Tag: startup

Today we’re talking about the value chain and how important it is that you understand where whatever you offer falls on that value chain.

The value chain is essentially a list of your product’s stops along the production and distribution cycle with each stop being a place where someone adds value. For example, a silk scarf may start off with the silk worms themselves weaving the raw silk, which would be stop 1 and then move to a silk refiner where the raw silk is spun into silk yarn, which would be stop 2. From there, the silk yarn would be dyed at stop 3 and then woven into fabric at stop 4. Finally, it would be sewn into scarves and packaged for sale to distributors, which would be stop 5, who would then sell the completed scarves to retailers at stop 6 who then sell those scarves to the final consumer.

Each stop along the value chain is a place where someone adds value, hence the name value chain. Some stops add more value than others and give the controllers of those stops better profit margins. In order to most effectively plan your business, you need to know where your products and services fall along the value chain.

So, for each of your products or product lines you should:

1. Identify the complete value chain of the product from the very initial components all the way through to the final consumer.
2. Identify which stops on the value chain add the most value in the eyes of the consumer.
3. Identify which stops along the value chain provide the highest profit margins.
4. Identify where on the value chain your company falls.

Once you’ve done that, think about whether you’re located at the right spot on the value chain and if you may want to adjust your offerings slightly to improve potential profitability. If you’re located somewhere on the value chain where margins are slim, think about whether that’s where you really want to be as you move forward with building your business. Maybe you want to eliminate certain services completely or maybe you want to add more to generate better margins.

Taking the silk scarf value chain example from earlier a bit farther, if you currently spin the raw silk into silk yarn but you discover that those who dye the silk yarn generate huge profit margins, you may want to consider consolidating those two steps and spinning and dying the silk yarn. This is called vertical integration and simply means that a company is taking over multiple steps on the value chain and combining them under one roof. This is one way that companies may expand in the future, but even startups should consider where the best place on the value chain to be is and set up shop there to begin with.

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, the best thing you can do for yourself is to just get started. Pick up my business planning ebook here to be guided through the whole business planning process for less than $5. More of a video person than a text person? Click here to try my ecourses instead.

Today I want to talk with you a little bit about how you do primary research when you’re planning your offerings, exploring your market, describing your ideal customer, or any of the million other things you need to research and validate when you’re building your business.

First, a quick story to illustrate: I’m totally addicted to Coursera. For those of you who don’t know, Coursera is an online platform where you can take courses, for free, taught by some of the world’s top professors at the top universities. The offerings cover a huge range of topics so there’s something for just about anyone and I have taken literally dozens of courses because I love to keep learning as much as I can.

Anyway, I was recently watching a lesson in one of my courses and the professor was talking about the field of popularity research within psychology. For years and years, I don’t know exactly how long but for at least a decade, all of the researchers studied popularity using a measure of how well liked various people within a group were by the other members of that group. So, basically, they would poll a class of students and ask them to say who in the class they liked the most and liked the least. They’d tally that up and do some calculation about how often someone was identified as most liked versus how often he or she was identified as least liked and then rank the students’ popularity based on those findings.

Here’s the thing though: One day some researchers were talking about their work with a group of high school students and those students were totally confused. They wanted to know why the researchers were measuring popularity with likeability because, in their minds, popularity was a completely different thing, so who was the most well liked wasn’t going to tell you who was the most popular.

This shook everything up in the field and researchers now have a completely different understanding of what popularity means to different groups and they measure it differently. This conversation with these teens literally changed and entire field of psychological research.

So why am I telling you this? Because the lesson from this example that comes out of psych research is that you need to make sure you’re asking the right questions or the answers you get won’t actually help you measure what you’re trying to measure, and the same holds true for you in your business. By asking who was most liked, the researchers were coming up with skewed views of who was most popular amongst adolescent groups and, therefore, any conclusions they might draw from that data would be questionable.

Now let’s say you’re doing some market research before you launch your new line of cell phone cases and you need to choose which colors to produce. You go around asking your target customers which colors they like best. That seems like it should be an obvious question if you’re trying to decide which colors to produce, right? But it may be the wrong question. Maybe people really like the color red but it would clash with too many of their outfits so they wouldn’t want a case that color. Maybe they think orange is a hideous color but they would buy a cell phone case in orange so they’d never lose their phones. Clearly, I’m just making stuff up here, but I hope you get my point. You have to be very careful and very deliberate about what you ask potential customers or you may get answers that don’t actually tell you what you need to know.

Let’s try another example: Let’s say you’re opening up a bakery and you go around having people taste test a variety of offerings and asking which ones they think taste the best. Again, that seems pretty straight-forward, but it might not actually tell you which items would be the most popular. Perhaps something is delicious but its ingredients would mean you’d sell it at a price point that nobody would be willing to pay; or maybe your ideal customer is super health conscious so if you ask them just, “Which tastes better, A or B?” they’ll say B, but in their daily lives they would never buy B because it has too many calories.

There are lots of variables that go into a customer’s decision to buy or to not buy, so if you want to get any benefit from the market research you conduct, you need to be sure to ask the right questions.

I participated in a market research study once about bras and how they fit. For about 80% of the time, they asked us to compare X feature to Y feature or A brand to B brand. Pretty boring stuff and we weren’t very animated, nor were we in agreement. Towards the end, however, they asked us if there was anything else we’d like to discuss and we all started excitedly sharing what we love and hate about bras and guess what? We all basically had the same loves and hates. That was the real gold for the market researchers but it didn’t come up at all in any of their structured questioning.

So, the lesson for you as an entrepreneur conducting market research is this: be very clear on what information you’re trying to gather, use that clarity to be very deliberate with crafting the questions you ask, and then also be sure to leave some room for whomever you’re speaking to to just talk about whatever he or she wants to talk about. That way, you’re much more likely to get the information you really need to make informed decisions about what to do within your business.

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, the best thing you can do for yourself is to just get started. Pick up my business planning ebook here to be guided through the whole business planning process for less than $5.
More of a video person than a text person? Click here to try my ecourses instead.

This week, I want to talk a little about the importance of being crystal clear on what everyone’s expectations are when you enter into any business agreement like a partnership or other contract. We all know this, but we also all sometimes forget it. I did just that awhile ago (oops!) and it cost me quite a bit of time, effort, and frustration simply because my expectations were out of line with the reality of the deal.

If you’ve been following me for awhile, you know that I teach a few online courses including the Business Builder Workshop and How to Fund Your Startup. I started out teaching on Udemy and have switched to Curious. Because I teach these courses, I recently participated in a market research study about what it was like to teach an online course through platforms like these and what I like and don’t like about doing so. Answering those questions got me thinking about some of the misconceptions I had before my first course launched and how the lack of consensus on how the teacher/platform relationship would play out lead to quite a bit of dissatisfaction with the arrangement…eventually leading me to switch platforms.

The cliff’s notes version: I felt that I was promised promotion for my courses by Udemy in all of the materials they gave me to pitch the idea of me becoming an instructor on the platform. That made sense to me: I provide the content, they provide the heavy lifting when it comes to marketing and promotions, and we split the revenue; win, win. As it turned out, however, Udemy really doesn’t do jack to promote a course. From my perspective, that makes them useless. If I have to do all of the marketing myself anyway, I could throw up a members only portion of my website and have my course materials there with very little effort. In this case I would take orders myself and pay waaaaaaay less to a payment processor than I do to Udemy. So, again, if I am responsible for all of the marketing, Udemy gives me nothing but takes a sizable percentage of my revenue. That’s a craptastic deal for the instructor, if you ask me, and that’s precisely why I moved my course from Udemy to Curious and my second course and soon to be released third course are only on Curious and I didn’t even consider putting them Udemy.

I wasted a bunch of time and initial promotion energy on Udemy, however. Why? Because there was a lack of consensus between the two parties – myself and Udemy – about what each party’s responsibility was in the context of the arrangement. This is a long-winded personal story to try to highlight to you the importance of being sure that everyone is clear, from the beginning, about what is expected of all parties involved in a deal from the beginning if there is any hope of that deal being successful.

With that said, here are some tips for making sure you have that clarity:

• Firstly, be very descriptive, in the contract, about who does what, when they do it, how they do it, etc. If you’re interacting directly with a human being and negotiating a contract, you can work together to draft comprehensive terms that both sides are comfortable with. If you’re working with a boilerplate agreement from a company, like with me and Udemy, you can carefully read through all of the details. Udemy made vague statements about how they could promote my course but there is nothing that requires them to do so.
• Secondly, if you can’t have super clear requirements in writing because it would be unrealistic, as with my deal with Udemy, you should do extensive research about the organization you’re getting into bed with. I did some research on Udemy, but once I began to get frustrated I dug deeper and found lots of other instructors who were unhappy with Udemy’s lack of promotion and utterly opaque payment terms. These were overshadowed in my initial, cursory research, because Udemy is an SEO powerhouse.
• Building on that point, if at all possible, actually talk to other people who’ve done business with whomever you’re thinking of partnering with so that you can ask specific questions about what to expect, and what not to expect, from the relationship.
• Finally, if something feels fishy, don’t do it. If you’re a new business owner, you probably feel like any deal you pass on could lead to the demise of your business, but it’s unlikely that’s really true. It’s typically much easier to get a business deal later than to get out of one that has turned out not to be what you’d hoped. Trust your gut and if you feel like things aren’t going to go the way you want them to, don’t do it.

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, the best thing you can do for yourself is to just get started. That first step is huge!
If you’re not ready for a big commitment, check out my business planning ebook here. It will take you through the whole business planning process for less than $5 so you’ll at least know if you can and should move forward.
More of a video person than a text person? Click here to try my ecourses instead.

This week, we’re talking about how you, as an entrepreneur, should interact with any of your targets – potential investors, potential partners, potential customers, whomever. What I have to say is pretty straight-forward, but it can really make or break the relationships you have that in turn can make or break your business.

No matter where in the business world you work, you’ve probably been to a gazillion workshops or trainings that talk about sales or networking and how best to build relationships and make sales. Now, I always find these things really interesting? curious? odd because the vast majority of the advice that I hear given over and over would have the exact opposite of the desired effect on me:

If I asked someone what they do for a living and they came back with a question trying to get me to admit I have a problem that they’re then going to say they solve for people just like me, I’m annoyed that they didn’t answer my question and plotting my escape route because I see the sales pitch coming. If they give some bullshit response about how they make entrepreneurs’ lives easier or happier by doing xyz amazing thing, I’m focusing all of my energy on not rolling my eyes so I don’t look like a bitch and plotting my escape route. If they call me and leave a message – because I never answer the phone if I don’t recognize the number – there is a less than 1% chance I will call them back, no matter what they’re pitching. Yet, I have heard over and over and over and over again the advice that, when you’re introducing yourself, you should make yourself memorable by starting with a question or saying how you solve a problem. I’ve heard even more often that, in today’s tech-heavy world, a good old-fashioned phone call is the best way to build a relationship with people.

Here’s the thing though: even if that advice is true in general, it may be terrible advice for you to follow. Let’s say it’s been studied and calling someone on the phone has been shown to get higher response rates than email. Great. Who was doing the calling and who was receiving the calls in the study? If you don’t know that, you don’t know if this info is useful to you at all. Maybe 99% of people do prefer a phone call, but if your target customer is in that 1%, you’re hurting yourself, not helping yourself, by calling everyone on the phone trying to give a personal touch and make a connection. Some people blacklist anyone who insists on calling all of the time because we don’t find this “personal touch,” endearing; we find it incredibly annoying. If your personal touch strategy is getting you blacklisted with your potential investors or customers, you’re in trouble.

People always talk about the Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have done onto you. Well, I don’t really give a crap if you would like me to call you if I were going to sell you something. If you’re trying to sell me something it matters what I want, not what you want; and you need to be very careful about assuming those are the same thing. You may find someone who answers a questions with a question memorable, be intrigued, and want to follow up. I find a person who answers a question with a question annoying and salesy and want to run in the other direction. So, if you’re trying to sell to me, which do you think you should do, what would get you interested or what would get me interested? Clearly, it’s option B here folks.

So, my take is that you should forget all of those stupid rules about how and when you should contact people and what you should say. The most important rule is that you should follow the other person’s lead. How do you do that when you haven’t even met the person yet? Trust me, there are clues.

Let’s take me for example. If you go to my website you’ll find an email address there to contact me. You’ll find links to all of my social media profiles. What you won’t find is a phone number. Why? Because I hate the phone. Take the hint and don’t call me. My email signature also doesn’t include my phone number. It’s because I really don’t want you calling me!* Taking it a little further, I admit I was exaggerating, slightly, when I said that if you call there is a less than 1% chance I will respond. The more accurate answer is that there is a 0% chance I will call you back, but there is a small chance I will respond – via email – if what you said was particularly intriguing or if I’m just bored that day. Once you’ve called and I’ve emailed, however, if you call me back again there is zero chance that I will get back to you. Why? Because you should be following my lead at this point: you called and I did not call you back; I emailed you. That is a clear indication that I prefer email and if you want my business you will interact with me in the way I want to be interacted with, period.

I know that sounds harsh but, in all seriousness, there is no shortage of options when it comes to places any of us could spend our money or people we could do business with so I’m not going to go out of my way, at all, to do business with and give money to someone who doesn’t make it as painless as possible for me. For me, email is painless. For someone else it may be the phone. For someone else, it may be text messaging. It doesn’t matter. The point is you need to follow their lead, not expect them to follow yours.

Let me give you a few more examples: Back when I worked at a non-profit in DC, I got a lot of insurance agents who wanted me to recommend their services to my clients. When I got a voicemail from one of them, I always emailed and asked them to email me some materials clearly stating what they offer/specialize in, how best to make an intro between them and a client, and anything else that might be useful like additional languages they speak. About 80% of them called me back again and left another message saying they’d like to set up a time to talk through everything with me, and didn’t give me any of the info I’d asked for. They never got a referral from me, ever. Why? Because I told them exactly what they needed to do to make my life easier and get what they wanted out of me and they flat out refused to do it. Why would I send any of my clients there to get that level of service? I wouldn’t. The 20% that emailed me what I asked for, however, I usually ended up having a conversation with and referring the smart ones some business. The exact same thing happens with web developers, designers, small business bankers, and a million other vendors that want to sell to my clients.

If you stop trying to follow the golden rules that your sales trainer or business coach set out for you and start paying attention to what that potential investor or client or partner wants from you, I bet you start having much greater success. Just listen and they will tell you exactly how they want to be interacted with. If you give them what they want, you’re already a step ahead of the competition in getting what you want. Compound that across all of your relationships and your ignoring of the supposed golden rule will leave you and your business golden.

*I meet with my consulting clients via video chat, so they’re generally tech savvy and have no interest in calling me either

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, the best thing you can do for yourself is to just get started. That first step is huge!
If you’re not ready for a big commitment, check out my business planning ebook here. It will take you through the whole business planning process for less than $5 so you’ll at least know if you can and should move forward.
More of a video person than a text person? Click here to try my ecourses instead.

We’ve all heard the refrain, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” It’s especially popular in small business and entrepreneurship circles because it encourages people to leave their dreary day jobs behind and exchange them for a career full of passion and fulfillment in entrepreneurship. I absolutely believe that many people can find much greater happiness and fulfillment if they build their own business and I’m not saying that entrepreneurship is a bad thing at all. My experience as a business owner has been amazing and has allowed me to find a level of satisfaction in life that was elusive to me before. I am saying, however, that entrepreneurship isn’t all smiles and sunshine so you should be aware of what you’re in for before you begin the journey. Too many people don’t anticipate the struggles of entrepreneurship and allow their businesses to ruin their passions.

There are two reasons why, despite what the famous quote would lead you to believe, you’re going to work, and work will feel like work, no matter what you choose to do:

• The first is that bringing an extrinsic reward into the equation for an activity that you used to be intrinsically motivated to do because you simply enjoyed it actually ruins that enjoyment and intrinsic motivation. This is called the overjustification effect and has been shown in a number of experiments. (Have at it on Wikipedia here, if you’d like.) That means that even if you used to love to paint, once you start being paid to paint, painting will begin to feel like something you have to do instead of something you want to do. You’ll lose a bit of your love for painting if you get popular enough that people regularly commission paintings.
• The second reason is that, in the real world, there a whole ton of things that need to be done to run a business that have absolutely nothing to do with the original thing you’re passionate about but are essential to keeping the business alive. Stuff like marketing and sales, tracking your finances, ordering supplies, and managing your staff will suck up huge amounts of your time. Basically, you might open a gym because you love training people but then spend so much time running the gym you never actually get to train anyone.

Let’s take a look at how both of these issues may work together to ruin your passion a bit, and then we’ll talk about how you can build a business that doesn’t make you hate your hobby once you turn it into a company.

Assume you love to bake. Right now you spend 9 to 5 Monday through Friday at the office but whenever you have time in the evenings and every single weekend you’re mixing batter, baking cookies, experimenting with pie crusts, and frosting cakes. The act of baking relaxes you and makes you feel accomplished. You enjoy your time in the kitchen and those around you enjoy the fruits of your hobby. In fact, they enjoy your treats so much that they encourage you to open a bakery and you finally take the plunge.

Now you have to get up at 3AM in order to have fresh bread ready to go at 6AM when your store opens. Now you worry that honey’s gotten really expensive and you might have to change the recipe for your famous glaze so you can improve your margins. Now you’ve gotten carpel tunnel from mixing so much batter and your arms are covered with burns because you haven’t gotten used to your industrial oven yet. Now you’re stressed about making payroll because one of the sandwich shops you sell bread to is behind on their payment to you. Now you need to worry about following health codes whenever you bake anything. Now when you go home after work the last place you want to be is the kitchen and you need to find another hobby to help you chill out.

Well that sounds pretty sucky and depressing. Unfortunately, this is what happens to a lot of entrepreneurs who open a business because they want to make a living through their passion. It doesn’t have to be that way, however. Here are some tips to help you avoid the fate of our imaginary baker:

• Firstly, think long and hard about whether or not you really want to build a business out of your passion. I’m willing to bet there are a number of things that you enjoy and are good at that could be turned into businesses. There’s no reason to pick you absolute favorite activity of all time and turn it into a business. It may be the better decision to keep your passion hobby a passion hobby and build a business around something else that you like, but that isn’t such a big part of your leisure time. That way, you can still enjoy the work you do and you don’t run the risk of ruining your passion. You’ll want to still have that outlet available to you for the times when the stress of entrepreneurship is really hitting you.
• Secondly, be realistic and have a plan before you launch your business. There are tons of resources available out there that can help you plan for business ownership, many of them right here on this site. Before you launch, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. Dealing with the credit card processor and balancing your books won’t seem as terrible to you if you’ve been planning for these activities all along. It’s when you imagine a day filled with blissful baking and then are surprised by these other business tasks that you’ll feel overwhelmed and disappointed. Having them on the schedule makes them less painful.
• Thirdly, outsource what you can. Depending on the financial situation you’re in, this may be more or less of a reality to you, but you should always do what you can to focus your energies on the parts of your business that you are good at and enjoy and outsource the rest. If you think 2+2=7, perhaps you should hire a bookkeeper or accountant to track your finances. That will free up your time to spend on the fun stuff.

In the end, turning a passion into a business will steal a little bit of your love away. You can make sure it’s just a little of that love though, and not end up hating your business like you used to hate your boss, if you follow some of these strategies.

As many of you know, I have spent the past 2 years as en entrepreneurial nomad moving to a different country every couple of months and exploring the entrepreneurial ecosystems in each. I’ve interviewed dozens of entrepreneurs, investors, and incubator and accelerator managers to learn more about what’s happening in the startup scene in cities around the world. If you want to see some of those interviews, you can check out my Startup Nomad blog.

This type of travel poses its own particular set of challenges and adventures and it’s surprised me how much I’ve learned about myself and about entrepreneurship by living out of a suitcase and having to find my place in a new community every couple of months, so this week I’m going to share some of the insights I’ve learned through travel that can help any entrepreneur in his or her business. Fair warning, there will be a little more fluff and smushy stuff than is normal in my posts.

The first lesson I learned is to expect the unexpected. Now, clearly, this isn’t a new concept, but anyone who’s ever tried to fly anywhere knows that you can’t count on your plane leaving on time, you might miss connections, your bags may never show up. There’s a lot that can go wrong when you travel and any setback usually has a ripple effect that causes a host of other problems down the line. If you let the fact that your flight was canceled mean you didn’t take your trip or the fact that the airline lost your suitcase mean you didn’t enjoy your cruise, however, you’d be making yourself miserable for no reason and failing at being a good traveler. Yes, unforeseen issues are going to arise that make your travel frustrating and will require you to alter your plans, but that doesn’t mean that your entire trip is a failure. The same holds in entrepreneurship: I can pretty much guarantee that not everything will going according to your business plan and you’ll have to quickly adjust your strategy if you want to stay in business. Not being able to predict every scenario is not what leads to failure in business. Letting those unforeseen issues fluster you to the point where you can’t simply adjust and keep moving forward is what leads to failure in business. Just as you would simply find another flight or a completely different means of transportation if your flight was canceled, you just need to find another customer or a new line of revenue if your biggest contract goes south.

The second lesson builds on the first and it’s that there’s always a solution. As I just said, if your flight is canceled, you find another way. If a customer goes to a competitor, you adjust. When properly managed, it’s incredibly rare that a business will fail because of one bad bit of luck. What’s more common is that an issue in a business is not addressed and so it cascades out, causing a whole host of other problems in the business, which, in combination, eventually lead to its failure. Adjusting your business strategy when an issue arises is no different than changing your itinerary to account for bad weather. There’s a solution out there, just don’t panic and you’ll find it.

Still building on the first two lessons here, number three is that you control how you react. We’ve all seen those jerks that have complete meltdowns if there’s a flight delay or start screaming if the wrong kind of pillows are put in their hotel room. Sometimes there are even those awful people who go to a country where English is not the native language and are somehow enraged when they come across someone who doesn’t speak English. Imagine if a tourist came to see the Grand Canyon and then started cussing the tour guide out for not speaking Chinese or German. It’s ridiculous and, quite frankly, you’re not very likely to see anyone but a person from the good ol’ US of A behave that way. Given the poor behavior of some that I’ve seen, when I travel, I am always incredibly conscious of how I present myself because I know that there are stereotypes of how Americans behave out there and I never want to perpetuate those stereotypes. So, even when something really frustrates me while I’m abroad, I make a conscious decision not to react to it. It began because I didn’t want to be “that hot-headed American” but then I realized that it was really nice to just let stuff roll off my back. It made life way more enjoyable and then I had an epiphany: if I can control how I react when I’m abroad and that choice makes life better for me, I can control how I react wherever I am. I used to roll my eyes and be annoyed when people would say that it’s up to you how you feel about situations, but now I am a believer. It’s just a muscle that needs to be exercised and you’ll get better and better at consciously choosing your reaction the more you do it, and there is no place where this skill is more useful than in entrepreneurship. Being an entrepreneur is stressful, uncomfortable situations will constantly be thrown at you, and your every action will affect the reputation of your business because you are the owner. Therefore, the ability to control how you react to certain unexpected issues or problem customers will have an incredible impact not only on your business’ likelihood of success but also on your own sanity and happiness as a business owner. I’m really tempted to splice in some of my favorite renditions of “Let It Go” from Frozen right here, but I will resist. You’re welcome.

One way to help yourself out with controlling how you react to things is to realize that you can’t know the intent behind someone’s actions. Different cultures have different cultural norms, so you don’t always know why someone is doing the things they’re doing. For example, I’ve been out to eat abroad with many people from the U.S. who become frustrated or even angry about the service at restaurants abroad because they feel the wait staff isn’t attentive enough – they don’t come check in often enough, they don’t automatically bring the check when they see you’re done eating, stuff like that – so they decide the server is lazy, not paying attention, or has some problem with them. The reality, however, is that in a lot of places around the world it would be rude for the waitstaff to behave the way they do here because constant interruptions would be considered intrusive and bringing the check before it’s requested would be like asking a diner to leave before s/he had said she was ready to go. In the past, as soon as I’ve explained this, the people I’m with completely change their emotional state. It’s like a flip is switched and they’re no longer pissed. In this situation, they thought they knew the intent behind the action and their assessment of that intent made them angry, but they were wrong. The same applied in business. You have no idea why your jerk customer is acting like a jerk or why your supplier is raising prices. Yeah, of course, sometimes they’re just being jerks, but you’ll save yourself a lot of angst if you just assume the kindest possible explanation for any action instead of the most negative one, unless you have a reason to think otherwise. Still make sound business decisions – if the supplier’s prices are too high, switch to another supplier – but there’s no reason to bother wasting your energy being angry about it.

Finally, whatever issues you’re having in your business, appreciate what you have. If you travel outside of your own country or even, sometimes, outside of your own neighborhood, you’re likely to see you have it pretty good. You’re watching this video right now, which means you have a high speed internet connection and some free time. You’re doing pretty well. When you have a shitty day in your business, just remember you have your own business and be thankful for it. Yeah, maybe you didn’t hit your quarterly revenue target but you’re not a child begging in the streets in India or a young adult in Argentina who just found out that your parents are actually adoptive parents who murdered your biological parents because of their political beliefs. Things could much worse.