Steve Mills - Life, the Universe and the Digital World

Is your business sustainable?

I have been doing a lot of work over the past few months on the business GreenMortgages.com.au. It’s a great business, as it gives environmental organisations a rebate when you get a loan from them. They also help people refinance so that they can green their home with solar power and water saving features. Good worthwhile stuff.

But all of this immersion in the ideas sustainability has got me thinking, where else can the idea of sustainability be applied? Sustainability is a word that doesn’t only apply to the environment, it can also apply to of your family, your working habits, your business. We live in an extremely fast paced and connected society now, and with that increased pace comes the ability to work as long and as hard as we want to. It also allows others to connect with us all of the time, and to place demands on our time and energy when they choose.

I have spoken to a few friends recently who have just moved on from working for companies that demand 80 hours + a week from employees and still ask for more. These are talented guys, creative and hard workers as well. If you look at this situation objectively, there are benefits to the business (increased production, meeting of deadlines) in doing this. But if they choose this course of action there are also consequences. The business starts to burn out their most valuable resource(you would think), their employees. They will take more sick days, they will start doing less then their best. They will start leaving the company.
The work situation is only sustainable if there is a steady stream of young people who are willing to take on those conditions and expectations, until they too are burnt out.

There another way of thinking about sustainability in business as well.

How depended are your revenue streams on the actions of others?
I am not talking about customers, as they are always what a business is ultimately dependent on, I am talking more about channels that customers can access your products and services.

For example, some online business’s rely entirely on Google adsense for revenue. Even if this does work for a time, the problem is that your business becomes reliant on the policies and politics of Google, and their continued support of the program. If Google changes their mind, or decides that they will half the advertising fees that get paid via adsense, then there is not a lot you can do about it. Unless you have an exit strategy or diversified income streams, this single point of failure could spell the end of your viable business in an instant.

This has already happened with EBay sellers in the past year. Businesses sprang up that were 100% reliant on having cheap listings in eBay stores. EBay was allowing anybody to set up an ecommerce presence , and have items on permanent sale for 10 cents listing fee. Seemed to good to be true for those that wanted a cheap, networked way of selling goods. And it was….

As soon as EBay realised that sellers were making a mint while they were making 10 cents an item, the quickly upped the prices. The result, a mass exodus and close down of eBay stores, with sellers moving to other online auction and ecommerce solutions, or consolidating their stores to a smaller size.

You won’t here about this in any of EBay’s online marketing, but if you scroll back through the message boards on MyEbay about 18 months ago, you will see the storm that erupted.

The businesses that thrived during this time were those that had used Ebay to build their own, independent online presence. They had directed the ebay traffic through to their own domains, collected their customer data on an external database to compile mailing lists, and set up their own online stores on their own sites.

I’d love to hear from my readers what people are doing out there to make their businesses more sustainable….

Quick Update From Holidays

Hi All,

Thanks heaps to all of the recent commenters, I really enjoy the thoughtful additions that you have all made to the discussions here.

I am currently enjoying some  R&R, but will be back with my usual frequent posting schedule in a week or so. Please subscribe if you are interested in what I have talked about over the last few weeks, there will be  plenty more articles and discussion like that comming up.

Now you have to excuse me, its time to go for a surf, then spend the afternoon lazing in my hammock.

Steve

5 ways to beat Habit Creep

Hi all, I am busy getting ready to go on holiday for a week and a half down at the beach with my family, so posting may be less frequent for the next 10 days or so as I get a bit of much needed R&R.

I have been thinking over the last few days how easy it is to fall back into bad habits after you make a change, even if it is a change that you really want to make. For instance, at the start of last year I made the commitment to myself to check email only once per day, in order to limit lost time from constantly checking the inbox, and the distraction of answering mail that really, when you think about it could have waited until the evening.

Email, while a fantastic tool, is a real flow killer. What I mean by that is the constant interruptions, the sense of “this is urgent, I must answer now” that most messages have breaks your attention away from the things that you really should be getting done. I used to find myself checking it perhaps 10 times a day, which is not as bad as some people that I know, but when I look at how I want to be living my life, feeling like “I have to check email” is one of the things that I don’t want to have constantly buzzing in the back of my head.

So the year started of well, I would check my email at 9am, and then just leave it for the rest of the day. I am not going to lie to you, at the start it was a painful experience. I thought I was missing out, I thought that life was going to pass me by. The big surprise is that it didn’t. The worlds turned without me pushing send receive every 10 minutes, and I found that I had at least an hour of productive time more during the day. The one thing that I did learn is that even if you make a minor discretion, it’s not worth throwing in the whole process and going back to your old ways.

Habit Creep, where the old habit slowly starts to worm its way back into your life is always going to happen. It can happen easily. First it’s a check in the morning, then one at lunch, and one at night. And that’s fine. But then its also one at morning tea, then at 11am and so on, until before you know you are back hitting send receiver like a rabid monkey. The important thing is that when you become conscious that you have fallen back into an old pattern to not mentally punish yourself or give up. Just start again and continue.

So If I beat the email demon you ask, then why has this been on you mind for the last few days?

Glad you asked, this has been on my mind because I have become aware of a new, more insidious terror that has crept into suck time from my day. The name of this demon is RSS.
I have got into the habit of checking and rechecking RSS feeds, even when I know that they probably haven’t been updated, even when it is distracting me from more important tasks. It has been my mission over the past few weeks to work on some simple tools to beat “Habit Creep”; the following is what has worked for me.

Top 5 ways to beat “Habit Creep”

1. Write down the permanent changes that you want to make and look at the list once per week. I know that this may sound really pedantic or a bit too much trouble for some, but it really does work. An ingrained habit is your automatic response to a situation, and it will take a lot of work to change it.

2. Only make a change if it is reasonable and increases productivity, not to make a point. If checking email 10 times a day is a real necessity then continue on. Only make a change if it will make a real improvement.

3. Cold Turkey doesn’t work for everyone. A conscious decision to slow down or reduce the amount of a habit can work, if you give yourself a daily reminder. Any change is a step in the right direction, and the only person that you need to prove anything to is yourself.

4. Don’t overly chastise yourself for indiscretion. As I said above, you haven’t failed if you make a slip up and go back to old ways. Just take it as a learning experience on the path to the lifestyle that you want and continue from where you left off.

5. Remind yourself of the positives, not the negatives. On your list of permanent changes, write next to each one what the benefit is. The benefit of not continually checking RSS would be at least an hour of extra time a day, time that could be used to get more done, or to knock off from work early and spend time doing what you love

My Lifestyle Design Plan : A Review

I just thought I would spend today giving everyone a bit of an update to my current situation. I am currently working towards my ideal lifestyle. It is amazing when you look around how many people are not. People think they are, but what they are doing is chasing the next promotion, in order to get more money, in order to buy more things.

I am after more then that. I want an independence of the 9-5, sit in an office workday. I want to be truly rich. Not monetarily rich, but time and experience rich.

Slowly my plan is starting to become real, as I am directing my life and making choices on work habits and situations based on my “lifestyle design.”

Just to get everyone up to speed, my lifestyle design plan is

• To have a variety of interesting work.
• To set up autonomous systems in order to make passive income.
• To have the freedom to work hours of my choosing, in the location of my choice.
• To be able to travel for at least 3 months of the year with my family.

The steps that I have taken so far in the last year have been to :

• Establish a network of consulting clients while still holding down a 6 - 4 (10 hour days plus 2 hour commute) job. This was the hardest part, and one that I will write about in more detail soon. I was working 18 hour days for 3 months there getting things off the ground. Not an ideal lifestyle at all. But people have to consider a small amount of hard yards, a couple of hard months if they want to seriously work at breaking the 9 -5 rut. I’m not talking about the years of corporate grind / deferred lifestyle plan of the usual wage slave, but the ability to make small scale sacrifices for massive long term gain isn’t a bad trait to have.
• Quit the job with a steady net of clients. This gave me 4 day steady work a week, 2 of which working in the city, 2 of which working quite close to home. The other day deliberately left free in order to source more contracts and work on passive income earners.
• Develop 2 sites with passive income earning potential. One is a video sharing site that should attract some advertising revenue, due to it being in a specific untapped niche.
• Develop partnership agreement with one consulting client, resulting in equity share if project goes well. Large passive income earning potential
• A growing network of web development, graphic design and internet marketing clients that I consult with purely over the phone and internet.
• Starting to develop efficiency and knowledge management tools to compress the work day down to a smaller time investment.

So I am starting to get things off the ground, and although I have deviated from my plan a few times and fallen back into unhealthy work habits, I have had the piece of mind to look back at my plan and remind myself that life is for the enjoyment and experience, not the dollars.

The Power of Focus

Sometimes, I feel that i can be a not very organised person. That’s a bit of an understated sentence, so let me rephrase it.

I am a very unorganised person by default.

It’s not by design, and it’s not from being slack or not being bothered. It’s more from the fact that I just have so much on at the one time. That and I also do a wide variety of things that draw on very different skills and mindsets. Being a contractor that does some entrepreneurial activity on the side has many, many good points. But the one bad point is to keep yourself organised against competing priorities, and not getting in the situation where it all feels too much. You know that point, the overwhelming fear of dread that makes you want to surf the web or play solitaire rather then do work.

In the course of one week I can be doing low level helpdesk support, fixing servers, writing c++ code, developing websites, designing brochures, writing marketing material, organising business deals, doing business development, marketing, sales, buying advertising space, liaising with government, mortgage broking, dealing with contractors, designing logos and generally keeping everyone happy in the process.

AND, to make matters worse, i was working with only a rudimentary list system, or no list at all. I was keeping it all in my head, and it was starting to drive me crazy.

So i took the revolutionary step last week of buying a planner and writing it all down. I know, rocket science it ain’t, but for me it is a big step.

What it has given me is freedom to not keep so many balls in the air, and just to pick one thing and focus on it until it is complete, knowing that that is the action with the greatest priority at that time so it is what I should be giving all of my attention to. Sounds good in theory, and I am working on it.

Focus is a powerful thing.