RJ Martino's Web Log » Small Business

4-Hour Work Week – Elimination

rjmartino — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:01:52 +0000

Does a 4-hour work week seem like a pie in the sky to you? Not to me. After reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss, I’m convinced it’s possible. Ferris’ unique journey is a compelling read. More importantly, it has increased my efficiency and therefore… profits.

4HWW Principles

Timothy Ferris found four basic principles that when combined will help you escape the doldrums of every-day life, create success and prosperity without long hours, difficult bosses, commuting, or a time clock. Change your world by riding this roller-coaster to efficiency.

One of these four principles, Elimination, has left me without the ton of bricks I used to carry around for no reason. I’ve removed my least profitable projects, stopped commuting, simplified my processes, found my inefficiencies and dropped them, found my strengths and mulitplied them.

Elimination

Elimination is removing those things in your life or business that drag you down, tie up your time, cause errors or distractions. If you change your paradigm and see your day in terms of “what do I have or what do I do that really doesn’t help?” then you can eliminate and simplify – getting more done in less time. And I don’t mean more in quantity – volume isn’t the key. How you reach your goals is the key. Any activity, customer, or project that is really a time-waster should be considered for elimination.

My Personal Elimination Tools

StayFocused by Transfusion Media is an extension to the Google Chrome browser that lives up to its name. It helps you stay focused by limiting the time you can browse websites you have designated as time-wasters. Track your time on websites and then configure them into StayFocusd. Like an automatic diet you’ll soon spend less time surfing and more time working.
Other Inbox is a tool that analyzes your incoming email and places low-priority emails out of the way so you easily focus on what is truly important, not what appears to be urgent. This works great with Gmail.
Google Voice gives you more control over your voice messages. Screen calls, read voicemail (which is quicker than listening), and customize your greeting based on who is calling you.
Gmail removes spam better than an any other email client I have every used. Spam is growing; I get over 1,000 spam emails a day. Gmail has the best filter, and it lets me add my own filters. Combined with Other Inbox, and you will never waste time in email again.

Don’t misunderstand me. The 4-Hour Work Week is not a proposal to do more in less time. It teaches you how to identify and do what is most beneficial and leave out the rest. If the most important work is only a fraction of the time you are currently spending, wouldn’t you want to know? Wouldn’t you change your activities to maximize your profit or reach other goals? Get your copy of The 4-Hour Workweek now.

Tell Me

Now it’s your turn to help me. What tools do you use to eliminate wasting time?

(ALMOST) 20 Places That You MUST Register Your Website With

rjmartino — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 17:21:16 +0000

We’ve been getting tons of local (Little Rock) requests for search engine marketing services. We’ve been providing search engine marketing for years but our customers were always large ecommerce web sites. Our customers targeted anyone, anywhere. Our customers didn’t care if you were in New York or Little Rock; if you were looking for widgets, they wanted you to come to their sites.

Internet Marketing for Local Services

But, local companies that only serviced Little Rock Arkansas seemed uninterested. They understood that they needed a web site but didn’t want to spend any money on internet marketing. Slapping the site at the bottom of their business card was “Good Enough.”

Over the last few years, that has changed. They’ve realized that research (whether local or worldwide) starts on ~~the internet~~ google. And we’ve had a lot of luck placing top results for local companies! I think it’s safe to say that it’s easier getting top results for local companies.

The Local Internet Marketing List

Below, I’ve compiled a list of sites that will assist your local internet marketing efforts. Google loves these sites and values their entries. This means that in addition to your information being placed on other sites, your site actually gets ranked higher!

Before you just start submitting your site, do some keyword research, write some optimized descriptions that utilizes those keywords. Good luck and if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Local Directories

Important Directory Sites

Important Yellow Page Sites

Important Review Sites

Important Database Sites

InfoUsa
Localeze

Magento v. osCommerce; Jungledisk v. Mozy

rjmartino — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:59:41 +0000

As you all know, I recently created an AMI which allows a user to instantly launch a Magento ecommerce site using Amazon’s Cloud Computing Technology. So that brings me to two very different points (I should probably break this into two posts):

Point 1: Magento Rules the Ecommerce World

Magento is now more popular (at least more visited/searched) than other major open source ecommerce web applications (Checkout Google, Compete). Currently, I believe Magento is leaps and bounds above any other ecommerce system out. If you don’t agree, I urge you to show me a more fully featured, open source ecommerce system.

Point 2: My Personal Backup is still Jungledisk

I’ve been developing with Amazon’s AWS services for about a year. They’ve really been leading the development of “cloud computing” applications. Their API’s are pretty straight forward and although I have a few complaints, it’s a pretty nice system.

The Amazon S3 Network (which allows you to store data on Amazon’s cloud) has been my latest love. Amazon’s “pay as you go” pricing model makes it competitive even when you compare it to a DIY project.

After checking this out, I wanted to start running my personal backups onto Amazon’s S3 network. I thought I’d have to develop something but then I found JungleDisk. JungleDisk is a Windows and Mac backup system that stores all of your data on Amazon’s S3 network. That means, if someone steals my laptop, all of my data would still be safe. JungleDisk currently costs $20 (one time fee) and Amazon’s S3 network costs me about $6 per month for around 40GB worth of a data.

I’m real happy with JungleDisk and I’m proud to recommend them. Its automated, fast, reliable, and cost-effective. But, they have a few things that they should be worried about… They were recently bought out by Rackspace (Amazon’s cloud computing competitor). Although you can choose to use either Amazon or Rackspace, I’m usually scared to commit to a vendor unless I know their future intentions. I hope things aren’t going to change (JungleDisk claims nothing will change), but you never know. Also, JungleDisk has a very strong competitor in Mozy (Bought by EMC which also claims nothing to will change due to their buyout). Although I have used the mozy system, I stuck with JunlgeDisk b/c of it’s performance and the Amazon’s S3 network. But now, Mozy only costs $5.00 per month! For $5.00, its definitely worth trying. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Mozy and Jungledisk.

My recommendation: personally, I don’t care which backup system you use. You can continue to use 3.5″ floppy disks… but please… please… PLEASE BACKUP. I once had a client pay $10,000 for data recovery. Seriously.

New Apartment Complex

rjmartino — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 05:41:57 +0000

So, we’ve purchased a new apartment complex in Jacksonville, AR. It’s 46 units and is currently full (no discounts given to facebook-friends). It should be a good deal. I’m 100% confident that we bought it at a great price, the cash flow projections look good, the management is solid, and the occupancy rate is high.

We’re doing a good job at aligning our properties such that they are relatively close, the management is getting better as screening tenants, contractors are more understanding of our terms, and most of the properties have similar goals.

With any organization there is a “culture” that everyone buys into… that includes the owners, contactors, employees, management and even the tenants/customers. If you can’t get everyone to buy into the culture, you either have to change the culture or change the people.

The guys at the top typically define the culture… the guys at the bottom have to buy into the culture… if you’re at the bottom and you want to change the culture, you get repromanded… thats why turnover is so much higher at the bottom…. thats why you hear of so many employees that “just didn’t work out.”

If you want to change culture, the guys at the top have to change… and I mean they have to be replaced. Changing people is too hard to do.

Who Gets the Dirty Job

rjmartino — Tue, 15 May 2007 14:44:09 +0000

I have a hard time on small stuff. I know… “don’t sweat the small stuff”… But I can’t help it. One that I ran into last week was trying to determine who should do simple data entry that nobody wanted to do. We had two programmers that were equal, paid equal, and had an equal work load.

The difference between a large company and a small company is that in a small company you have to wear many hats. Sometimes its the “visionary” hat and sometimes its the “trash man” hat. Large companies have a trash man set aside for cleaning, small companies have owners that are sick of seeing trash around the office.

The end of the story is this… I did the simple data entry that nobody wanted to do. And although I hated every second of it, I was reminded that sometimes I have to take off my “I have more important stuff to do” hat and wear my “things have to get done” hat.