20150308 - Letter to Jan - Making End$ Meet

Hi Jan,

I've been thinking about your question. Here's an attempt at a reply. I hope you don't mind if I think out loud here. Some preliminary observations:

I have a very loyal, appreciative, longstanding client in Colorado. She has been working at the same place for a long time receiving a very flat, modest salary. She needs to improve her income. She had an idea for an art & dance school for developmentally disabled kids. I felt it was viable, wrote a business & marketing plan for her; but she was too shy to sell it, and it remains an idea on paper. She went back to school not knowing exactly what she wanted to study; she's gravitating toward health care; when she's done with school she'll have incurred at least $20K in debt. Then she'll be back to the challenge of persuading someone to hire her. Maybe with her new education it'll be an easier sell than the school idea for developmentally disabled kids was. But honestly, she never really tried to sell it. I think she compiled less than twenty prospects, and gave up. I mention her because one thing a lot of people in your situation do is decide to "go back to school." In my view unless the student has a specific, crystal-clear game plan, going back to school may just be a diversion that delays the inevitable: persuading someone to hire you. It can be tempting though, because insitutional affiliation can convey a sense of security. However that sense of security may often be false, depending on substantive underlying economic forces. Recently Mark Cuban was featured in the news for remarking that he sees a student loan bubble about to pop. I think he's right; and that the subsequent awakening, although it'll feel rude to many, will in the final analysis be a healthy one. But I think the student loan bubble formed because too many people have bought into the education-for-education's-sake myth, and have unreasonably high expectations of their educations. Take it from me: both my parents were teachers, & my dad holds a Ph.D. I've seen the limits of education up-close and personal. I've lived it.
Employment opportunities happen when revenues exist to afford salaries and wages. There's an old saying, "Nothing happens until somebody sells something." And when somebody does sell something, worlds of opportunity - employment and otherwise - open up.
Not that I'm a Mark Cuban fan (I'm not, I think he's obnoxious), but he's also quoted these days about a tech bubble. For a long time, in tech it became ordinary to operate WITHOUT selling anything, fueld by venture capital. This is why everyone expects stuff on the Internet to be "free." The term "fail forward" became popular: start a tech business, get investors, experiment with their money, lose it, and learn from the failures to, hopefully, do better next time. Sometimes the money came not from paying customers, but when somebody else bought your company in hopes that THEY could somehow monetize it - case in point, Facebook's purchase ofWhatsApp. Now we seem to be in a retrenching phase in which companies like 37 Signals have pulled back, canceled products that weren't very successful, and focused on the critical few that are - a great case study in the Pareto Analysis. They're focusing on the critical few things that work. They've reached the end of the "fail forward" way, and are now focusing on what actually sells, when real customers pay real money for real things that they really need and want.
I've long been of the opinion that because of a fear of rejection, laziness, and misanthropy ("I hate you and I love your money"), we've developed unrealistic expectations of automation like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and other get-rich-quick scams. I can't tell you how many scams I've had to vet lately. In the course of vetting them last year, I discovered a guy named Ethan Vanderbuilt, and exposing scams is all he does. Anyone in your position has to be extremely careful of scams because it seems like they're everywhere, and they're designed to exploit feelings of desperation, resentments, fears, grudges, evil suspicions, and so on. They exploit the worst in human nature and take people from bad to worse. Toxic. Unhealthy.
Five years ago, in the Benefits Manual, in the Good Income section starting on page 20, I noticed this phenomenon, of an over-reliance on automation that deteriorates our sales skills. So I've been noticing and thinking about this for quite a while.
Although I don't expect you to like it or watch it, FYI the popular satire South Park's first episode this season was entitled "Go Fund Yourself" and it did a great job of showing the misanthropy underlying a lot of the tech world and sales automation. Without actually watching it, you can read about it here in this Wikipedia article. One needn't like a program like South Park to still recognize its longstanding popularity, and how in humor there is truth. The truths expressed by South Park, though in vulgar boy humor, resonate with a lot of people. In this episode, although the main plot was about the Washington Redskins, one sub-plot was about how in tech there's an agenda to get money without really doing anything, and heap contempt on the people who pay you. I felt it was quite accurate, that they really nailed it.
Be that as it may, e-commerce is real. Once we recognize the hazards and pitfalls, there is a right way to do it. My main resolution for this year is to learn that way, master it, and share what I learn on a new web page.
I am amazed by how subtle and varied pitfalls can be. For example, the grand-daddy of domain registrars, Network Solutions, just let me down. After fifteen years, their web site builder (like Godaddy) stopped working. I could edit, but I couldn't publish. After waiting a week for them to solve the problem, and false messages from them that they had solved it, I switched to Weebly.
I like Weebly a lot. It does everything right, except one thing: I can't depend on them to email contact form submissions to me. When the whole point of a web site is to put customers in touch with you, that seems pretty absurd, right? I mean if I can't depend on them to send a simple email, why should I depend on them to process a financial transaction? So you'll never see me using Weebly's shopping cart features. I'll keep the Weebly site and use something else to do shopping carts and ecommerce. (I used my trusty CRM to work around Weebly's dysfunctional contact form.)
Researching ecommerce, an individual named Ezra Firestone stands out. He is a kind, generous, humane, friendly fellow, and he seems to be technically competent. He comes from a family of merchants, and has done a great job of bringing the human side of commerce that has always existed going back generations, into a modern context. He's very generous with substantive information, some of which is in Shopify's curriculum.
One of the things I've learned from Ezra is that it's now possible to OWN your own store. Previously, we rented store space from places like Ebay, Amazon, Etsy, Craigslist, etc.. But now via outfits like Shopify and Ecwid, it's possible to own your own store with your own brand, lower transaction costs, and free from the hassles of dealing with huge outfits like Amazon that have sketchy reputations for the ways they treat their employees, hurting local businesses, etc.
I still remain convinced that CRM is key. But it's about the process of relating to people. You still have to have a product or service they need or want & are willing to buy, even if what you're selling is yourself to a prospective employer. CRM is great for job-seeking.
Jan, both you & the lady in Colorado share some things in common. You're both kind, sympathetic, caring people who aren't very assertive but who really care & are interested in being helpful & in making the world a better place. I believe such people actually make the best salespeople; but because we've historically done business so badly in the past (Andrew Carnegie waged war on his own employees, and he was one of the good guys - a philanthropist!), they've traditionally been overlooked.
We also know people hate to be sold and they love to buy. Sales still has a bad reputation because historically, bad people have worked in sales. But it doesn't have to continue that way. If good people get involved in sales, then things will improve. As the humor in South Park indicates, we're still in a predominantly misanthropic environment. But you could be part of the solution.
I realize what you were trying to sell may have been a little out of the mainstream, making it harder to sell. But I wonder whether there are more mainstream products and/or services that you would enjoy selling.
As you know, I just developed an app that solves a huge problem for many ordinary businesses - any company that operates on a job, project, or time + materials basis and has employees. It's eminently practical, designed to the specifications of someone who has 40 years of experience in his industry. Might you be interested in selling it? Currently I'm pricing it with an installation fee of $500 per division and $20 per user/month. If you sold it to a four-division company, that's $2,000 that I'd be willing to share.
Regardless, my suggestion is to master the art of sales, pick a collection of products and/or services in which you believe wholeheartedly, and sell them using a combination of CRM and ecommerce shopping cart tools. Even if you get a conventional job, the highest paid employees are salespeople for good reason.