It’s been a long time since I posted on Tech Nomads.  Kane and I have been talking about bringing this site back.  Lots have changed since the last post on here.

 

I am still consulting for businesses and have been creating some innovative strategies for local businesses who want to get leads and sales from the internet.

 

Go check out my blog about Local Online Marketing and Local Search Marketing.

Thanks,

Tim

Sorry for the hiatus.

Unplanned issues came up with my pool service business and I have had to go hands on full time for the last month and a half.

I will have a longer post about it up on www.TimeIncomeMobility.net, which will be my main site from here on out.

Thanks for your understanding and I hope to see you on T.I.M.

~ Tim

 

I have harped on developing a nongeographically-based income as the surest way to add freedom to your life.  In nearly all of human history, to survive we had to make our living where we stood.  Eventually, interest on loans and much later corporations were created allowing the landed wealthy to create income from sources other than their landholdings and conquest of others landholdings.

So how do I make my money?  I do marketing consulting for a handful of clients, which has been referral-only for several years now.  It is almost exclusively done over the phone.  I have a couple clients who live near me and we will grab lunch or dinner together once every few months.  I don’t have to do these lunch meetings, but I find them fun so I don’t mind.  If I am scheduled to do a session with a client while traveling, I just get on the phone. 

I have just recently started implementing my own online businesses.  I have been helping others build online businesses and my friends have shamed me into doing what I do for others on my own websites.  I am working with one of my friends, Michael McLellan on an ebook that showcases how he went from poor Midwestern farmboy to a world traveling Tech Nomad. 

An Aside:
Here is a lesson I have learned already.  I was writing this ebook with the goal of getting it published on Escape Artist.  After many emails with one of their representatives, I found I would have little influence on how the book got marketed.  I felt I wouldn’t be able to sell very many of them if I went with them as the publisher.  My lesson was I wrote an ebook that is over twice as long as the standard ebook because Escape Artist wanted a long book.

I am going to break the ebook into two.  Michael had warned me about what I was doing, but I was stubborn.  The good I got out of this lesson is that I have twice as much content as I need, but the bad is that I could have been selling the book a long time ago.  Speed of implementation should be a high priority.  If other priorities begin to slow implementation, you need to stop and reevaluate all your priorities because you are probably doing something wrong.

 I have started working on a project with my friend and mentor, Joe Polish.  He created a business course with Alex Mandossian, internet marketing guru, a couple of years ago, but didn’t put any resources behind selling it.  I have joined up with Joe to turn that program into a significantly better course for business owners and managers.  Check out the blog at www.stickstrategycoach.com.

I also have a site coming online soon in the equine industry.  I won’t share with you just yet what I am doing until it is firmly established. 

This blog, started with Kane, is meant for using technology to have more freedom in your life.  Many people end up with less freedom, the more technology they have in their lives.  For example, the cell phone or mobile depending on where you’re from.  Let me tell you a bit of history to show you why we have little time because of the cell phone.

A Brief History of the Telephone Sucking Up Our Freedom

When phones were first invented, there wasn’t any such thing as an answering machine.  If the phone rang, and you weren’t there to answer it, you missed the call.  The reverse of this is if you were home, you had to answer it to find out what the call was about.  Companies ended up with loads of receptionists answering phones so calls weren’t missed. 

A rule that came into being, at least in the US, was that if the phone rang you must answer it.  One interesting behavior was a part of phone etiquette.  You should answer the call on the second or third ring to be courteous of the caller.  How messed up is that?  Someone else is calling you, interupting what you are doing and it is you who is being rude if you don’t answer the phone quickly enough. 

The answering machine was invented in 1904, however, in the US they didn’t get widespread use until after the US Government broke up its enforced monopoly on the telephone companies in 1984.  You were not allowed to put any device on the line because the phone companies owned the phone line and the phone in your home.

So most people grew up with the training that when a phone rings you answer it.  Even after the answering machine was widespread, people tended to use them just to screen their calls so they didn’t have to talk to telemarketers or in-laws. 

This behavior was carried over into work and it has been taught to kids today.  A text, or SMS, message comes in on the cell phone and immediately kids are texting back.

Being taught and continuing behaviors that are no longer useful and with the profusion of more communication methods, you will have your time sucked away by other people’s desire to talk to you. 

To correct this, you should not answer your phone.  Every call should go to voicemail or to your assistant.  The only people you should be talking to are those you have verified as to wanting a conversation that is important to you, not the other way around.

A Long Way to Tipperary

What does this have to do with Tech Nomad or Entrepreneurship & Freedom.  Hopefully, the freedom part is self evident.  Probably not.  I am prone to tangents, this one has been a doozy.  Freedom is mostly thought of in political terms, but I think of freedom on a personal level, which is the only place it counts.  Others taking your time through phone calls, email or any form of communication lowers your level of freedom.  You should communicate on your terms.

As for how this connects with entrepreneurship, to have a free life, your business should facilitate your lifestyle not define it.  If you design your business based on outdated thinking or on wrong assumptions, you will have a reduced lifestyle which equals reduced freedom.  One form of outdated thinking and bad assumptions rolled into one is giving your customers every form of access to you. 

Have you ever seen the guys who carry pagers, a cell phone, and a blackberry?  I guarantee you these people are miserable.  If they aren’t getting a call or page, which is rare, they are thinking about when they are going to get one.  You can’t be very productive under those conditions and you can’t enjoy yourself.

This post on Entrepreneurship & Freedom, if you haven’t noticed yet, it dedicated to the freedom half.  If you choose to get into consulting like I did, you should educate your clients to leave you a message.  Everyone of my clients knows that to get a hold of me, they should email me or leave a voicemail and I will get back to them at my earliest convenience.  I had one client who couldn’t get that through his thick skull and would get upset with me.  I would tell him I was sorry, but I wouldn’t change my lifestyle to be at his beckon call.  He hated not having that control over me, so I fired him as a client.

Why Online Businesses

Many people are seduced into thinking that having an Internet business is easier than an offline business.  Yes and no.  Any business improperly designed will a hard business to run and live with it doesn’t matter if it is online or not.  I know several internet gurus who claim how easy their lives are, how little they have to work, etc, but the reality is they work more than they ever did at their jobs and only a few of them have net income that would make it worth the hours.

What they are selling is hope, a dream of the easy life.  But they set their businesses up wrong and they don’t have the easy life.  They could.  One such guy, I won’t name him here even though he has stated this himself, had a crappy life as an internet marketer.  He was making a lot more than when he had a job, but his hours were horrendous–typically 10 -12 hours seven days a week.  He then hired his wife to do some of the work, which he micromanaged for months until she threatened to quit. 

Once he let her do her job, he had more time.  What did he do with that time?  He worked.  He filled his day with more work.  Not long after, he was burnt out.  He hated his lifestyle.  He was going to quit his internet business.

Then he met a guy who actually knew how to run businesses who coached him on how to change his business to one that fit his lifestyle goals.  Within a couple of months, this guy had his work done in 6 hours each day and worked only four days each week.  That may sound like a lot of work to anyone wanting to live without doing any work, but for those who are still working a lot such a reduction is immense.

Think about it.  He went from at least 70 hours a week working every day to 24 hours a week and only working 4 days.  He cut his hours by about two-thirds.  The best part is his income went up. 

This is the same story told by Tim Ferriss in his book the Four Hour Workweek except Tim got his hours down to 4 a week instead of 24. 

In upcoming E & F posts, I promise to spend some time on actually making money, but always with the caveat that you must take into account your lifestyle goals not just your income goals.  You must have Time, Income and Mobility to have the fullest life possible.  You can be happy and content if you don’t have one or two of the three–in theory, I guess.  Having all three in abundance gives you freedom–the freedom to design your lifestyle the way you truly want it.

~ Tim

Some of the recovered previous posts can be found on the Old Posts page. 

I was having DNS issues, tried to fix them.  Screwed up wordpress in the process and when I reinstalled I messed up the database.  I decided to start fresh instead of trying to find someone on short notice to fix my stupidity.

Oh well.  I guess tonight I’ll just have to put up the Entrepreneurship & Freedom post I promised days ago.

Anyone know a good wordpress designer and webmaster, have her or him contact me at tim @ tech-nomad.com.  I have this blog and a couple of others that I’ll need ongoing work on.

Thanks,

Tim