End of the first sabbatical trimester

It's been a little over a month since the sabbatical started, so about 1/3 of the way done. Here are a few of my thoughts/impressions at this juncture, and some updates:

The day goes by really fast. The first week or so, it was because I would wake up, read up on my fantasy leagues, play some Mario Kart Wii... But since then, I haven't watched any TV,  played any video games, nor sat around wasting time during the day, and a below average amount during the evening. Granted, the reason for that is because the Milwaukee Brewers fell out of the playoff race and the fall TV season hasn't started yet, but it goes to show that even when you're not wasting time, the day goes fast.

I set a goal to get 4 hours of business related work done a day. I'm still struggling very hard to get there... I'm still at 2-3 hours. I discovered that my house is not conducive to getting my work done, because it's a mess from lack of maintenance since I've been living there the last 8 years. So I've spent a good amount of time fixing it up, with the latest project decluttering (4 bags to Goodwill last week) and painting the kitchen. I want to make "pimp my home office" the next project. I figure if I can make my office an inviting place to work, it'll get me to 4 hours a day a lot easier. Right now I'm compensating by going to Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, Panera, and trying to discover new places to work. I still plan on going to these places to work, but the home office might get me the incremental hours I'm looking for...

The biggest learning for me is to focus on one thing at a time. It's REALLY hard to do that. I'm a divergent thinker, lots of random ideas and thoughts I like to chase. It is one of my strengths, but I do need to hunker down and focus if I want any of those ideas to take off! So I've changed my line of thinking. My original goal was to start 3 ventures, to get failures out of the way. Now I'm going to focus on one project, NOTtheBookStore.com, and then with any leftover time in my 4 hour a day goal, I'll work on other things.

Overall, this has been a great experience. It's been a great mental break from corporate life. The work I do for my own ventures doesn't feel that much like work... it's more getting over fears. I think because of that, I'm not mentally drained at the end of the day like I am from work. Plus not having to fight traffic helps too. In the next "trimester" of my sabbatical, I hope to get to 4 hours of work a day or more, really driving NTBS, and making my house a place I love to work at.

End of the first sabbatical trimester

Pimp my Home Office

It's never too early to start planning how awesome your home office is going to be when you are working for yourself and can't spend the incoming fortune on a home office remodel fast enough.

Fortunately my wife watches HGTV and while I usually can't stand to see what they are doing - they have a cool section online featuring the best Home Offices.

I also found this great article from Inc.com about Setting Up a Home Office.

(Where are the best places to work outside of the home? Check out Best Places to SEEFAD and Pimp My Road Office)

Since I have always wanted a "Masterpiece Theater" home office, here's a few pictures I could find close to my dream home office:







How would you describe your dream home office?

Pimp my Home Office

My 4 Hour Workweek Moment

The book 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris talks about working no more than four hours a week and from anywhere you want... including the beach. I had my 4-Hour Workweek moment last August, which gave me the vision of what I wanted in my life...

My dad's company sent him to a conference in Honolulu, Hawaii... Quite a boondoggle. My mom joined him, and I figure I would too. Free lodging in Hawaii, all I had to do was buy a plane ticket. My dad even offered to cover that to get me out there, but I really didn't need any more incentive to go so I told him thanks, but I'd be more than happy to pay my own way there. This was August of last year.

Rewind back three years... I was an MBA student, and I discovered that buying textbooks at the bookstore was a crock... you could buy books on Amazon.com for at least $20, if not $50-100 cheaper. So after graduation, I started playing around with creating a site that felt just like buying from the campus bookstore, but it pointed you to Amazon instead. I got some revenue out of it, but nothing major.

Back to last August... I had spent the spring of 2008 working on marketing and promoting the website. I dropped almost $1000 on marketing (doesn't sound like much, but I'm closer to the "corporate" part of corporateprenuership than "entrepreneur"). The start of the textbook buying season coincided with my trip to Hawaii. And since students weren't accessible in the summer, all the advertising was done in the spring. So all I could do was watch and see how much revenue would come in every day.

The resort had a wireless connection, and it was accessible from the beach. So every day, after sightseeing, I'd take a swim in the ocean, have dinner, shower, and head to the beach with my laptop. Since Hawaii was 6 hours behind, I was able to check the previous day's revenue while I was still up. Each day I checked... some days would be $30 days, but some days got as high as $120 days. By the end of the week, I was up to almost $500.

I was living the dream... money was rolling in, while I was basically working one hour a night. That's a 7 hour workweek (not quite 4 hours), but when that one hour a day is spent on a laptop on a beach, I think anyone would sign up for that. The money I made wouldn't even pay for my flight out there, but it was a major breakthrough to taste it for just that week. I considered this the first step in the long term goal of financial independence. My mom took a picture of me with my laptop on the beach, and I have it up on my wall so I can look at it every day.

Some people back home didn't get it... They felt like it was sad that I was working on vacation. On the contrary... people thought my working on the beach was replacing vacationing on the beach. I wanted working on the beach to replace working.

My 4 Hour Workweek Moment

SEEFAD: Self-Employed Experience For A Day

One of the Tips & Tricks we at the Corporatepreneur are most proud of is SEEFAD.

SEEFAD: Self-Employed Experience For A Day
In one of our many "meetings of the minds" - we were lamenting about how annoying it was to work at your full-time job all day when you had something awesome you wanted to do for your own business on the side. And even worse - by the time you got home you were too exhausted to be productive for your own business and maybe you even fell asleep on the couch only to wake up the next morning and drag yourself back into your cube in the corporate world.

Well - we figured out a way around this and it has been amazing. SEEFAD. What we do is take a vacation day or use one of the many holiday days off to mimic a "a day in the life of working for ourselves." And the experience is amazing. It's like fast-forwarding into the future when you can control what you do and when you do it. And all of your productivity benefits you directly.

SEEFAD doesn't mean that we spend that entire day working a 9 to 5 for our own job. Some of us wake up late - hit the gym (because we always said we'd get in shape if we had more time) and then work leisurely from home. Other times a small group of 2-3 of us meet at a coffee shop with Wi-Fi and build our own businesses with great drinks and great company. Nothing is more motivating than being around others who are entrepreneurs (or have the entrepreneurial spirit) as well.

So try it for yourself, SEEFADing is not that complicated:
1) Pick a day that you can dedicate to SEEFAD (either a vacation day, or President's day, or even a Saturday).
2) Live that day exactly how you would wish to if you were working for yourself full-time!

Now tell us about your SEEFAD experience!

SEEFAD: Self-Employed Experience For A Day

Work From Home - You won't get rich but you can make money

As you know - we don't believe in the get rich quick scams. A common theme at the Corporatepreneur is that building a business can be very rewarding but takes time, talent and hard work.

I just saw a great article warning about the work from home scams. This article talk about how work from home scams are on the rise as the economy weakens and people become more desperate for money making opportunities. From the referenced article:

Durst says Staffcentrix researchers screen about 5,000 home jobs leads every week, and there is a "54-to-1 scam ratio."

"This means that for every 55 [work-at-home] leads we investigate, only one passes our legitimacy standards," she said.

This came as a bit of a surprise to me. I wasn't sure there would even be one legitimate work from home opportunity in 55. Of course there are (like selling dental plans) but none of them will make you rich as I warned just a few weeks ago!

So I did some investigating and I found a cool new feature from Amazon! So I am fascinated by this because it is a seemingly legitimate way to make a little bit of money from home - though likely not too much money (maybe $5 / hr depending on how you do it).

Amazon.com has launched a service called Mechanical Turks where you complete tasks for a specific fee. You can be paid in cash or amazon.com gift cards after you have a certain amount of credit. I think the real opportunity for this work would be for people in India or other countries where working for a few dollars per hour is meaningful compared to local labor wages.

These are jobs that just can't quite be automated by a computer.

Examples of "job" opportunities (take a look on your own too - there are 47,000 tasks listed currently)
1) Review online profile pictures to make sure they aren't inappropriate before they are posted to the web. ($0.01-$0.03 per photo)
2) Re-write an existing paragraph to deliver the same overall content but in a new manner ($2.00 per paragraph) (likely trying to get around any plagiarism)
3) Write a 350-400 word paragraph from scratch about how LED lights are the future of lights (there are 10+ LED topics so you could spend a little time researching LEDs then crank out a bunch of paragraphs) @ ($4 per article)
4) Review images and associate the proper image description "tags" to the image ($0.01 per image)
5) Some of the higher paying tasks include audio transcription - where you listen to a 10 minute clip of a meeting and create a written text of the meeting ($3.00 per transcription)

I plan to test it out for pure curiosity's sake. I've calculated that to make $7.20 per hour you will need to make $0.01 every 5 seconds. So if the task is to review an image for a penny, make sure you can do so in under 5 seconds. Also factor in "lost" time because it is unlikely you will be able to work for an hour straight without interruption or even a break. I believe with the audio transcription you could make in the $9-12 per hour range depending upon how fast your typing skills are.

From what I understand some of the better paying tasks require you to qualify for - which makes sense. Check it out for yourself!

Work From Home - You won't get rich but you can make money

There are no shortcuts!

While on vacation this week - I ended up catching one of those infomercials that start at 1 am. I was surprised because this one was so outrageous but it was aired on CNBC which I feel is a fairly reputable source for business news and information.

I have been out of touch on the "make millions from home" infomercials but they have really stepped up their game. Let's all be honest with each other - if you could work from home for yourself on line and make $7,000-$10,000 per month - you'd feel quite successful. And... I know that that is entirely possible - but as we have always said here at the Corporatepreneur - that doesn't come easy. It takes years of hard work with little to no return until you figure out your business model and niche.

So don't fall for an infomercial that says things like "take a shortcut to making millions on line - and you don't even have to know how to use a computer!" Maybe people are finally catching on to these schemes promising to make you rich - so they had to step up their game. Again like I said if you make $7,000-$10,000 per month you are doing quite well and it would be life changing - but apparently these infomercials don't stop there...

What about making $7,000 per week!


Still not interested in their $40 product - what about $15,000 per week!?!


Or maybe $40,000 per week (more than most people make in 1 year)...


And before you can catch your breath they hit you with $6,000 PER DAY ($180,000 per month!)


Still not falling for their pitch - they step it up to $100,000 PER WEEK!


In case you thought your eyes were playing tricks on you or there was a typo - they hit you with $110,000 per week!


What about some unspecified time frame in which you can make millions!?!?


How could you not order their $40 gimmick now? Well let's talk about this for a second. What do you think you could do that would be worth $100,000 per week? I'm just bringing us back to basics here that in order to make that much money - someone (or some group of people) would have to pay you that much money in a week because they felt what you were offering was worth it. And I'm not even saying that in business this is impossible (think Dell, Microsoft, Google, etc) BUT - you won't get there with a $40 program where you can work from home and not know how to use a computer and have huge checks deposited into your account.

How huge a check? How a bout $110,400 in one day!


So my point from this whole rant is - don't fall for the quick fix. Becoming an entrepreneur is a long hard road - but the payoff in the end could be huge IF you focus on building a business of great value to others - not some get rich quick scheme.

It is my belief that if the folks behind this infomercial had a system that really worked - they wouldn't sell it for $40 - they would start a company and hire employees to do this work and pay them 1/2 of the profits and keep 1/2 for themselves (still a good deal for all involved). So why sell it for $40 - because it probably doesn't really work like they say and they want to get $40 from everyone who wished it did. Just one man's opinion.

There are no shortcuts!

Get Rich Quick / Work From Home

Are you ready to start working from home and getting rich quick? Who isn't?!!?

Well we have poured through ALL of the opportunities you may have seen online or on TV (usually late at night) and we here at the Corporatepreneur Blog have created a list below of all of the opportunities that will ACTUALLY help you get rich quick while working from home!

• None

And maybe by now our point has been made. There is no shortcut to getting rich. We have been working hard at our own business for 8 years before starting this blog, and trust us - there are no shortcuts. In fact - in some ways that's a great thing! If becoming an entrepreneur were so easy, there wouldn't be any money in it at all. In the past 8 years we have struggled more than we could have imagined but also succeeded more than we thought possible. The work is harder and the payout is greater than we thought going in.

So get rich quick schemes just doesn't make sense. The US GDP can only be split so many ways - so there are no opportunities out there where you can just sign up and start making $5,000 per month from home right away - otherwise EVERYONE would already be in that line of work!! The same rules apply in entrepreneurship as any traditional business. In order to make money - you must provide something of value such that someone else wants to pay you for your product, your service, or your labor. And the more skilled you are - the more people will be willing to pay you. And this comes from education, training, and creativity.

So the fastest way to start down the path of true success as an entrepreneur is to ignore all of the hype and schemes out there and start educating yourself about what it really takes to make it. That's why we started this blog. As a place to share information with other entrepreneurs and help each other get out of "working for the man" and start working for yourselves!

So you need the Corporatepreneur - and we need you to post comments and share your insights, your links and your experience!

Get Rich Quick / Work From Home