New post @ 1600 Wall Street

I’ve just posted something about how a company gets AIDS in my other blog.

I’ve been experimenting with the header image. Still undecided about it. Any suggestions? (Angel, got a better photo of your toe?)

My new Blog

Of late I’ve been spending a lot of time swimming at the deep end of the pool in the business world.

I’ve recorded a few of those experiences in this blog and will continue to do so. I do however want to keep Bryan’s Cafe purely social so I’ve decided to channel anything business or professional-related into my new focused blog, Tales From The Street.

As I’ve mentioned before, I write for 2 reasons, one to help me think, the other to feed my age-old compulsion to write my ideas down. Its just my way of seeing if I’m progressing.

So feel free to stop by Tales From The Street if you’re in a mood to listen to some business rant or just wanna offer some ideas.

OPM-OPR Principle

OPM – Other People’s Money.
OPR – Other People’s Resources.

When I was in college a friend of mine whispered to me about his secret to making a million dollars.

He said he why use our own money to set up a business when we can get a free ride with OPM-OPR, the assumption being he could magically talk people into giving him that money. Impressed we toasted his great plan with a milk shake at McDonalds.

Ok so I was naive.

I had completely forgotten about it until someone mentioned that term yesterday. I had a good laugh for actually believing it was a secret strategy.

Truth is, OPM-OPR has been around for a thousand years. When the bank gives you a car or housing loan, it lends you its depositors’ money. That’s OPM. Secondly, when other people let you use their assets to run your business like how Adsense uses your blog to carry its ads, that’s OPR.

Everyone’s doing it. So much for secret strategies.

Do slap yourself silly when someone tries to enthrall you with fancy business terms.

Is OPM a good thing? I think it is, not because it frees you from risk (it doesn’t) but because it gives you a buffer in case something does go wrong.

Somebody dropped some money

I found a 10 cent piece on the sidewalk today. Yay!!

See this whiskey glass? That’s where I keep the orphaned coins I meet. I must have picked up at least ten 1-cent coins the last 2 months alone. I’d spot them on mall floors, sidewalks, bank counters, everywhere.

They’re not very popular are they, being kicked around like little projectiles and snubbed even by the ‘highly’ paid fast food cashiers. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who bothers to pick them up. Do you bother?

My dad has a saying. If you’re one cent short of a million dollars, you’re still not a millionaire.

Some day I know I’ll understand the wisdom of that statement.

Perfectionism and success

Does perfectionism bring you success?

For me the first clue of perfectionism is the fastidious use of language.

SpecializED in mobile sales. Its a statement of history. It tells the customer what they did yesterday but not today.

Never mind. If you wanna see something really interesting check this out.

Perfectionism schmerfectionism.

You can be as perfect as you like, we’ll just sit here and make our silly mistakes and rake in our daily thousands thank you.

Now that’s something to chew on…

The value of your degree

We hear it every year. Someone who never went to school makes it to the list of top 10 richest men in the country. And then you look at your miserable degree on the wall, the stack of overdue bills and wonder what went wrong.

From young we’re trained to study hard, get a job, secure a happy future. But things are not adding up and you suspect there’s more to it than that.

I don’t read the get rich guru books (wanna recommend any good ones? ) but if being filthy rich is your target, I don’t think any of them will recommend a 9-5 career. How do I know? Lets do the math.

Lets assume you just graduated and your degree allows you to sell your time (via employment) at $120 a day. In 1 month @25 working days you’re paid $3,000. In 1 year you get $36k.

Now let’s assume you get a 15% salary increase every year for the next 15 years after which your salary peaks at $25k a month. In 30 years you would have been paid roughly $6.2 million for your time. By then you’re near retirement age.

Knock off half of the $6.2 million for taxes, insurance, education for the kids in that 30 years and you’re left with about $3 million.

Knock off half of that for buying 2 houses and the 5-6 cars you would have owned in those 30 years and you’re left with $1.5 million.

Would you set up a business with a friend?

Your best friend has a great idea to make money. Because you two have such great chemistry he invites you to become a partner in business. Would you? Should you?

All the business people I know tell me the same thing, “Don’t do it,” citing one bad experience or another. All had parted ways with their once-good friends.

I can see their point. Business is about making decisions – tough decisions. When you put everything on the line, you tend to become less tolerant about mistakes and different opinions. What you find funny about a friend can suddenly become the very thing that harms your business.

The biggest killer of a friendship-cum-partnership I’ve been told is differences in opinion. I’ve never been in this situation before so I’m no expert but must it be true that business partnerships among friends is something impossible?

What if you could separate the domains of the two working friends so that they’re not in a position of having to compete for ideas, opinions and decisions with each other. For example what if friend A just focuses on writing game software and friend B focuses on selling it.

By separating the responsibilities (the further the better) can the friendship escape being judged by some business criteria? I mean we don’t judge the weight of an object with a measuring tape because its the wrong tool for the purpose so why would anyone use business criteria to measure friendship.

I get the answer…silly me. I’m dreaming eh.

Anyway a friend of mine is thinking of setting up a partnership with his best friend. They’re cool guys in their mid 20s. I’d hate to see the untoward happen and knowing these two fellas I know that something will happen. But how do you convince someone to ‘waste time’ on little details like this when the smell of money is so strong.

What about you, would you set up a business with your friend?

Should you turn your hobby into a business?

So what do you guys think, is it a good idea?

My friends think I’m very good with a camera (not the cheap phone-camera shots in this blog though). Some tell me I should set up a professional photo gallery and sell my creative work. Yeah right. Haven’t they ever heard of starving artists before?

Actually I’ve never thought of taking my hobby to that level. Yes I enjoy photography immensely as much as I do astronomy but I’m just an amatuer who happens to appreciate composition a little better than the average dude.

Furthermore this is not Berlin or San Francisco where they appreciate art cum photo galleries and even if it was, how much do they think a photograph here can fetch?

But that’s not the point of the question. The point is can you turn a hobby into a successful business and still call it a hobby at the end of it all?

Let me break down that question.

Firstly is it possible to turn a hobby into a business? Definitely. Is it possible to make that a successful business? That’s harder to answer. How’s this: If you know nuts about business, you’ll turn it into a disaster.

The third part of the question – can you still call a hobby a hobby after it starts ringing in cash for you? For me, it’s a no. I define a hobby as something you turn to to take your mind off the boring and stressful things in life. Sort of a welcome distraction.

When does a welcome distraction turn into a unwelcome distraction? When it turns into a dull ot stressful routine that you can’t shake off day in and day out.

You like cooking? K, try doing that for 10 hours a day 6 days a week. Remember you’re cooking for strangers now and not to your own fancies and customers like to complain and give you all kinds of shit. After 3 months of that, will you still call it a hobby? My guess is: probably not.

That’s why I think the best way to kill a hobby is to turn it into a business. Unless you’re saying that your hobby is making money in which case I’ll say my hobby is taking your money away from you

Make $ with no effort. Sure or nootttt?

Actually it happens all the time. People just don’t talk about it so let me say it. I bought some shares on SGX last year. The returns so far has exceeded my expectations. What was my effort? Zilch.

Ok so maybe that’s a bit of a stretch. If you wanna get technical about it, I did do some research on the company’s fundamentals before I bought in. I did seek the advice from my broker. I did glance through the stock listings occasionally to keep track of the stock price and I did incur an opportunity cost. So technically its not true that I did absolutely nothing. I did next to nothing.

To me making money is all about harnessing labor and capital. Nothing new there. You can put in 100% labor as in working 9-5 like a dog or you can put in 100% capital and make someone else do the dirty work for you. Actually you can also add any mixture of these two to have your own owner-cum-operator thingy but thats another story.

For me I prefer the capital market – investing money because the money works 24×7. I can take advantage of compound interest to earn more without doing anything extra. I can watch TV all morning in my pajamas and make prank calls to my pals in the office after lunch. Whereas if I get a job, I stop producing wealth after hours and on weekends. Plus I have to grovel and polish a few apples. Definitely not my best talent.

But to make money without any capital or labor? Dream on buddy, ain’t gonna happen.

This is just my bit to say that there IS such a thing as making money with next to no effort and more people are in it than you think (why do you think shopping malls are busy during office hours?). All you need is some capital and a good head between your shoulders.

And where to get capital? Go figure.

Is high IQ necessary for success?

Not in my books. There are far too many MBAs and PhDs from Ivy league unis out there who flunk badly in the real world. I mean failed businesses, trashed friendships, divorces and shit like that.

What I do know is that high IQ people tend to be unhappier than not-so-smart people. Whenever there’s a problem, a not-so-smart guy sees one solution but a smart one will see five or six. The smart mind likes to spend all its energy pondering all the possible permutations and scenarios long after the not-so-smart guy has taken off and finished the challenge.

I’ve seen companies that are led by very “bright” CEOs who probably qualify to be Mensa members but cannot increase corporate earnings to save their lives. They suffer from too many meetings, analysis paralysis and basically a fear of making the wrong choice in a sea of too much data. (Haha, reminds me of my pal who’s working in the CRM line).

So what is necessary for business success? Well, get a clue and look at our Asian millionaires. Ask yourselves how many of them might even understand the meaning of regression analysis and complex marketing theory.

My answer is simple. Two things – experience and foresight. Nothing beats having “eaten salt” and having a solid gut instinct. After all, the backbone of all business – risk – is an emotional number.

What about IQ? I think its somewhere around number 5, after capital and location.

I’m not saying that a good brain is useless. Far from it. Intelligence is just a tool and you can use it to solve problems that require the tool, for example a design problem. But try to use it to cool down an angry customer/lover and you might get beaten on the head with a handbag.