Consonum

Size Up Competing Companies While You Sleep

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:14:04 -0500

“The most valuable commodity I know of is information.” -Gekko

This week on the VAScripts series, I include a particularly valuable document that I use regularly when I find companies that are interesting, have reached out to partner with us, or are potential competitors.

The report pulls together many things I generally need to know about the company to assess how serious(or dangerous) they are. It should take about 15-20 minutes (or less) for a VA to complete and can drastically affect your strategy. Best of all, its 2 sentences and takes you about 30sec to write. The core pieces include:

How old is the company —shows maturity, older companies usually have long standing relationships that may be hard(or easy) to change
Who is involved (the principals as well as investors) —shows the experience of the company leadership
How much press they are getting —shows their market leadership
How much capital they have raised —more or less shows the “size of the army” that we are up against

About 4 months ago, I started having my VA roll these reports up into a google spreadsheet so that it is easy to reference. The instructions for that rollup isn’t included in this post, but if you use your imagination you should be able to come up with something.

Hello,

I recently have come across a company called Kiip, can you please put together a company intel report on the company for me? The report requirements and instructions are located in the below doc.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gHEXTOeEUIR-8N9_fhZYtq4bmnngbgsYWQnewqFgOI8/edit?usp=sharing

Virtual Assistant Scripts Series (VAScripts)

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 15:35:59 -0500

I have lately been obsessed with utilizing Virtual Assistant. Trying all of the major players at one point or another, I have learned much about breaking down complex projects into smaller manageable tasks. The improvement that I have seen from my ability to delegate effectively as a result of this obsession have been very drastic. Now I think about how to effectively put together teams to accomplish a task rather than the task its self. This allows me to scale my impact.

I strongly encourage any managers or would be managers to invest in a VA service and use it heavily for 6 months to help build your delegation skills.

Durring my exploration, I have written many emails that I use more than once — completely DRY. Stealing from the computer work, I have begun to call these emails “scripts” and have amassed dozens of them that I utilize to help offload tasks.

After pressure from many friends I have decided to make some of these “Scripts” public by posting them under the tag #VAScripts here on my blog. I will try to post a couple of them a week.

I start off with a recent script that I utilized to put together a list of answering services that I thought I could use for http://pingback.cc.

Pingback is a service that I am building via managing +80% of outside labor. Although I know that I could code the service by hand much quicker, I am looking for ways to scale my impact by removing myself as an independent contributor. More on this project later.

ON to the scripts!

Hello,

I am working on a product and I think that placing a phone number on the page will generate more interest. As such, I am looking for a super cheap answering service that will field inbound calls and email me with the messages they recieve. Can you please pull together a list of 10 options and include their price as well as the other information outlined on the below spreadsheet. Quora would be a good place to start for this.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmL1N2zSPjN8dHNVakVFbHBPWEtzbUh3SmhXdTNPSnc&usp=sharing

Best,

Relaxing NYE. (at Emil’s Swiss Pastry)

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 16:24:56 -0500

Relaxing NYE. (at Emil’s Swiss Pastry)

Merry Holidays! @pk4media

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 04:00:33 -0500

Merry Holidays! @pk4media

Nothing like a #warbird spotting on a Saturday. Will people be...

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 17:57:47 -0500

Nothing like a #warbird spotting on a Saturday. Will people be flying around F16’s in 50 years? #aviation #pilot #avgeek #yak

What will I see tomorrow?

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 15:49:15 -0500

Over the last 365 days, many drastic changes have occurred inside of me. Most of these things are perception based. Ordinary things transformed as the way that I see them transformed. My girlfriend became my fiance, Amazon became a web service, etc.

One seemingly inconsequential change is the way that I see the sky. In Mid September, I finally completed my Pilot training and was accepted into a brotherhood that only 3% of the US population belongs to.

On that day the way I see the blue above forever changed. Now the sky is an opportunity. It’s a friend who I have just begun to intimately know. Its moods, its bumps, its beauty are all things that I have come to love. It is hard to truly understand what it feels like to drop the flaps on final and feel the sky through the flight controls but once you have felt it, something inside of you changes. When it happens, you become no longer a creature of the earth, you become a creature of the sky. Someone who yearns and dreams of flight.

My question: If the way that I saw the sky changed this year, what will change for me next year?

Views at brunch.

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 16:27:59 -0500

Views at brunch.

I think this may be a #helipad #aviation #marinadelrey

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 01:33:25 -0500

I think this may be a #helipad #aviation #marinadelrey

Nice 8kts crosswind at #kvny this evening #cloudporn #aviation

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 19:55:48 -0500

Nice 8kts crosswind at #kvny this evening #cloudporn #aviation

16R

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 18:00:36 -0500

16R

Nightshades

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 14:16:48 -0500

Nightshades

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty..."

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:56:18 -0500

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

- Benjamin Franklin

Although he spoke of essential liberty, Franklin surmised correctly that the concept of freedom is woven into the fabric of humanity. So why then are so many reluctant to seize liberty? There is a John Gault in all of us. Dig deep and find him.

Technology And Experiences

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 16:57:55 -0500

Among all of the “liking” and “+1ing”, people tend to forget that technology is just a tool that can be used to amplify our lives. At one point, the pen was the most innovative piece technology created. It allowed passing thoughts to be captured, expressed, and shared. Now technology has taken another leap. Our thoughts..experiences..and lives can be shared shared instantly with everyone for little to no cost.

The entirety of human knowledge and experiences are at your fingertips at this very moment. But at the core of it all is and always will be life. Explore it, live it, share it.

"Ever since you were a little kid you always had this fidget..how you can make things..."

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:05:00 -0500

“Ever since you were a little kid you always had this fidget..how you can make things different…”

- @danielpatricio

Re:

‘Hard Drive’ from Eighteen Eighty on Vimeo.

Money

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 23:59:00 -0500

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Aconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

“Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions – and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.

“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss – the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery – that you must offer them values, not wounds – that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade – with reason, not force, as their final arbiter – it is the best product that wins, the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability – and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality – the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth – the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money – and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich – will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt – and of his life, as he deserves.

“Then you will see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: ‘Account overdrawn.’

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are.

“You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood – money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves – slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers – as industrialists.

“To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist.

“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money’. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

“Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide – as, I think, he will.

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out.”

-Above Excerpt from Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

A Half Thought On Post Racial America

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 13:27:00 -0500

At a panel I was observing recently, the moderator asked if the panelist believe we live in a “post racial america” and at once the “multicultural diversity panel” set forth responses. In the end, all of the panelist agreed, that we don’t live in a “post racial america”. Citing personal experiences of adversity and even personal preferences.

I disagree and believe whole heartily that people now care more about value than ethnicity.

Yes, perhaps much of the capital is controlled by a group from a certain ethnic background. However, I am willing to bet that if that group is given the chance to get in on a minority run business that will generate a 500x return, they would want to be involved.

Corporations, are sending jobs over seas to people who can create value regardless of the ethnicity of the workforce.

Everyday people, are also obsessed with VAUE. The success of value based companies Target, Walmart, GroupOn, etc exemplifies this new paradigm. The great thing about this is that there cant possibly be a correlation between one’s ability to deliver value and their ethnic background.

So why is this different then 30 years ago?

During the industrial age, the only real value the average worker could provide is that of muscle. Moving widgets, lifting loads, building roads, etc. Muscle is a commodity It can be denied, stifled, or suffer discrimination. The intellect, however, isn’t held by the same physical constraints as muscle. In fact, intellect thrives where muscle fails. While it does have preferences, intellect has no “ethnicity”.

Contrary to the industrial age, where muscle was powerful, in the information age, intellect rules. We have the ability to generate value strictly through intellectual pursuits with very little muscle needed -Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc.

What does this mean? There are still many muscle based jobs out there so Dr King’s dream isn’t dream isn’t reality yet, but it’s definitely close. In tech, however, the only limit is your mind. Grab your bootstraps. Its time to get to work.

“That roll is hot as f&%$&!” I’m like...

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:27:16 -0500

“That roll is hot as f&%$&!” I’m like sweating.

It is with great honor that I am able to celebrate my brother,...

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:18:37 -0500

It is with great honor that I am able to celebrate my brother, Spencer Smoot, who served as a Specialist in the US Army for 4 trying and difficult years.

"Drive thy business, let not that drive thee."

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:55:35 -0500

“Drive thy business, let not that drive thee.”

- Benjamin Franklin

ECONOMICS OF THE NORTH POLE:SANTA CLAUS AND THE PLAYSTATION 3

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Yes, Santa Claus is coming to town soon, but for all the good little boys and girls, is he upping the ante with the new advances in technology? Has he figured out how to combat the escalating production costs? Has he worked out a deal with the elves’ union and adjusted to the shift from a blue-collar to no-collar workforce? Normally, I would just check the annual report of a company for answers, but, as we all know, the North Pole is not exactly traded on NASDAQ.

Years ago, it was enough for Santa to leave a bike for Christmas, but times have changed. Now, children are looking for the latest and greatest technological items such as the new Sony Playstation 3. At first glimpse, this Sony game system seems to be extremely over-priced when compared to the rival system, Xbox 360. Perception, however, is far from reality.

In November, the company “Isuppli,” disassembled the Playstation 3 and made some quite interesting discoveries. Not only is the system the poster child of gaming evolution, Sony is losing more than $300 on every unit sold. This normally would be a bad business decision, but here are a few theories for why Sony would take such a hit on their latest and greatest achievement.

Some speculate that if sold at the extremely high production cost, Playstation 3 would lose the market to the already maturing Xbox 360. Thus, pricing the product a bit lower would allow for other consumers to purchase the product. This pricing strategy is known as penetration pricing and is designed specifically to get more of a particular product, in this case the PS3, into homes. Unfortunately, this pricing strategy is designed for products that are similar, which is not the case of the Xbox 360 and PS3.

The engineering of the Playstation is revolutionary and is far above any system that has ever hit the market. Andrew Rassweiler, the tear-down manager of Isuppli, said “with the PlayStation 3, you are getting the performance of a supercomputer at the price of an entry-level PC.” Rassweiler then goes on to say that the components of the PS3 are of the same caliber as network computers that serve as the framework of the Internet. “If someone had shown me the PS3 motherboard from afar without telling me what it was, I would have assumed it was for a network switch or an enterprise server.” Thus, comparing the PS3 to the Xbox 360 would be like comparing Rudolph to all of the other reindeer. The PS3 is simply in a league of its own. This puts the PS3 on the top of Santa’s sleigh when it comes to technology, thus an $800 price tag could easily be justified in the marketplace.

Another possible reason for Sony’s loss on each unit is that the company plans to make a majority of its losses back from video game royalties. This could be true in the future. However, in the short run, game royalties just do not add up enough to account for losses, especially considering that retail analysts suggest that only 200,000 systems were released stateside. Combined with the fact that are only 22 games are currently out with only four scheduled for release until February, video game sales probably won’t save Sony’s Christmas. For all of you math majors, in the unlikely event that everyone who buys the PS3 buys every game from now until February – that’s only 26 games. Sony would have still only sold approximately 5.2 million games. If current royalty pricing is consistent with Sony’s previous system releases, they are only making $8 per game. That is approximatly $41.6 million in video game royalties. If retail analysts are correct, doing the math on how much Sony is losing on the 200,000 released units would reveal a loss of $75 million in production costs alone. That $75 million does not include advertising costs, which always are a significant portion of any new product launch budget. Indeed, a portion of the cost can be recovered through game royalties sales, but, in the short run, Sony is still losing a significant amount of money on their system.

Certainly market insertion pricing and royalty revenues explain why such a successful corporation like Sony would endure such significant short-term loss on one of its flagship products. But I propose an alternative theory. This one takes a bit of a believer and involves a man who wears a different colored suit during the fiscal year. Holiday spirit is quite possibly the main revenue of the North Pole, and this time of year, that spirit is higher than ever. But there is a problem. Around September, St. Nick probably received reports that his product mix is becoming weak because, by not producing the PS3, he has neglected the technology-sensitive youth of today. Or, maybe the engineers of the North Pole told Santa they could not reproduce the new Sony unit because Santa’s corporate spies were unsuccessful. Or it could be that the spies were successful, and Santa’s accounting division said they needed a partner to put the units into production. Santa’s debacle grew as he realized that if the PS3 sold at Sony’s high production cost, it would be too expensive for parents to buy. As a result, many children would not receive the units from their parents, ultimately lowering their holiday spirit. Bearing in mind the North Pole runs on spirit revenues, this could dramatically impact their bottom line. So how has Santa planned to distribute the new PS3 without taking spirit losses and scolding from the North Pole board of directors?

Originally published in the “Rebel Yell” 12/11/2006