finances for collapse book 9

FINANCES FOR COLLAPSE BOOK 9

SMALL BUSINESS SUCCESS

Okay, you’ve decided that a second income should be rewarding and a stress release rather than just a soulless pursuit of more money.  You will do what you love rather than what makes the most money ( with our first spawn on the way, the Bison Master Plan was to sell all our assets, get the hell out of the rapidly sinking state of California, move to the Sooner State and enroll the Ball And Chain in pilot school and then I’d be Mr. Mom.  That only worked out to the benefit of the ex, but my point was that while planning the move I also got a second job.  I refused to duplicate the main job as a manager which was high stress, but rather picked a fun job.  When an income isn’t necessary for food you can actually find one you enjoy.  Mine was working at a movie theatre.  I love movies, so it wasn’t even like real work.  And my abilities far outshone the teenage scum there and I was golden.  Even working for The Man, you can have a rewarding second income ).

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But of course, working for yourself is a far better option if at all possible.  Most of us are highly unskilled.  We have a narrow specialty we excel at and can’t do much else, thank you very friggin much public education and the FedGov killing off the apprenticeship avenue for advancement.  Our hobby’s are where our creative juices are applied, and for almost anyone who applies themselves seriously to that hobby, your abilities there probably outshine your paid skills.  Now, obviously, talking about engineers or brain surgeons don’t apply here, but most other jobs are really nothing more that micro slots filled in by high specialization.  Which are mostly on the job training.  Instead of highly skilled apprentices we have low skilled repetitive motion experts.  We are essentially paid to baby-sit the robots or the bureaucracy or as a means to bypass increased insurance costs.  As wasteful as all that is, you can’t really do it cheaper.  The system is optimized to the corporations ( who really just work for the bankers and the government ).  Not the small business owner.  You simply cannot compete with those kinds of businesses.  You need to focus on niche markets.

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However, far more important than that, you cannot have the debt or overhead those kinds of businesses have.  Think about it.  You use your 20% interest credit card to buy small lots, but the corporation uses a 1% interest loan to buy container ship loads of product.  You cannot compete, period.  You can be in the same business but you cannot do it with debt or overhead.  That means no employees and almost no equipment.  AND NO DEBT.  I don’t think I can emphasize that enough.  A economic downturn, a mega-corporation gets another 1% loan.  If you have a loan, in a downturn you go bankrupt.  A corporation looks at regulations and employee grievances as the cost of doing business.  A micro business gets one employee misbehaving-theft, suing for perceived whatevers, fraud-and they go bankrupt.  You MUST build in redundancies to weather the unforeseen.  You MUST eliminate problems before they occur.  Eliminating debt eliminates reduced income issues.  Eliminating rent lowers overhead cost.

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To take low skill examples ( for the benefit of low skill entrepreneurs ), you don’t buy a pickup truck and a riding mower and employ foreign guest workers to landscape.  You have a push mower you place in a small bicycle trailer.  His cost, $50k and $5k a month expenses.  Your cost, $1k with $20 monthly expenses.  Guess how fewer lawns at which cheaper price you can cut.  A bicycle shop has insane building rental costs and employee costs to cover.  A bicycle mobile repair business is nearly cost free.  You can’t sell enough guns to pay rent on a retail building, but you can gunsmith out of your home, with the garage as your official site ( taking into consideration the BATF rules, you don’t want them sticking their noses into your house ).  Okay, gunsmithing is a higher skill level-but the point of lower costs stands. 

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Anyone can be a book publisher today.  It doesn’t even entail using Kindle ( a whole other subject ).  You can go to Lulu.com ( who I’ve had very good luck with ) and get a single copy of a book printed at a very reasonable cost.  Excluding shipping, a 400 page book is a mere $8 your cost.  Look at the slop Paladin Press offers at much higher costs.  That is what high overhead does to them.  You can undercut them on any subject matter, and have a much higher quality content.  Okay, you face the issue of exposure, but that isn’t insurmountable.  You mail a few free copies to high exposure blogs covering the same subject.  If you order more than one book at a time, reduced print cost and shipping make advertising a sub-$100 cost.  There are means and ways of manufacturing available to cheap start-ups, besides the 3D printing.  Whatever your skill/business is, you can start it easily enough just by following the Three Rules.  No debt, no overhead, filling the niche rather than directly competing. 

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Of course with the caveat that a niche business makes a micro income.  If it grows, great.  But NEVER take that expectation to the bank.  For the longest time, greed was the primary skill in business.  You borrowed easy credit and followed the suckers.  Now, most of the economy already having become parasites, you need to do things much smarter.  And much more ethical.  Standard business teaching completely ignores this of course, but by intelligently minimizing costs you can pass the saving unto your customers.  Rather than pleading Po’ Mouth ( “but my costs are X a month!” ) you can claim doing things smarter rather than harder.  Since EVERYONE is chasing the high cost/high price paradigm, you have about zero competition with ultra low cost/low price.  Don’t follow the herd.  Their collective intelligence is scary low.

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