By JAMES ALTUCHER
I loved talking to the skankiest prostitutes at three in the morning with a camera crew around me, fires burning in the street, sad, abused people clinging to scraps of life for their pleasures, bailed out prisoners and the drug dealers waiting for them to be released, homeless addicts with nowhere to go and they only weren’t freaks if you saw them at three in the morning .
In short, I loved my job.
Entrepreneurship ruined it. I’m not like how Mark Zuckerberg describes himself: “a builder”. My guess is, I’m not like most of the smart people who read this blog who go out there and build things to improve the lives of others. And yet, I kept doing it to myself over and over again. Once you enter the world of “eat what you kill” you can’t go back to being spoon-fed by the pencil factory anymore. Sadly. I write about my first job here (and the prostitutes).
I had a regular job at HBO. My title: Junior Programmer Analyst in the IT department. I told HBO, “you do original TV programming so why not do original web programming.” And magically, from 1996-98, they let me do whatever I wanted to do at three in the morning and then put it on their website. My original job was to do some Unix/ Oracle thing that I was totally unqualified for and didn’t know how to do. So I figured out a more fun idea for myself and persuaded them to let me do it.
Someone in the marketing department at HBO told me, “You CAN’T DO THAT.” But, as the readers of this blog already know, that’s the call to action to anyone who is going to do anything. For John D. Rockefeller it was to roll up all the oil companies in America. Nobody thought he could do it. For Andrew Carnegie, it was to buy all of the steel companies in America. For Larry Page, it was to build the 100th search engine without any ideas about a business model. They became billionaires. For James Altucher, it was to interview all of the prostitutes at three in the morning in NYC for almost no money. We each have the built-in predilections given to us by genes, upbringing, and whatever black magic you call god.
Then other entertainment companies started asking me to do the same thing for them. “Can you make our web presence entertaining and fun?” We want fun, they all said. So I jumped ship. Entered the world of the wild. Suddenly I was an “entrepreneur”. I didn’t even know what that meant. I got to the office. I had nobody to call. And nobody would return my calls anymore. I was no longer at HBO. I would cry every day. I wasn’t a natural businessman. But I tried to learn from the 5,000 or so mistakes I made that first year.
All I’m saying is, thank god you first-timers have me to now tell you exactly what you should do in your first year of being an entrepreneur. Do everything I say below or you’ll probably fail. I’m dead serious.
- Don’t hire anyone. Only hire people when you are absolutely desperate for more hands. And then start with freelancers. So you can fire them right away. When people raise money from VCs I notice the first thing they do is hire people. After my first company, which was profitable from day one and never raised a dollar, I started a second company where I raised $30 million from VCs and then hired $30 million worth of people, was fired as CEO and from the board, they then raised another $50 million or so and sold a year or so ago for about $1.
- Keep the cash. If VCs put money in your business then no matter what they say, keep cash in the bank. Don’t act like a big company all of a sudden. Do you really need your lawyer at $400 an hour to take notes at a board meeting? Do you really need a board meeting? You don’t need a secretary until you have at least five, paying, profitable customers, if ever. You don’t need a head of sales or marketing your first year. You are the head of sales and marketing. You don’t need any VPs. You’re all VPs. You just started!
- Get a customer. In order, here is the easiest cash you can get for your business: Customers, borrow against receivables, borrow against your house, friends and family, angels, venture capitalists, the public. Note that the VCs are near the end. Maybe you never need them. Why does everyone chase big-time VCs all the time? Do you really need $10 million in the bank. You just started! I shoud’ve made this point number one. Don’t even start your business unless you have a customer.
- Get a customer, part II. Give equity if you have to. Sell your first baby (or take mine). Do whatever it takes to get one paying customer. If you are a content site: get a sponsor. If you are a product or a service, get a customer. If you can’t get a customer then that means you have a shitty product or you’re not passionate enough about it. Go back to the drawing board. Take an extra $5,000 and make some new features. Note: I said “$5,000”. Not “$10 million”.
- Get a customer, part III – I mentioned this last week. Say “yes” to everything. EVERYTHING. If they need surgery performed on them, you’ll do it. If they need a database updated and your company makes tennis balls then say, “no problem, I have a guy for that. He was the database expert of Bangalore. And now he makes tennis balls for us. I’ll send him over Saturday morning to fix your database. And he’ll bring some pastries.”
- Corollary to the above: get the potential customer to say “yes”. Even if you have to do stuff for free. Just get them to yes. They can’t say no, for instance, if you say, “we can blow up your enemy for free.”
- Over-promise and over deliver for every customer. But only the first time. Don’t kill yourself for everyone all the time. You need sleep!
- If a client says, “I’d rather have this conversation in our offices,” then listen to me: DO NOT EVER go to their office. Don’t go there ever again.
- Most important: Stay Lucky. If you don’t stay healthy: physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, in your first year, its a guaranteed failure. I’m an expert on failure. Not having the four legs mentioned above means the chair you are sitting on is going to break and you are going to fall.
- If someone says, “I’m taking a big chance by hiring you”, get paid as quickly as possible. Get paid up front. You’re never going to do business with that person again. If his version of “chance” was hiring you then that’s it. He’s back to the pencil factory for his next vendor (no insult to pencil factory workers.)
- Every Friday, pay for a masseuse to come in for all of your employees. This assumes you have an office. Ideally, you have no office. But if you do, and employees are there, then get a masseuse. Make: “thank god it’s Friday” mean to your employees: “I’m so glad I’m going into the office today.” I had 50 or so employees at my first business when we got sold. Massages for everyone except me on Fridays (I don’t like anyone to touch me).
- I’m horrible at followup. But you have to do it. If you have a potential client, move it from the phone to the meeting, to dinner as quickly as possible. Dinner seals the deal. Pick up the tab. Ask about their love lives. If they are lonely, hook them up with your best single friend of the appropriate gender and sexual preference.
- Once they are a client, make them a partner. There’s three ways to do that:
Always hold out the bait that they can eventually make the jump from their crappy job at the pencil factory to the cool VP of Marketing position eventually opening up at your company (no offense to pencil factories).
Ask for advice. Ask them what else do they need that you can help them with, for free if you have to (over promise and over deliver the first time).
Ask them if they know anyone else who might need your services.
The best new customers are your old customers. The second best new customers are your old customers’ friends.
- In all of your spare time, do favors for your clients. Hire their mentally-challenged nephews. Contribute to their charities. Volunteer where they volunteer. Give double everyone else when they run in one of those stupid marathons for cancer. I say “stupid” because why can’t the cancer thing just ask for the money without forcing people to run for 26 miles. Your entire free moments of the first year of being an entrepreneur should be spent thinking of favors to do for your clients. Use the techniques of “Super connecting” to build up your clients’ networks. The bigger their networks, the more valuable yours becomes. Don’t horde your network or your favors.
- Fire immediately any employee with a negative attitude. Employees start to smoke in the stairwell and talk about you. So negative attitudes spread like a cancer. The only way to get rid of advanced cancer is radical chemotherapy to burn off the bad cells. Fire all negative employees immediately. No second chances. You won’t regret it. This doesn’t mean keep only yes-men. But the no-people have to work with you, not against you. If they start grumbling in anger, then they are fired.
- If someone wants to be your head of sales, only hire them if they are immediately bringing in enough revenues and profits to cover their salary. Everyone else is a waste of time.
Corollary: if someone makes an intro for you and it doesn’t work out (i.e. no customer results out of it) then never listen to them again. They gave their best shot and it didn’t work. So their second best shot won’t work either. And once you are on their third best shot then you’re probably an idiot.
- Reseller agreements are for suckers. Companies have a hard enough time selling their own products. Nobody really gives a shit about your products or services. Maybe in year two. But in year one, if someone wants to resell you then say, “sure, give me some phone numbers to call right now.” Then refer to the corollary above.
- Steal your competitors’ customers from them. Remember, they over-promised and over-delivered the first time. Then they began to disappoint (or perform like everyone else). Call up the decision maker and offer to do a little project for a little bit of money and totally over-deliver. You’ll be first on the speed dial when your competitor eventually disappoints. Which they will. Nobody can make the best purple tennis ball forever. Remember the easiest new customer is…err… your old customers! And then their friends. And then…your competitors’ customers.
- Finally, don’t make any of these nine mistakes. By the way, I plagiarized the post that link goes to. But you’ll never find where I plagiarized it from. Just don’t make those nine mistakes in your first year or you will fail. Free PDF of my latest book if you can guess where I take the 9 mistakes from.
Then, on the first day of your second year, if you follow the above, you’ll have customers, cash flows, a network of contacts, new friends who will kill for you, and your entire personality will be different. For the worse. So go back, try to repeat all of the above, and stay healthy. In order to stay sane while you get rich. By the way, you still might fail on that first business. But now it’s too late for you. You’re never going back to the pencil factory. You’re an animal, you hunt in the wild, you dig your sharp teeth into flesh and enjoy it, and at the top of the mountain you roar like a lion and everyone cowers in fear.
Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him@jaltucher.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Overworked? 4 Signs You Need to Recharge
Take a cue from endurance athletes: Here are four ways to tell you're about to hit a performance wall. by Jeff Haden in INC.
Sometimes it’s obvious we need a break, but in most cases we figure it out too late. When you work double-digit hours and Sundays are no longer a day of rest, feeling overworked can become the new normal. Even so you’ll eventually hit a wall, and when that happens it can take days and even weeks to recover the enthusiasm, creativity, and motivation you’ve lost.
Fortunately a few of the same techniques endurance athletes use to detect the need for additional recovery can be used to indicate when you need to recharge your work batteries. Where elite athletes are concerned, chronic overtraining can actually defeat the fitness purpose and result in decreased stamina, power, and speed; sometimes the harder they work the slower they get.
The same thing happens to us when we’re overworked. We put in more hours to compensate… and get even less done. So how can you tell the difference between feeling overworked and really overworking yourself?
I asked Jeremiah Bishop for some simple techniques anyone can use to avoid hitting a wall. Jeremiah is a professional mountain bike rider for Cannondale Factory Racing. He's a twelve-time member of the U.S. national team and is to mountain bike racing what an NBA All-Star is to basketball (except he’s currently not out on strike).
Here are ways to ensure you stay at your professional best:
Check your resting heart rate. Every day, before you get out of bed, take your pulse. (There are plenty of free apps that make it easy. Some even log results.) Most of the time your heart rate will stay within a few beats per minute. But when you’re overworked and stressed your body sends more oxygen to your body and brain by increasing your heart rate. (The same thing happens when athletes overtrain and their bodies struggle to recover.) If your heart rate is up in the morning, do whatever it takes to get a little extra rest or sleep that night.
Check your emotions. Having a bad day? Feeling irritable and short-tempered? If you can’t put your finger on a specific reason why, chronic stress and fatigue may have triggered a physiological response and sent more cortisol and less dopamine to your brain. Willing yourself to be in a better mood won’t overcome the impact of chemistry, and in extreme cases the only cure is a break.
Check your weight. Lose or gain more than a percent of body weight from one day to the next and something’s wrong. Maybe yesterday was incredibly stressful and you failed to notice you didn’t eat and drink enough… or maybe you failed to notice just how much you actually ate. Lack of nourishment and hydration can put the hurt on higher-level mental functions (which may be why when we’re overworked and feeling stressed we instinctively want to perform routine, less complex tasks.) And eating too much food—well, we all know the impact of that.
Check your, um, output. Urine color can indicate a lack of hydration (although sometimes it indicates you created really expensive urine after eating a ton of vitamins your body could not absorb.) The lighter the color the more hydrated you are. Hydration is a good thing. Proper hydration aids the absorption of nutrients and helps increase energy levels. If your urine is darker than usual the cure is simple: Drink a lot of water.
The key is to monitor each of these over a period of time so you develop a feel for what is normal for you. Pay special attention on weekends and vacations, and if you notice a dramatic change, especially a positive one, that’s a sure sign you need to change your workday routine.
Don’t say this sounds like something only elite athletes need to worry about. We all want to be the best we can possibly be, no matter what our profession, and whenever we slam into the workload wall we are far from our best.
And don’t say you don’t have the time to take a short break or get a little more sleep. You owe it to yourself to find a way.
Eventually your mind and your body will hit a wall and make you, so why not do take care of yourself, and improve your performance, on your terms?
Sometimes it’s obvious we need a break, but in most cases we figure it out too late. When you work double-digit hours and Sundays are no longer a day of rest, feeling overworked can become the new normal. Even so you’ll eventually hit a wall, and when that happens it can take days and even weeks to recover the enthusiasm, creativity, and motivation you’ve lost.
Fortunately a few of the same techniques endurance athletes use to detect the need for additional recovery can be used to indicate when you need to recharge your work batteries. Where elite athletes are concerned, chronic overtraining can actually defeat the fitness purpose and result in decreased stamina, power, and speed; sometimes the harder they work the slower they get.
The same thing happens to us when we’re overworked. We put in more hours to compensate… and get even less done. So how can you tell the difference between feeling overworked and really overworking yourself?
I asked Jeremiah Bishop for some simple techniques anyone can use to avoid hitting a wall. Jeremiah is a professional mountain bike rider for Cannondale Factory Racing. He's a twelve-time member of the U.S. national team and is to mountain bike racing what an NBA All-Star is to basketball (except he’s currently not out on strike).
Here are ways to ensure you stay at your professional best:
Check your resting heart rate. Every day, before you get out of bed, take your pulse. (There are plenty of free apps that make it easy. Some even log results.) Most of the time your heart rate will stay within a few beats per minute. But when you’re overworked and stressed your body sends more oxygen to your body and brain by increasing your heart rate. (The same thing happens when athletes overtrain and their bodies struggle to recover.) If your heart rate is up in the morning, do whatever it takes to get a little extra rest or sleep that night.
Check your emotions. Having a bad day? Feeling irritable and short-tempered? If you can’t put your finger on a specific reason why, chronic stress and fatigue may have triggered a physiological response and sent more cortisol and less dopamine to your brain. Willing yourself to be in a better mood won’t overcome the impact of chemistry, and in extreme cases the only cure is a break.
Check your weight. Lose or gain more than a percent of body weight from one day to the next and something’s wrong. Maybe yesterday was incredibly stressful and you failed to notice you didn’t eat and drink enough… or maybe you failed to notice just how much you actually ate. Lack of nourishment and hydration can put the hurt on higher-level mental functions (which may be why when we’re overworked and feeling stressed we instinctively want to perform routine, less complex tasks.) And eating too much food—well, we all know the impact of that.
Check your, um, output. Urine color can indicate a lack of hydration (although sometimes it indicates you created really expensive urine after eating a ton of vitamins your body could not absorb.) The lighter the color the more hydrated you are. Hydration is a good thing. Proper hydration aids the absorption of nutrients and helps increase energy levels. If your urine is darker than usual the cure is simple: Drink a lot of water.
The key is to monitor each of these over a period of time so you develop a feel for what is normal for you. Pay special attention on weekends and vacations, and if you notice a dramatic change, especially a positive one, that’s a sure sign you need to change your workday routine.
Don’t say this sounds like something only elite athletes need to worry about. We all want to be the best we can possibly be, no matter what our profession, and whenever we slam into the workload wall we are far from our best.
And don’t say you don’t have the time to take a short break or get a little more sleep. You owe it to yourself to find a way.
Eventually your mind and your body will hit a wall and make you, so why not do take care of yourself, and improve your performance, on your terms?
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
In between motivation
Do you remember how the last sales training motivated you to read more about sales and spend more time planning and preparing your calls and visits?
Remember how that seemed exactly what you wanted for about two weeks and how your focus trailed off again two weeks later?
Remember how your colleague hit a 200K deal and that woke you up again and made you read more articles and prepare your calls again, for about two weeks?
This is what we call FOCUS.
In one of my previous articles, I discussed the Reticular Activating System and how you can 'teach' your brain to focus on the things that are necessary to reach your goals.
Needless to say that if your goals aren't clear to begin with, you'll have a hard time focusing.
So...you find yourself in between focus-peaks.
How do you re-focus and switch ON again?
You can't be switched on everyday and all day, you may argue.
Well, I would agree that you have to balance your efforts in order to continuously be at your best. And emptying your energy and brain reservoirs certainly isn't the way to go.
However, if you have clear goals, and you have established that those goals will make you happy - you DO have endless energy to pursue those goals.
Quantify your goals and recreate what that means in the number of deals you will need to close in order for you to reach your goal. Quantify how many quotes/business offers you typically need to have in your pipeline for you to expect that amount of business in signed deals. Quantify how many calls you need to make to get to that number of quotes. And break it down per quarter, per month, per week and per business day.
If you calculate that you need 40 calls per day to get 10 deals that will meet your monthly target - not your boss's - YOUR target, then wasting time chatting at the coffee machine may seem a lot less attractive all of a sudden.
With that said, if you DID make your 40 calls, there IS time to reward yourself and take a bit of steam off by chatting with coworkers, playing ping-pong or other leisure.
So, what about the In Between?
How can I regain my focus and energy if I am in between those peaks of attention?
PLAN your daily, weekly, monthly infuse of motivational support, interesting sales tricks, and mentoring conversation.
If you want to make progress, why just rely on your own discipline and insights, why not ask for someone else's help.
If it's a direct sales colleague - all the better. You probably both have the same issue. If you think someone else at your firm, or your ex-boss may be of great value and offer good insight and self-reflection, why don't you plan for a breakfast meeting to start the day energized?
The conclusion is:
You can wait for your sales manager or CEO to motivate you, but ultimately you are chasing your own dreams, and there's no-one more capable and interested in achieving those goals than you. You just need to make it happen.
Make it happen!
Happy selling,
www.salesguru.nl
Remember how that seemed exactly what you wanted for about two weeks and how your focus trailed off again two weeks later?
Remember how your colleague hit a 200K deal and that woke you up again and made you read more articles and prepare your calls again, for about two weeks?
This is what we call FOCUS.
In one of my previous articles, I discussed the Reticular Activating System and how you can 'teach' your brain to focus on the things that are necessary to reach your goals.
Needless to say that if your goals aren't clear to begin with, you'll have a hard time focusing.
So...you find yourself in between focus-peaks.
How do you re-focus and switch ON again?
You can't be switched on everyday and all day, you may argue.
Well, I would agree that you have to balance your efforts in order to continuously be at your best. And emptying your energy and brain reservoirs certainly isn't the way to go.
However, if you have clear goals, and you have established that those goals will make you happy - you DO have endless energy to pursue those goals.
Quantify your goals and recreate what that means in the number of deals you will need to close in order for you to reach your goal. Quantify how many quotes/business offers you typically need to have in your pipeline for you to expect that amount of business in signed deals. Quantify how many calls you need to make to get to that number of quotes. And break it down per quarter, per month, per week and per business day.
If you calculate that you need 40 calls per day to get 10 deals that will meet your monthly target - not your boss's - YOUR target, then wasting time chatting at the coffee machine may seem a lot less attractive all of a sudden.
With that said, if you DID make your 40 calls, there IS time to reward yourself and take a bit of steam off by chatting with coworkers, playing ping-pong or other leisure.
So, what about the In Between?
How can I regain my focus and energy if I am in between those peaks of attention?
PLAN your daily, weekly, monthly infuse of motivational support, interesting sales tricks, and mentoring conversation.
If you want to make progress, why just rely on your own discipline and insights, why not ask for someone else's help.
If it's a direct sales colleague - all the better. You probably both have the same issue. If you think someone else at your firm, or your ex-boss may be of great value and offer good insight and self-reflection, why don't you plan for a breakfast meeting to start the day energized?
The conclusion is:
You can wait for your sales manager or CEO to motivate you, but ultimately you are chasing your own dreams, and there's no-one more capable and interested in achieving those goals than you. You just need to make it happen.
Make it happen!
Happy selling,
www.salesguru.nl
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