TechnoBuck.com

This is a question that I’ve been making myself lately, specially now, when I’m 2 months away from losing my job and getting my severance.

In Mexico, when a person is fired, without a justified cause, the worker has the right to get at least 3 months of salary + 20 days for each year fully worked. We call this compensation a severance.

I’ve been thinking lately, that maybe is time to use the money I get as severance to open a business and no longer work for company, and during this time I’ve been analyzing some potential businesses. When I see one that is interesting, the first question I make myself is: Is this a good business? And then I start analyzing the profitability, the demand, required capital, etc. with the purpose of finding out if it is a good business or not.

However, I think I hadn’t taken in consideration another question, which is: Am I the right guy for this business?. I guess this question is even more important than whether a business is good or not, and I guess I have some experience on the consequences of not analyzing this carefully.

Around 4 years ago, it occurred to me the idea of breeding Hamsters. I saw on the Entrepreneur magazine, that a guy of Mexico City was promoting a”franchise” to setup a Hamster breeding business. As I like pets very much, specially dogs and cats, I thought that a Hamster would be pretty much the same thing. Analyzing their nature a little bit, I realized that their pregnancy period lasts just a few weeks and that a mother can have up to 15 to 20 little hamsters at a time. I did the math and the growth was basically exponential, and I immediately saw the business potential, and I went over to Mexico city to buy around 200 hamsters, most of them females.

I found out very soon that I had jumped to a business without doing my “due diligence” first, and I paid this mistake at a very high cost. I never analyzed my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, in a few words, my SWOT analysis.

I live in Guadalajara, but the breeding business was in Ocotlan, that is around one and a half hour away from Guadalajara, so I had to hire a boy that could help me to breed the animals during the weekdays. This guy, just went to take a look at the hamsters every now and then and when I was working there on the weekends, time wasn’t enough to just fill in the bottles of water.

Due to this, the animals started to die, and I didn’t have enough time to sell the few hamsters that were able to survive. Besides, I realized that hamsters are not dogs or cats, and I started to hate them very soon.

Is breeding hamsters, a bad business? No, absolutely not. What happens, is that this business was not for me. Besides the fact that I realized that I didn’t like hamsters, I didn’t have the necessary time to run the business in the right way. Any business, if it is not managed properly and with the wrong people handling it, it is destined to failure.

So now, I have to be very careful, and I have to make a detailed analysis before investing my hard earned money, in order to make sure that the business is good and that I’m the right guy for it.

Technorati Tags: Business, due diligence, hamster, severance, swot

Test of Google Docs

I saw that Shoemoney.com was recommending GoogleDocs a lot and I decided to give it a try. I read most of the comments from current GoogleDoc users and they seem to like it as well.

I like the idea of having a place to put all my files and being able to access and work them no matter where I’m located. This post that I’m writing at this time is made in GoogleDocs, I want to test the capability of making wordpress posts from here, if it works then this is great news for me as currently I can’t acess my blog from work due to the firewall.

Another feature I like is that I can check misspellings in English and Spanish so this is great as well.

If this application works, then there is no need for me to keep posting via email when I’m not able to access my blog, because if I have access to a web browser, then I can post to my blog as well. I can even insert images, links, separators, tables, etc. so many things I couldn’t do with posting to my wordpress blog via email.

So let’s see how it works, if you are seeing this post in my blog, then it means it worked really well.

UPDATE: To write in my blog, now I use Windows Live Writer or BlogDesk which are Desktop applications that let you write something you plan to post into your blog, without the need to be connected to the Internet. Later on, when you connect to the Internet, you can syncronize what you wrote with your blog. These applications are also  great because you don’t have to worry about learning HTML or any other type of code, to write, format or add videos or images. 

On Friday of this week, just the day after the Thanksgiving day in the US, I read a post from ShoeMoney.com that made me think of all the things I’m thankful to God.

The post of Shoemoney.com is titled “Things I’m thankful for this year” and I really liked it because it inspired me to think about all the blessings I’ve received from God so far.

God has been very generous with me and in some ocasions I think he had also saved my and my family’s life in several ocasions, so this makes me think as if God has a special place for us somewhere in his heart and I also think that all these miracles and blessings are because God is expecting us to do something great for our brothers and sisters sooner or later.

In my case these are the things I thank God every day:

1) My family: I have a beautiful wife who gave me two great little girls, that have brought light to my life as when I was single, I felt very lonely and my life was kind of empty, emotionally speaking. These three girls makes me see life in a different color.

2) My Parents: I was very lucky to have a mother like mine, with his big faith in God and a woman that is always thinking in helping other people and a hard working father that I admire and respect a lot. My parents have always loved each other and I don’t remember having seem them fighting or anything like that. I think that is one of the reasons why I had a very happy childhood.

3) Being alive and with reasonable good health: This is so obvious that sometimes we forget to thank God for this. There so many people out there that would kill for having half our current health.

4) My house and my work: Thanks God I’ve had decent jobs that have allowed me to buy a house, it is really small, but it doesn’t matter, at least it is ours, (well almost, as I almost finish paying my mortgage). Thanks to this I’ve been able to provide my family a certain stability that is really good for my wife and my kids. Unfortunately I will lose my job in January 2008 but I’m still young with more than 13 years of experience so I know I will get something soon (or better, I expect to start making some money from my websites).

So thanks God, I hope you can keep giving me the faith and health needed to keep on working hard so I can give the best to my family.

Technorati Tags: blessing, family, God, kids, thanksgiving, wife

I did a test today to see how many effective hours I spent at the office. I have always had the idea that there’s a lot of improductive time. In order to do this test, I used a free online service called slimtimer.com which was very handy and easy to use.

Today was an average busy day with nothing special in particular. Do you want to see how productive I was today?

Out of the 8 hours and 40 minutes I spent today at the office, only 5 and a half hours were truly effective time dedicated at work, I also spent 2 hours and 30 minutes in Non-Productive tasks. I’m glad to report that I was busy today and I didn’t spend too much time navigating on Internet, which I confess I do very often when I don’t have too many things to do.

I think it is very important to track the time we spend, probably more important than managing money and the reason is that you can always recover any money lost but time is not recoverable, and a well invested time can produce a lot of money if used wisely.

It comes to my mind the movie “The Persuit of Happyness” with Will Smith. If you watched the movie, you might remember that Chris Gardner (Will Smith) valued every minute of his time in such a way, that he didn’t drink water at the office so that he didn’t have to go to the bathroom, in order to get more time to keep making phone calls to prospect more customers. Now it is important to note as well, that Chris Gardner had to be extremely effective working only the hours of his shift otherwise we would lose his place at the shelter, who knows how many days I’ve arrived late at home after work, because I wasted precious time at the early hours of the office doing a lot of Non-Productive tasks, and later staying “extra hours” to finish the regular work.

I will keep trying to manage my time more efficiently, I’m sure I can get a lot of hours that I can dedicate to my online business without sacrificing too much.

Technorati Tags: chris gardner, persuit of happyness, slimtimer, time, time management, will smith

Reading through Yaro’s Starak’s “Blog Profits BluePrint” I found that he uses Openads.org to manage the ads on his blog. I’ve never heard of this software before, so I went to Openads.org to see what that software is about and after reading the manual, and making some tests on my sites, I think it is an excellent piece of software and the best of all is that it is absolutely free.

One of the features that I like about OpenAds is that it allows me to place banners according to the type of visitor I have. I mean, if I get avisitor from Spain then I can show ads targeted to that country and if another visitor comes from the UK, I can show ads targeted for them. This is called “GeoTargeting Marketing” and it uses the IP address of the visitor to figure out from which continent, country or city they are coming from.

I really was in need of a tool like this because currently, on my Spanish blog, I’m showing ads that are targeted for the USA and not for people that comes from Spain or Latin America where Spanish is spoken, and even though all these countries speak the same language, each country has very specific characteristics, so I would have do a campaign for each country. In theory, I should be able to get better results from my ads as they match my audience much more closer

I’ll keep making some tests with this software up to this weekend, apparently I can also manage all kind of ads such as Google Adsense, so I might end-up managing all my ads with this.

UPDATE: Now OpenAds is “OpenX”, it is essentially the same open source software but they changed their name for some reason. I still use it and I highly recommend it. On the left is the new logo

Technorati Tags: geo targeting, geo targeting marketing, open ads