Category: business

Change happens, just be ready for the unexpected

When I first met Bonnard, my soon-to-be girlfriend’s cat, we got off to a bad start.
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An eight year long bad start.

Bonnard would have preferred I wasn’t around, and one occasion seemed to be actively trying to crush the breath out if me with his rotund, but not-heavy-enough body. Hissing, biting, scratching… All part of the norm. Now, and quite suddenly, Bonnard cuddles with me. It’s disconcerting… I’m not exactly neutral on the subject of cats.*

This got me thinking about all of the other surprises that have come along in my life. My career path has diverged greatly from what I thought it would be, and probably for the better. I’m glad I haven’t resisted the change, even though a part of me bristles when people suggest I’m “not a lawyer anymore.”

Despite that, I’m glad I have been open to shifting away from preordained notions of career towards paths that have been fulfilling, interesting, diverse, and allow the lifestyle I have come to enjoy. Change in my “business” life has been good, particularly when it’s incremental and on my own terms.

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*I sort of dislike them, but he’s sitting…. right… here… as I tap this out…

It’s good to be busy

Behold, the Green Goblin!

As I continue my mad sprint to the end of the month (and thus the beginning of my bike tour vacation) I’m happy to say I’m pretty busy. Having had periods of less-than-full-employment, I’m confident in saying that I prefer being busy. I’m trying to implement some new systems at the yoga studio, handle some back end web issues for Kimberly’s website, and I can forsee some video shooting on the agenda early next week.

All this, and I have a big project brewing on the back burner. I’m hoping to be able to announce that pretty soon, perhaps before I leave for Oregon.

It’s good to be busy.

Stormriders!

I’m hosting a “summer camp” retreat at my cabin this week (led by the irrepressible Kimberly) – while the weather has been less than ideal, we managed to sneak in a short tour of the Western Maryland Rail Trail by bike.

Statistics:

  • Number of flats I’ve had on that trail over the course of about 400 previous miles: zero.
  • Number of flats we had collectively in 11 miles yesterday? 2.
  • Amount of rain forecast during our 2 hour period according to radar: zero.
  • Percentage of time we were rained on: 80% of the ride.

Moral of the story: always bring your full repair gear, learn to change all sorts of tires, and remember it’s supposed to be fun. Luckily we had all of that. I present to you, the stormriders of summer camp 2012…

 

World Domination Summit

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending World Domination Summit in Portland. I’ll confess something: I had never read Chris Gullibeau‘s book The $100 Startup, read his blog, or consumed anything at all related to WDS. Kimberly (the girlfriend-slash-entrepreneurial goddess who I work with and for) had heard great things about the first WDS in 2011, and we managed to nab tickets for this year’s version.

So, all I knew was that people really (really) dug the first one, the second one sold out in about 23 nanoseconds* and the whole thing has a terrible, nondescriptive name.

And it was great. I mean really great. Even though I didn’t “get” it until the end of day 1.

If I were to bumpersticker WDS, it would go something like this: a summit of people who live and work on their own terms. Lots of entreprenurial types… lots of people who work online… lots of people who travel the world… a lot of minimalists (which sounds funny)… and a lot of people who aspire to be one or more of the others.

The main speakers were interesting… I was most drawn to the stories told by Scott Harrison (founder of charity:water), particularly how he leveraged the peculiar talents of an ex-party promoter into building one of the more impressive and successful charities in the world. I also really liked Chris Brogan‘s presentation, largely perhaps because I was one of the nerds in the audience that got all of his obscure comic book references. The breakouts I chose focused on minimalism and finding freelance gigs from anywhere in the world. Day 2’s breakouts included learning more about crowdfunding and online tools for finding efficiencies in your workflow.

So, yeah… WDS is a little random… but usefully random. Maybe someone more clever would call it a holistic approach to living life on your own terms… but that would probably require a much smarter blogger. We signed up for next year, and I’m looking forward to seeing what I do between now and then.

Almost forgot the most dramatic part… as the summit was closing, Chris took the stage for a final time and told the story of how last year’s WDS lost about $30k and that this year had made a small profit (to polite applause). He then mentioned some unnamed person gave WDS $100,000 for the 2012 summit. No one, and I mean no one, would have begrudged him to invest that money into next year, or even taken that as profit. But this is the guy who wrote a book about starting a business with 100 bucks… and there were a thousand of us.

(let’s see… five carry the one… um, I was told there’s be no math in this blog?)

We all got a $100 bill. That’s putting your money where your mouth is. It’s also 1000 bets on on 1000 people to see what they can do with it. I’m planning on re-energizing Nineball Media… my hope is to have some good stories for WDS 2013…

UPDATE… Chris blogs about the investment here, and posted the video of the moment too:

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*This is a lie. It was 20 minutes.