Day Job Exit Strategy | Finch Sells

Retire At 21, Feel Like An Idiot At 22

Aug 17 2011

Dear Trusty Employees,
It is with great sadness that I announce my impending departure from our Company. I have decided to retire from all business so that I can put my feet up in the leafy suburbs, desperately attempting to convince myself that there’s more to life than work.
I’m sure you will have many questions. Why now? Why so young?
Please accept my decision. It shows that I’ve achieved more than you in a shorter space of time.
I am greatly looking forward to tackling the next challenge in my life: puberty.
Yours truly,
Young Retired Dipshit

Many people consider retirement the reward for a lifetime of turmoil. It’s the bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow. The day of reckoning when we can say “I’ve done my bit“, and stop worrying about surviving from one pay cheque to the next.

The Internet age has spawned a generation of online entrepreneurs who are capable of retiring in their 20s. Does Mark Zuckerberg need to worry about his financial future? I suppose he does if he likes to keep track of his billions.

Even though Zuckerberg can retire, I’m positive he won’t. And there’s good reason for that sentiment.

The next step after retirement is death.

Who would want to retire in their 20s? The idea gets bounced around with prestige and glamour. There are websites dedicated to the ambition of retiring young, but I shudder to imagine how somebody capable of assembling the finances so young would react to the transition of pottering around a garden and writing Christmas cards in September.

It’s a paradox if ever I heard one.

When you have nothing left to work for, you have nothing left to live for. Anybody who believes otherwise might as well go hang out with Macaulay Culkin. Smoke some pot, watch Home Alone 2 and revel in your own waste of potential.

Time and time again, I have friends cross-examining me on the nature of my work. In their eyes, I’m retired. I make money online, which is as good as twatting around on Facebook while the dollar bills grow in my fridge, right? They’re wrong.

Even though I work in comfort, there’s rarely a second in the day where work isn’t close to my thoughts. It follows me around like an infection that just won’t shake, so why don’t I learn to forget about work and switch off? It’s simple. I don’t see work as a bad thing.

If you take a human being and strip him of his desire to work towards a goal, what do you have left? An empty shell that’s retired and ready for death. There isn’t much of the person left over.

Work doesn’t have to be employment as you and I know it. It can be charity-based volunteering, or even just a commitment to stay busy. However, the retirement yearned for at unhappy office cubicles is no more than a desire to believe the grass is greener on the other side. It rarely is, and retirement is seldom the experience you crave.

What you really desire is work that you can believe in. You want to spend energy completing tasks where you give half a shit about the end result. Who doesn’t? This is the great illusion of retirement. Giving up a mundane chore isn’t going to fill the void in your life. That void exists because you haven’t felt the passion to get out of bed at 8am out of choice.

If financial independence was all we longed for, millionaires would be happy and averagely paid employees would be jumping from office blocks. Happiness is not a flexible hours agreement, or retirement altogether. It’s the desire to get out of bed. To do something with your plain existence and convince yourself that retirement would only get in the way of all the things you have left to prove.

If that means changing career, go right ahead. We spend a third of our lifetimes at work, or thinking about it, so it makes zero sense to be working for the wrong reasons. The day you wake up and don’t feel an urge to work towards a goal, that’s when you have problems. That’s when retirement will become the death of you.

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What’s Your Day Job Exit Strategy?

Jul 18 2011

Are you ready to give up your day job? As appealing as a life on the backyard patio may seem, it can actually turn in to a downward spiral of depression and desperation.

Bold words. Now, I’m not trying to scaremonger the masses from wanting to quit their day jobs, but I do think you should think twice about your true motives before calling it quits. A day job, despite being the unglamorous cousin of entrepreneurism, brings security, stability and routine in to your life.

From my experience, people love to talk down the idea of routine in their lives. Many just-turned entrepreneurs will react with real spite when you ask them what they think of a Monday to Friday day job in somebody else’s company. Maybe it’s the burning need to stay consistent with their own life choices, but I believe that time will shine a light on the objectivity of those choices.

Many entrepreneurs later realise that the grass was indeed much greener on the other side. They see that being parked in an office cubicle ready to go by 9am is actually a much lighter burden than the self-inflicted misery of running an unsuccessful business and scratching around the bank to make ends meet.

It’s over 2 years since I worked my last day in Central London. I was a web developer, charged with pretty comfortable tasks and blessed with reasonably decent prospects. I was the youngest person in the agency where I worked, and probably the least likely to quit and start my own business.

I had no resentment towards that last job. Unlike many people who email me looking for answers to their own career slash mental breakdowns, I was content and had no reason to detest conventional employment.

However, I was passionate about wanting to run my own business. I developed a golden opportunity to do so in the space of six bat-shit crazy weeks, stumbling head first in to affiliate marketing and barely batting an eyelid as I wrote out my notice in a flurry of activity that still gives me a headache to look back on.

Who builds a sustainable business in six weeks? Inventors, Mark Zuckerberg and the occasional Einstein freakshow that I most certainly was not. I was in no shape or form prepared to start a business, despite harbouring some naive love affair with the idea of calling myself the boss.

Those first six months were a series of trials and tribulations of my own inflicting. I had a Plan A and a lot of newly established spare time, but little else. When my Plan A failed – within the first few days – I was faced with a sink or swim scenario where I needed to redesign a business from scratch or get back in the recession-struck waiting queue for another day job. Thankfully, keyboard sweat and tears paid off and I succeeded in reconstructing a profitable business.

What the entire experience taught me was that running a business, no matter how optimistic you may be, will always challenge you more in every way than the monotonous nature of navigating London Underground and reaching your desk before 9:01 every morning.

The nature of the challenge, or rather the acid test of how many hairs you’ll lose trying to succeed, can be boiled down in to an equation of preparation and then… lots more preparation.

You need a sensible Day Job Exit Strategy (AKA “How to escape the frying pan without burning your arse in the fire”)

You’ll have to forgive me for inflicting yet more misery-guts perspective on the proceedings, but it’s time to get real. Are you REALLY prepared for the challenges ahead? Here are some of the concerns you should be raising with your neocortex.

1. Do I have enough money to survive for 6 months if I’m not making immediate profit?

Entrepreneurs will give you varying answers for how much money is needed in the bank. I think six months of covered outgoings is a safe bet for online ventures, assuming your business plan is worth the paper it’s written on.

2. Who is going to handle my accounts?

The next logical question if, like me, you answer “Err…” to am I fully qualified to handle my accounting? My initial attitude towards taxes was one of complete disregard. I knew I would be expected to pay them, but my assumptions were about as well founded as a poor English bastard buying shorts in July. It’s not always obvious, but when you choose to become your own boss, you lose the accounting safety net of your previous employer.

3. Is my business built on moving ground?

Fads come and go. If your business idea is so niche that it isn’t capable of withstanding a small shift in the market – or the arrival and enhancements of new technologies – then you need to really think long and hard about the sustainability of it all. Don’t obsess over stealing a quick dollar in 2011. Anticipate how your business will meet a market demand for the next several years.

4. Am I mentally equipped to be my own boss?

I don’t mean this in a negative light, but some entrepreneurs are naturally better suited to the role of followers rather than leaders. It makes sense. After all, no economy can survive without willing servants to carry out orders. I think discipline and goal-setting is very important in this regard. To succeed with your own business, you have to hold yourself personally accountable.

Even when other people fuck up, it’s still your fault. Repeat the words, and learn not to take them personally.

As I personally found out, this awakening of responsibility can hit your social life with frightening force. Be prepared for the surreal shifting of priorities as “Thank God It’s Monday” becomes your new catchphrase.

5. Am I escaping a life I don’t enjoy, or creating a life I’ll enjoy more?

This is another hard-hitting question that only a very honest soul can answer. It’s a little like the analysis attached to “Is the glass half-empty or half-full?”

For many people in unhappy day jobs, starting a new business is an unfortunate learning curve that will take you to the realisation that two wrongs do not make a right.

Entrepreneurism is often a misread solution to the career crisis, when simply finding a better job would lead to greater happiness. If you’d do anything to escape your day job, there is always more than one answer to your problem. Starting an entire business is very much a niche solution, and 9 times out of 10, the wrong solution.

Your professional happiness does not hinge on running as far as possible from the office cubicle. It could be as simple as joining a different cubicle across the hall. For others, no cubicle will contain their aspirations. And for these people, starting a business is the only way to handle that burning flame of ambition.

Before you decide if you’re that person, you have to answer some basic home truths. The honest answers will lead you towards a sensible Day Job Exit Strategy. Behind all the glamour of being an entrepreneur, rest assured, it’s a living nightmare for the individual who answers those questions naively.

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How To Build A Diversified Online Business

Jul 05 2011

Diversify, diversify, diversify.

The three coolest words in an Internet Entrepreneur’s vocabulary. But what does it mean in practical terms?

Most entrepreneurs appreciate that with competitive markets and rapidly changing technologies, placing all your profitable eggs in one basket is a risky tactic.

If you don’t want your online business to end in a flood of tears and bitter resentment, then you better learn to diversify and create several avenues of profit. MySpace has shown, quite spectacularly, that it’s possible to fall from grace in 18 months. And you would do well to assume that so can pretty much any profit spinning website in your portfolio.

What Makes a Strong Portfolio of Online Assets?

In no particular order, here are some of my favourite business cornerstones.

Profitable affiliate marketing campaigns

Who would have guessed it? An affiliate marketer recommending affiliate marketing! Stable it is not, but an important staple of my business it will remain.

CPA campaigns provide enormous earning potential, and although short term in nature, can be used to fund investments in to more long term business models. I advertise affiliate offers using various PPV traffic sources, Plentyoffish and Facebook.

Effective affiliate campaigns require only part-time management, making them key contributers to your bottom line, without swallowing up all of your time.

The information resources for Tomorrow’s Next Trend…

Forget about the monetization, and ask yourself, “What is going to be really talked about in 2012?”, then build a website that provides top quality content on that topic. Does anybody remember the crazy market for backgrounds and add-ons when MySpace peaked? These exploded in popularity, and those who were ready to meet the demand, profited immensely.

Predict what is about to become hot, rather than attempting to monetize yesterday’s news, then build a website that delivers outstanding content on the topic. If you do this well, the monetization will take care of itself. Being first matters.

How about a home bizopp site for Greeks? Smell the demand, jump on it.

Having an online store

Drop-shipping and digital download stores are two areas I’ve been exploring closely over the last few months. I have a turnkey download store that produces a steady flow of revenue, and it’s inspired me to look further afield.

One of the great benefits of selling your own products is a conspicuous lack of anal manhandling by Google if you later decide to use their Adwords platform. Yes, owning your own product takes away the title of Internet Middleman, which Google unfortunately associates with Aids and Rabies.

For those with aspirations of something more legitimate than a digital product store, feel free to get utterly lost in the possibilities of drop-shipping. Sites like Alibaba make it possible to purchase, via wholesale, just about any product imaginable, and then sell it on for [sometimes] healthy profits. This is a step away from simple sideways diversification, but worth a look.

The branded blog

You may have noticed my soft spot for blogging. And you may have noticed my particular style of blog branding. I believe that it’s possible to become an authority in your industry, making good money as a blogger, without selling out in the eyes of your readers.

But the formula is murky.

Some bloggers use their platforms too eagerly to push any affiliate product with a commission attached. Others, I feel, are guilty of under-monetizing their blogs. I prefer to ignore writing about products, and instead focus my efforts on establishing relationships of similarity with my readers.

For my Internet Marketing blogs, I like to use humour, sarcasm and an occasionally self-deprecating tone. These are excellent weapons for building bridges of trust with a notoriously cynical market, but they’re not always as effective elsewhere. If you’re going to diversify in to becoming a blogger, step one is to understand your market.

And no, that’s not just some useless Quantcast demographics. But understanding what makes them laugh, what makes them smile, what content are they known to devour, and most importantly, what do they aspire to be? It sounds straightforward, but is often forgotten. The secret to running a popular blog is to know exactly what the “end goal” is for your average reader…and then to position yourself as the lifestyle rainmaker who can deliver that golden egg.

I have developed a collection of popular blogs that rake in $5-10K per month through direct banner buys alone. Many affiliates would laugh at those numbers, but hey – it’s diversified income. Most of my money traditionally comes from affiliate marketing, but if it were to disappear overnight, I make more than enough through publishing crap like this to live comfortably within my means.

The coupon haven

Consumers love coupons. It’s an addiction that has been passed down through generations and is now more exploitable than ever thanks to the reach of the web.

When people ask me what kind of website would make a good first addition to their portfolio, I tell them to go find some niche coupons for products with affiliate programs, then build a website around them. If you’re smart, you’ll do this in such a way that the website doesn’t die with each coupon period that expires.

Your own personal page

Even if you don’t want to become a blogger, I don’t think it’s ever a bad idea to have a personal presence on the web. Some of the most exciting opportunities I’ve had would never have found my inbox if I hadn’t made the decision to promote myself, and what I do, through a personal site.

Obviously, a portfolio is not going to attract money in the diversification sense. But you shouldn’t underestimate the opportunities that can fall your way if you tell the world what you’re good at.

A collection of mailing lists

They say the money is in the list, and although that statement is being challenged by the arrival of fan pages and enormous Twatter followings, I believe it still rings true. Mailing lists are fantastic assets to have. The ability to land effortlessly in the inbox of 50000 potential customers at the snap of your fingers should not be discounted.

I like to use Facebook and PPV sources to build highly targeted mailing lists that can be sold various products. For a brilliant illustration of how this works, get your IMGrind on and read this.

Understand there are Internet Gazillionaires who make money through no other means than by mailing the hell out of some very large lists. Contrary to popular belief, those lists do not last forever, especially if you’re the kind of prick who buys them from the unsolicited scrapheap. However, put to the right use, mailing lists can deliver lots of return customers and cross-selling opportunities.

The acquisition of good products

As perfectionists, we sometimes doubt what others are capable of achieving. One of the best ways to diversify an online business is to invest in somebody else’s good work. You can’t give 110% of your attention to every brainfart that occupies the mind… but somebody else can.

Stable businesses make a habit of innovating and investing in equal measures. While I enjoy the creative thrill of building websites from scratch, it makes just as much business sense to buy websites and digital products straight off the shelf if the standard is high. You might want to avoid marketplaces like Flippa which are about as buyer-friendly as a fist in the balls for your money back.

I recommend buying re-sellable digital products, or privately seeking out under-monetized blogs for the best chance of adding a nice juicy investment to your portfolio. If you can monetize better than 95% of other webmasters, you can have an absolute field day profiting from their hard work.

What Are The Areas I Don’t Like Diversifying In To?

Are there any projects to avoid? This is likely to provoke an angry response from those who dedicate their careers to the work I’m about to mention, and with good reason. Entrepreneurs are driven by different motives with different objectives. But for me personally, the areas I don’t like diversifying in to include…

Anything driven solely by SEO. I can’t control it, therefore I don’t pretend to understand it. SEO is an afterthought for all of my projects. If you build it, they will come. Only a complete bumberclart wastes his time trying to compensate for Google’s next move.

Web design and programming. I have the skills from my background as a programmer, but it’s far too time consuming to “diversify” in to client work. And it’s not so much a diversification, but rather a complete veering from the racetrack. In short, client based programming work can suck a donkey chode. I always get the shivers when friends or family contact me asking for a “quick website built”. And that’s without the duty of actually being paid for it.

Web hosting services. They will consume your entire working day, unless they’re entirely modularised and outsourced. I’ve seen many examples on Flippa of small web hosting services boasting respectable profits, but when you factor in that time is money, those profits suddenly start to look very small. Committing to be somebody else’s 99.9% uptime bitch would push me to insanity.

Customer subscription services. You will find that once again, unless you outsource everything, another service will usually beat you to the market by dedicating 100% of it’s time and doing a better job. A good example of such a subscription service is the pay-to-access forum. Many of these forums are emerging (PPV Playbook, IMGrind…), and it’s tough to knock the earning potential when you look at the numbers. 500 members paying $60/month is a healthy $30000/month in revenue.

However, forums are also notorious time-vacuums. Unless you can dedicate significant time to them everyday, they will never blossom in to healthy communities. Even once they’re established, you still need to engage and interact on a daily basis. This is perfect if the forum is your primary business. But as a diversification strategy? Be prepared to double your current workload, or get eaten by the competition.

Niches I know nothing about. If I can’t understand what I’m selling, I have no hope of guessing my customer’s next move. I’ve made the mistake far too often of developing websites on niche topics that I don’t “get”, and although I can motivate myself for the build phase, they often sit derelict after the site is launched.

Whatever You Do, Do It Well

It goes without saying that diversifying a business is irrelevant if you do a half-arsed job of it. We can go back to the MySpace example as a prime example of this. The examples above are merely my own professional choices, based on my own skillset and the talents of those I work with. You may have a very different vision.

As long as the vision is clear, and the planning is sound, diversification can only ever be a good thing.

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