looking back now, obviously things could have been done much better. The point is the business was functional. It lacked experience but money was being exchanged.

I should point out that I am not against big concept ideas. In fact I am currently working on one which I am super excited about and has kept me busy for the past two years. It has required a large team of really specific skill sets to build the project and it’s a great experience. But there is nothing like starting a business and transacting right away.

So here is my guide to help those of you who are looking to jumpstart your business to generate immediate cash-flow. These tips won’t help you if you can’t come up with a business idea of your own.

1. Get a phone and a business address.
2. Determine if you’re looking for new businesses (because you sell services like merchant accounts, CPA’s, credit cards, cell phones) or your service requires new consumers who have moved to a new area. (Dental, Veterinarians, pool cleaning services, gift baskets, etc.)
3. Call a mailing list broker and ask them for a new or existing business list if you’re looking to do b2b. Ask them for a new or existing homeowners mailing list if your planning to market to consumers.
4. Jump onto a freelance website and have some tri-fold brochures created for you. Don’t spend more then a few hundred bucks on this and negotiate a deal so you can have them create a handful of brochures for marketing purposes.
5. Stick some stamps on the brochures, label them up and throw them into the mail box.

From this point you can just wait for your first call, but I would say don’t. Pick up the phone and start pounding numbers. I am not ashamed to admit; I started a very profitable business by telemarketing other businesses (Note, watch out for the new ‘do not call’ rules. Make sure your lists are scrubbed clean).

I found that if I called one hundred targets a day, I’d may get 5 call backs. By the end of the week I had 25 call backs. Out of 100 call backs in the month, (those are now pre-qualified leads I had created for my self) I could close on average 20% – 25%. I did this for the first few months until I perfected my direct mail marketing campaign. I landed some very nice well paying clients doing this and jump started a business that lasted a few years.

In summary, if you’re a budding entrepreneur then remember the goal is to get cash flow in as fast as possible. You may not be running the business like you had planned for but at least you got money coming in and you’re surviving.

Many of these big multimillion dollar projects that I have been apart of failed because executing the large idea took so much time and money. And like all businesses, these companies could not sustain them selves with out cash flow.