Category — My 2 Cents

So after one long and pretty successful week, the Delta Squadron launch is coming to a close.

That’s right, delta is closing down.  Luckily we had no servers melt, the scripts worked, and our stats kept up to date for fast response.  All in all we had a pretty good launch.

If you want to check out what we’re doing over there, check out http://bit.ly/17TFxn

Speak soon!

- Mike

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had to switch from providing consulting services to finishing my own products.  I went on a long rant about how consulting is not a scalable business model for a 1-man developing operation, as time is your primary product and it is not a scalable/automated resource.

After spending a day dropping work load with clients (some were easy, some you’d think we were engaged), I was able to dedicate an entire work day to a project of my own.  I was able to do more work in the 1 day for my project than I had gotten done in almost two months.

I’ve pointed a few of my friends over to the post to get their thoughts on it and gauge whether or not i had been a bit melodramatic, or whether i was on the right path.  All of them agreed that focus is the key to success.  And I have seen that already.  Focusing on a single project has given me the opportunity to pinpoint when i see it getting done.  Pulling out a handy excel spreadsheet, I was able to see myself that just completing this project would net me more money than if i had been doing consulting work the entire time.

Either way, dropping consulting for my own products has been a win.  Let’s wait a couple months and see if that is still true.

As some folks may have noticed, I have not at all updated you on the outcome of my vista vs. ubuntu dilemma. Nor have I made any other types of updates.

Why has this been?

With a scarcity/safety mindset, I took on several hourly consulting clients when I decided to leave my full time job to focus on my own business. 2 months later, with 2 months to go in the experiment, I’ve found that I have made 0 progress on any of my personal projects. It have effectively replaced my full time job with mini-full time jobs. At the end of the day, I’m working MORE on those projects and almost not at all on my own projects.

While it is true that when you have your own company your customers ARE your boss, the entire reason I left the corporate world was to be my own boss and make my own hours. In 2 short months, I managed to build up 6 separate bosses who all thought they were the #1. Pitting them against each other doesn’t work so well. Giving each of them the excuse that I was working for the other is getting old hat as well. They are all (rightfully so) expecting direct attention on-demand for the premium they are paying.

Remedy?

Drop them all. That’s right. I have decided to shift focus back in house. Use the 10 hours or so a day (6-7 days/week) to focus on the completion of my own products. I have 2 that are half-baked. They can very easily become full-baked if i simply remove my head from my keaster and FINISH them. Focus is key to success. Running around like a consulting chicken with my head off is not focus.

To look into this a little bit deeper, I would argue that a successful consulting service IS, in fact, a valid business model. The problem with that though is that the product is quantified in time, the one resource I have been striving to get back. When offering consulting service, you are selling your time. The sales process for this requires 1-on-1 attention which cannot, and should not, be billed for. You want to give them a taste of the product, and get them coming back for more. But to fill a full schedule, you need multiple clients. You need to court them all and give them all special attention. Not only that, as a developer, you need to wrap your mindset as well as your passion around what they are trying to deliver. With 1 or 2 concurrent projects, that’s easy. But to replace a full time income, you need to make sure that you can fill 40 hours at a premium price per week, which means maintaining 4-5 concurrent projects.

Let’s be reasonable. Clients don’t want to pay $5,000+ for development of their project. While marketing, USP development, scalability and usability analysis are all extremely valuable commodities; (does that go there?) all customers see (and say) is “I paid $5,000 (50/hour * 100 hours) for my program. I could have gone to scriptlance and paid $1,200″. They then use that as an argument to grab more billable hours from you. The difference between a techie who speaks marketing and a code monkey is ROI. More of my clients have received the full package and have developed sustainable business models off of my product (time) than they would get from your average “code monkey”. The problem is, they just don’t put the 2 + 2 together.

Greed, short-sightedness, call it what you want. But i’ve seen the same thing happen in the Joint Venture brokering and consultation game. High level marketing consulting is business mentorship and hand-holding. I know several marketers who have gone from simple affiliate promotions to multi-million dollar business models off of the right joint venture/launch broker/consultant. Once they reach that high level, they look back down the ladder and all they see are numbers. “He brought in 500 affiliates, i paid him WHAT?! my list is 300k now, screw him, i’ll farm my own “JVs” from my past affiliate lists”. “He developed 1 program?! I paid him WHAT?! screw him, i’ll hire a scriptlancer for 1/5 the price”.

They don’t realize that time from the right consultant is a multi-dimensional product. There are not enough metrics to quantify consultancy. Fortunately for the cause (but unfortunately for the individuals) I have had the opportunity to see people realize the folly in this way. They discard what they found to be an over-priced resource. This resource is replaced by a more “cost-effective” resource. The bottom line goes down. They blame every other aspect of their business. Fire/churn employees like they are a retail chain. Scrape together clones of “hot” products. All to no avail. Meanwhile the folks who have seen value in the resource have doubled their empires in the last year to the point where they could control entire markets and print money with products they slapped together in a couple of weeks.

Bleh. Rant over. The point here is that the main teaching of many internet marketing and self-success lessons is to build multiple automated and scalable streams of residual income. This means more physical (or digital) resources that may be tweaked and sold. I plead to other developers out there who want to build a successful business. Stop selling your time. Create another product. Perhaps with a stable of 3-4 developers, one can sell “time” as a product. They have more of the time resource to map.  They can then bring on bulk clients and have fall-backs in place. But right now my personal time is the only resource i have and that is not a scalable resource.

So after leaving my full time job and going out on my own, I left my beloved MBP behind.

I’m busy investing all of my resources into the development of the business.  So my question to myself was, do I invest $2000 into another mbp or do I boot up the gateway with the exact same hardware specs.  Suffice to say, I went with saving $2000.  (Should i be on one of those new microsoft commercials for that?)

Probably not.

The box still has the tools i used on it a couple of years ago.  Run some updates and my workflow is back.  Then all of the usual gripes about Vista came back.  Lag with the file system, bloated animations/gui effects, me remembering that it is in fact vista and not xp.

To be continued…

7:40 am – Alarm goes off, but I hit snooze twice.

8 am – Call with Michael Cheney, approximately 45 minutes, while at the same time fending off texts and emails from Anik Singal.

9:15 am – Head to the office

10:30 am – 7pm – Doing my work thing at Lurn, Inc. I spent a lot of the day planning with Anik, traded a few emails with Mike Filsaime regarding Launch Tree, chatted with Michael Cheney a few more times about Delta Squadron, and finally missed a call from Frank Garon. I try to keep in touch with the marketers I have worked with, so I pepper my day with emails to Mike Ambrosio and a few others.

8 pm – Spent about an hour on the phone with Mike Merz, just shootin’ the breeze.

9pm – 12 am – Eat dinner, answer some emails, do some scripting, go to bed.

So, judging by my day I should be a millionaire right? That’s a newbie marketer’s dream come true, hob-knobbing with the big guys all day…

Unfortunately, that’s not quite how it works. I find that in this industry, people feel the need to namedrop, brag, and improve the truth to make it big, but I’m living proof that it’s what you do, not who you know. The rich didn’t get rich by giving away money, so hanging out with them does not generate revenue by osmosis. I have spent a lot of time dabbling in everything without forming a clear plan for success. Yes, it’s nice to know these guys, but without a product, list, or site, nothing is going to happen.

I need to take a more pro-active approach to marketing, it’s as simple as that. Everyone was a newbie at some point in time, and the big dogs only got big by building their business piece by piece. My intent with this post is to let the newbie’s out there know that no matter what people tell you, and how people act, everyone starts somewhere, and just because you don’t know anyone yet, that doesn’t mean they won’t want to know YOU in 2 years after a lot of hard work and some big launches. Hey, if you want to get to know me, come check out JVNotifyPro, I spend a lot of time there getting to know the regulars, offering help where I can, and just starting to immerse myself into the real nitty-gritty of building my business.

Hi, Mike Merz Jr. here!

Have you ever noticed how many “Mikes” there are in the Internet Marketing World? It seems everywhere I go I meet a new marketer who shares this common name, hence the nickname, “Merzy”.

Throughout my professional career, it seems like everywhere I go I’m always hearing, “Hey Merzy, how do I…?” or “Hey Merzy, where can I…?” Well it’s time for Merzy to strike out on his own. I’ve spent the last several years working for some of the biggest names in the game, and now it’s my turn. My dad likes to say he sent me out to get an education, and I look at this time spent like a new professional would fondly recall his college years. Now I have the tools, the skills, and the connections to really start something of my own.

I’m starting with the foundation, a good site where people can go to pick my brain, read my rants, and hear what’s new. I have big plans for this site, I want it to be a true hub for industry-relevant information. If there’s something out there that’s leaving you scratching your head and staring at the computer cross-eyed for hours, toss me a shout, “Hey Merzy, what’s the deal with…?”

Check out my “Who is…?” section for the low-down on anyone in Internet Marketing. If you don’t see the name you’re looking for, shoot me an email, and I’ll find out all about ‘em. Check out “What is…?” to find out about products and services, “When is/does/did..?” is all about launches and events, and “Where is…?” will give you info on where to find tools, programs, and support, as well as where your favorite marketer is hosting his or her next event. “Why is/does/did..?” is all about method, why do you need it, why does it work, why do people want it? Finally we come to “How do I…?”, which is a section designed to pick my techie mind, send me your tech questions, conundrums, and quandaries, and I will walk you though them.

So let’s get started! Email your questions to: mikejr@heymerzy.com and we’ll see who can be the first to stump me!