Free up your time and focus on what you love to do and the more important things by hiring a virtual assistant to take care of the other stuff.

I took a look at my daily tasks recently and realized that I was spending wasting some time everyday on trivial tasks that my imaginary kid brother could accomplish under intoxication.  Something needed to change.

After recently reading books like Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Workweek and other motivational reads,  I decided recently to hire a virtual assistant to help me take care of errands and research that I’d rather not waste time on.  It’s been a week now and I’m quite satisfied with the results.  Here are some tasks that my assistant has taken care of in only the last week:

• Posting craigslist ads
• Researching whether the ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’ musical is worth watching (and best prices)
• Finding the top 3 sites (traffic-wise) to post used books
• Contacting a few websites with miscellaneous inquiries
• Hiring and communicating with other contractors to work on coding jobs

My assistant works in India, has perfect English capability, and has exceeded my expectations and performed on time and with quality results so far. He works from 9PM to 9AM PST and basically takes care of my work while I am asleep.  He has saved me at least 10 hours of time (and hassles) in the last week at the cost of only $5 an hour.  In my opinion, money well spent.

Depending on your workload, you could be saving yourself much more than 10 hours a week.  I found my current virtual assistant through Elance but there are many other options like Brickwork (not recommended, the quote they gave me was totally overpriced).  I may hire more assistants in different disciplines overtime as workload increases.

Do you have a virtual assistant?  Please share your thoughts.

I recently traveled from Taiwan to Los Angeles for a brief visit and now to New York.  Many colleagues ask me:

“How do you plan to pay off your daily and travel expenses while traveling without working?”

It’s a great question and I’d be asking the same thing if I met someone in a similar position.  Well, the simple answer is the Internet is going to be paying for everything.  Yes, the Internet is my bank account.

As you may have figured out, doing business on the Internet allows you the freedom to be 100% mobile as long as you have a computer and Internet access.  Obviously, you need to have a little tech geek savvy and some street skills.  But it’s truly a beautiful thing.  If you are interested in having the freedom to do business online, here are a few ways the Internet pays me:

100% Online Design Business

I say “100%” because so far literally all my clients have been only through online referrals and interactions.  I started my company Geekwhat Design earlier this year, we specialize in designing all types of web and print graphics for clients from London to Seattle.  So far, we’ve spent basically $0 on marketing/advertising our services and make anywhere from $800-$2000 a month.  I spend about 15-30 hours a week creating designs for clients and managing this business.  I can only imagine the scaling should we start to spend some $$ on marketing.

Blogging

This blog, Geekwhat.com, has existed for around 4 years on the web.  Back in 2007-2008, I worked hard to increase the visibility of the blog and raised its income to average $90-$110 per month through ads and well… some more ads.  Unfortunately, my server was cut off in 2008 after forgetting to pay the bill ontime.  I lost all my earlier blog articles and backlinks and had to start over again.  Lesson learned.  I am now making about $20-$30 per month and intend to increase that amount with the new blog design/layout and increased blog articles.  I’m intending to commit to about 1 hour/article at about 3 articles/week, so about 3-4 hours a week on this.

Selling Products Online

This one is a bit tougher because there is overhead involved and physical shipping of products.  However, I’ve learned recently of the process of automating everything from warehouse shipping to customer service.  In the past few months, I experimented with some  hip products and was profiting about $700-900 a month in my best months, but ran into some problems with sites where I was posting.  I’m contemplating going the solo route with an isolated online store and spending some money on advertising to get the word out online.  Clearly my products were selling well when viewed by the right eyeballs.   Before the automation kicks in, I’d say I would spend about 10-20 hours a week on this.

So, to sum up… based on these three methods, the Internet was paying me about $2000-$3000 a month on good months and $1000-$1500 on slow months.  Amount of time spent on these activities = 40-45 hours per week — and nearly zero marketing.  I’m in the process of outsourcing and automating a lot of my tasks to minimize my number of work hours so I can focus on marketing and increase my bottom line.  My goal: Have the Internet pay me around $5000-$8000 per month by the end of this year (with the majority of the income being passive i.e. automated/outsourced), this would be ideal.

More to come about automating and outsourcing.

Internet money image courtesy of http://www.taramagazine.com

Yum…. Pho. The popular Vietnamese bowl of transparent noodles with a satisfying soup base and the perfect combination of peripheral sauces and vegetables. The beauty of Pho is that it makes the very thought of Vietnamese food so clear and focused in a foreigner’s mind. When you walk by a pho place, chances are the restaurant name has ‘Pho’ in it. You know exactly what you’re going to get if you go in and sit down. It’s the perfect business lesson — focused, clear, and give the customer what they are expecting.

In comparison, the food served at Korean or Chinese restaurants (for example) is generally more vague. You aren’t clear right off the bat what you’ll be eating should you enter. If you place a Korean restaurant next to a Pho restaurant, a hungry passing foreigner would at least know right off the bat what they’ll be served if they enter the Pho restaurant. Whether he chooses it or not is another story, but just the clarity of the business is a win right away IMHO.

I think you’ve become successful when an average Joe can name what you do within 3 seconds after hearing your brand. Try the following:

Apple = iPhone. GOOD.
Samsung = … tv … tablet … phones… BAD.

Eminem = angry white guy. GOOD.
Kid Rock = … had that one rock-ish/rap hit…. BAD.

IKEA = home stuff. GOOD.
Sears = … appliances … clothes… BAD.

Caltech = engineering. GOOD.
UCLA = …. bruins … white racist chick … poly sci? BAD.

Simpler = win. Complicated = mediocre. Your thoughts?

After purchasing and using my new iPad 2 for a week, I’m here to share a few tidbits about the good and the bad. The version I got is a black 16GB Wi-fi only iPad 2. In my opinion, those who should be considering get an iPad should fall in the following categories:

a) don’t own a decent laptop
b) don’t own an iPhone 4
c) want something to take on the road for emailing, word processing, and surfing the web
d) bored with a lot of $$$ to spend

If you don’t fall into any of those categories, the iPad may become redundant and somewhat useless to you. In my situation, I spilled hot coffee on my Macbook Pro (2 years old) keyboard a few weeks back and now certain keys don’t work and the laptop fails to go to sleep. So basically for the time being (until I get to replacing the non-functional parts), I have a desktop laptop with an external keyboard and mouse.

I had originally planned on getting a 13″ Macbook Air 1.86GHz with 4GB RAM but after chancing upon this iPad 2 (that I am typing this post on now) at Walmart, I knew that I had to grab this opportunity and buy the damn thing — even if I end up just selling the guy on craigslist. Well, temptation struck after the third day of staring at the package and I opened the sucker. Now let’s get into the review.

Speed-wise, the iPad 2 is super fast, no complaints there. I intend to use my iPad 2 for the following tasks:

1. Facebook
2. Browsing web, blogging
3. Reading magazines, books, news
4. Replying e-mails (I have online businesses, so replying clients = everyday)
5. Casual entertainment (games, watching TV shows)

Basically everything besides heavy duty tasks like designing with Photoshop/Illustrator and recording music. I do those taks on my handicapped Macbook Pro at home. For the five tasks I mentioned above, the iPad 2 is totally adequate. Facebook via an app like Friendly or MyPad is awesome, you can do status updates, reply comments, etc. easily. Even upload a photo you took with the iPad 2 within 30 seconds time. Safari is super fast so browsing the web is simple. You can watch youtube videos (I recommend through Safari rather than through the slow Youtube app supplied) and shop online seamlessly. I check my favorite news sources through Flipboard, a sweet app with awesome layout design. You can also use Pulse or other RSS readers for customizing your reading experience. Replying e-mails = quick and painless. Games are endless on the iPad 2, some awesome ones like Maelstorm or Infinite Blade (sp?). I use an app called AirPlay to watch a bunch of video files (movies, TV shows, etc.) on my 1 TB external hard drive at home via Wi-fi. So I’m not using any space on my 16GB drive on the iPad 2. The output of the video files on the iPad 2 = awesome.

Oh, forgot to add that I bought a Zagg Logitech keyboard/case:

This guy uber helps with typing blog posts like this and replying e-mails quickly. In terms of Wi-fi versus 3G model, you can find tons of articles debating this topic. I went with Wi-fi because.. well because it was the only one of its kind left. Black versus white? You decide, again check the plethora of articles online debating this matter.

iPad 2 = victory if you fall in one of the 4 categories above and are looking to use it for the 5 categories in list 2. Feel free to add your thoughts and/or refute me hehe

Bruce Lee once said “be the water”.

If you’re an entrepreneur, I say be like a cockroach.

Yes cockroaches are tiny little creatures, BUT they’ve expanded to 4,500 different species (according to Wikipedia) and have been existent all over the world for a very long, long time. They’re also damn hard to kill and pretty much impossible to wipe out.

Here are some notable …respectable… characteristics of cockroaches (passages from Wikipedia):

They’re all about teamwork:

Research has shown that group-based decision-making is responsible for complex behavior such as resource allocation. In a study where 50 cockroaches were placed in a dish with three shelters with a capacity for 40 insects in each, the insects arranged themselves in two shelters with 25 insects in each, leaving the third shelter empty. When the capacity of the shelters was increased to more than 50 insects per shelter, all of the cockroaches arranged themselves in one shelter.

They survive through the harshest situations:

Cockroaches are among the hardiest insects on the planet. Some species are capable of remaining active for a month without food and are able to survive on limited resources like the glue from the back of postage stamps. Some can go without air for 45 minutes. In one experiment, cockroaches were able to recover from being submerged underwater for half an hour.

They’re tough fighters and just won’t take DIE for an answer:

It is popularly suggested that cockroaches will “inherit the earth” if humanity destroys itself in a nuclear war. Cockroaches do indeed have a much higher radiation resistance than vertebrates, with the lethal dose perhaps 6 to 15 times that for humans.

I don’t know about you, but I think every business / entrepreneur should definitely have these three traits.

In the future, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’ve hit a roadblock, just think to yourself…

WWACD a.k.a. What would a cockroach do?

Image courtesy of blingcheese.com

I’ve been doing some research recently about various money making scenarios. There are basically two primary ways of gaining income. One would be to focus your efforts on one solid venture and the other would be multiple streams of income. If your goal is to work minimally, make a lot of money in a short amount of time, and retire early, it seems that multiple streams of income is the way to go.

Yes I am gung-ho about the ties between Starcraft and entrepreneurship, but I must make one more analogy. In Starcraft, if you focus all your efforts and resources on building one solid base, you’re much more likely to fail than having backup bases in case you get attacked. Ideally, you want to have 2-3 bases generating resources and constantly expand.

I guess there are a few different ways to perceive this situation. After a few years, Google (a massive entity) now has multiple streams of income through their various products. A blogger may have multiple streams of income from the beginning by building hundreds of mini niche sites.

Bottom line is don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Your thoughts?

Do you play Starcraft?  If you have, you’d probably agree that there are strong parallels between strategies used in the game and techniques used to run a business (or even your own life e.g. optimizing your day-to-day expenses and income).

When you get attacked, is your defense strong enough to survive the attack?

Are you optimizing your efficiency?
Do you have sufficient resources?

When playing Starcraft, you must constantly be aware of what is happening all over the map, whether it be your opponents or your partners.  In the process of staying aware, you must make sometimes up to 100 decisions per minute to expand efficiently and eventually win.  Below are seven mantras that surround these types of decisions and are crucial to success in any Starcraft battle AND in starting/running a business.

1. Teamwork and Communication. When you are playing on a team with other players, you MUST work together and communicate in order to succeed.  Without a mutual strategy and technique, the team will almost surely fail and get destroyed.
2. Optimize Efficiency. In the game, you must prioritize the way you build and generate troops to optimize the speed by which you create the strongest army.  If you are not efficient, you will be destroyed over and over again by someone who is more efficient.
3. Strategy and Direction. If you just build aimlessly, you will be inefficient and lose.  You must have a very clear strategy and direction in order to defeat your opponents.  If for instance you have no clear plan to defend your base, your opponent will simply find your weak spot(s) and destroy you.
4. Knowing Your Competition. You must always observe the type of races you are competing against before starting to build.  Each race has its own unique weapons and strategy sets.  Without observing your opponents first, you won’t know how to defend against or defeat your opponents.
5. Having All Bases Covered. In any Starcraft battle, you must have all bases covered.  If you plan to attack someone, you must make damn sure that your homebase has sufficient defense to block off any attacks while you are away from home.  This ties back to #1 in communication with your team members.
6. Constantly Gaining Resources. In Starcraft, you constantly have workers called ‘SCVs’ mining gold and gas.  Normally, you’ll have around 15 SCVs obtaining resources, and that’s ALL they focus on doing.
7. Adaption. Depending on the map chosen, there are many variables that affect the strategy by which you should build your troops.  For example, variables include the number of entries to your base or whether the resources at your base are infinite or limited.

If you ask me, I think every entrepreneur or business owner should play Starcraft to simulate your business techniques in the game. As you play, you will notice your weaknesses, because they will recur over and over again.  Chances are these weaknesses appear in the way you run your business (or your life) as well.  Better to find these weaknesses before they wreak havoc in the real world!  Hell, enough application of business techniques in Starcraft just might be more efficient then sitting in MBA courses…

A while ago, I wrote a post about how life is basically a game of blackjack.

Here’s another bizarre analogy:

Being an entrepreneur is basically about throwing a bunch of seeds out there in soil and seeing which seed grows and becomes a gigantic and beautiful tree.

Basically:

• Soil = The venture / opportunity
• Seeds = Your time, efforts, and money
• Tree = …money

In the ideal combination of the right seed planted in the right soil, your tree (i.e. your mental and financial well-being) will become super large and beautiful.

As you analyze your tree, there are two basic variables to consider:

1. Your Happiness
2. Profitability

Given these parameters, there’s basically only three possible situations:

A. Large and Beautiful Tree = You are happy and the venture is profitable

B. Large and Ugly Tree = You are unhappy but the venture is profitable

C. No (or Very Small) Tree = Depending on the amount of time passed, You are either:

1. Just starting, or

2. If it’s been a while, you are unhappy AND the venture is unprofitable

Actually this concept pretty much applies to life, business, and relationships.  For example, in a relationship, the tree represents the state of your relationship and you and your companion are the seed and soil.

Spending some time first to really gauge out the right seed and right type of soil is much more efficient than just throwing a bunch of seeds all over the place a.k.a. pick the right opportunity and cultivate a focused effort rather than spreading yourself too thin.

I think this is a good visual way to gauge the status of things in your life.  So…

Is Your Tree Large and Beautiful?