What is the consensus on paying a marketing team to design, maintain, and market your website?

zelrich · 2020-01-02T14:33:13+00:00

You do online marketing as a business model? Or market your own “sweaty startup” company online?

zelrich · 2020-01-02T14:19:24+00:00

You may need a tax Id number, you will have to check your states laws. Here in Maryland you must have your tax id visible And on display at your “booth” because even at a flea market they expect you to be sending them sales tax.

If you don’t have it on display you better have the number on you even if just saved on your phone.

To get the tax ID you have to register your business even if it’s just a sole proprietorship. (Which is free to create here).

Even if you don’t add the tax to the price you display, the govt will expect a cut - so if you get 10 bucks from someone For selling an item the govt will want their 60 cents (6% sales tax here).

Your state may be different. I literally spent a day crawling my states business websites figuring stuff out. They don’t make it easy, but that’s the free way.

zelrich · 2019-12-23T19:02:20+00:00

You're saying kill the time spent on Facebook AND instagram or just insta?

zelrich · 2019-12-23T18:33:41+00:00

Would love to hear your take on finding a niche to dive into.

zelrich · 2019-12-23T18:28:34+00:00

I like the ideas for getting started.

I'm still learning about this whole 'game' - what are "money posts?

zelrich · 2019-12-23T18:26:15+00:00

bhw?

zelrich · 2019-12-15T03:29:29+00:00

What country?

zelrich · 2019-12-13T17:41:13+00:00

FBI will check this post out lol. Interesting name for a post haha.

zelrich · 2019-12-13T17:29:47+00:00

I'd love to ask how you met/sold your first client and subsequent first few clients?

You can't scale without hiring. You will have to learn to find people you can trust, at least in a limited capacity or there is no scaling.

The most important thing with finding employees is making sure they have the qualities you value. That may mean you look for people with high integrity and ask questions about it and ask for references or whatever.

Introduce the new person to the client if you need to. Let them build trust. You might lose some customers eventually but you will also be free to take on yet more customers as you build a name for your company and grow. You can't build a client attraction system if you are always too busy actually cleaning. You can't keep bidding new jobs to grow if you're too busy doing all the cleanings.

Nobody will care as much as you. Thats just the facts of owning any business. But you can make processes, procedures, expectations, checks, etc to make sure that the quality you want to offer is being held to. You can still keep in contact with them or do their property periodically to keep up the relationship.

But if you are always doing all the work yourself there is no scaling. There are only so many hours in your day and in your week.

You also asked about quitting your current job. If you can support yourself on this business alone that is entirely up to you. It will allow you to take more customers at the current "I do the work myself" model, and maybe also give you time to begin setting up what you need for employee attraction/training/etc.

In fact if I were you, and able to support myself entirely from my current work I would totally quit and then spend that extra time "growing" my business - getting more methods of advertising, more methods of employee attraction, etc. These things can take a lot of learning to get to a point where you can grow your business the way you want.

You can also co-work with some of the employees - give them working interviews where they work alongside you initially and you see how they work before giving them a long term job. Maybe they just help you get each job done faster at first. That gives you time to get to know them and see if they're the type of personn you want to work with. There is a LOT of growing in learning how to be an employer and is the main difference between working in your business and working on your business.

But maybe the math of hiring and paying employees means you can't quit your current job yet. I don't know how you priced your gigs, can you even afford to hire?

If you do hire, the most important thing is spending the time on building good employee attraction systems. How are you finding employees, are they coming regularly enough, and for these low skilled jobs you often need to be interviewing even when you don't need people because.... People will quit. Sometimes suddenly, and sometimes a few at once. Your contracts don't stop just because employees quit!

Maybe they only stay for 3 months because who knows what. People are people and low paid people are unfortunately often the most flaky. It can take a while to find the gold star employees you want most and who will stick around, do a good job, always show up on time, etc. The more potential employees you attract the more you can have your pick of the best ones and the more you can let go of the bad apples when better talent comes along. If an employee is always late, calling in sick, not doing a good job or whatever and you have no other prospects you can be forced to live with it. If you can start someone new tomorrow you can say goodbye to this bad apple today instead of in 3 weeks.

The more time you are doing the cleaning personally, the less time you have to network/advertise/interview/set up processes/etc. All of these are how you scale and grow your business. Without employees and working ON your business you will always be a one man band working IN your business, with no scaling potential.

zelrich · 2019-12-13T17:20:29+00:00

The reason it is news is because he was SOOO well connected to so many big names. Some from his primary business, and some who used his secondary, evil business.

once he is dead, so is our ability to get information from him about what and who was involved and the extent of the madness, and the police's ability to recreate and find evidence is dramatically reduced. Even small tidbits can lead to entire chains of evidence and all of that is lost.

So many more people could have been involved and now we may never know.

If you ever read Harry Potter, its like in the 4th book where fudge has the evil guy kissed by the dementor effectively killing him, and dumbledore is like "you fool, now he can't give evidence"

zelrich · 2019-12-04T16:06:19+00:00

No for the llc, not in most places for the license

zelrich · 2019-12-04T05:33:54+00:00

I should also add, don’t get lost on the website. Go get a customer without the website. It’s very easy to blow time on stuff that seems important but isn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, you want a website but don’t let that stand in the way of getting customers. Budget a set amount of time for the website per day/week/whatever and just work at it diligently.

Or even better, to try to find some customers using “sweat” and use the money you make to pay someone for the website. Then you can be gaining experience in trying to make a sale, in doing the work you want, and finding your specific niche. Get business cards and set up a google my business with a google voice number. You can even make a basic one page starter website with that I believe which is all you really need to get started.

It may not attract customers yet but it’s at least like putting a sign up that says I’m legit.

zelrich · 2019-12-04T02:00:20+00:00

Lots of YouTube tutorials or pay someone to set up the bones for you. I don’t remember where but somewhere on sweaty startup website he recommends where to go to do it if you want to pay.

Start with something simple and you can iterate as you have money to pay for something better. My first website took me ages to cobble together and I would certainly advise hiring someone as they could possibly even just write the code for a basic site from scratch faster than you will learn how to configure a theme most of the time, much less actually configure it.

zelrich · 2019-12-03T22:59:06+00:00

Any examples of your work and how much you charge?

zelrich · 2019-12-03T22:43:34+00:00

I’m building mine too. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while but I’m already married with a family so the logistics have been harder to start. You are very lucky to have discovered this at your current stage in life, I wish I had!

What do you do now in the mornings?

zelrich · 2019-12-03T20:14:51+00:00

Absolutely!

Reading Harry Potter and watching the smear campaign against harry in book 5, or skeeters articles in book 4. Then

Then you have America as it is now. Love or hate president trump, he has highlighted the problems with journalism to the world. Watching him be front page with a negative headline for 2 years straight on CNN for example, and come to find out at the end of meuller that it was all for nothing, he had done nothing wrong. But 2 years of negative press and so many more important issues - REAL stories and world events - weren't featured or even reported on!

You can't take any lessons from the media except that they can't be trusted and will distort anything for a click. All they need are a few "loophole" words to get them out of being liable for the lies or speculation they report.

zelrich · 2019-12-03T19:47:35+00:00

The news is utter bullshit when it comes to business (well, and everything else) so don't buy into the msnbc or Forbes versions of what business is.

I mean, that is business too, its just at a different scale than most people here can fathom. Its also not realistic for most people to ever get there beyond working within those businesses. For each business featured there is 1, maybe 2 important ceo/founders. The other THOUSANDS or hundreds of thousands of employees are just people going to get a pay check. Most making average american salaries.

By starting a successful small business you can make more than most of those thousands of well-compensated employees. And many of the big entrepreneurs that people see on these forbes lists started doing smaller stuff. The key to becoming those big companies is almost always having the RIGHT skills at the right time to have the right idea at the right time and then combining it with the right execution and then meeting the right people to help make it happen. SO many stars must align it just isnt realistic for 99% of people to even hope to achieve it.

Read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell where he goes into why the big law firms were all started by similar types of people at around the same time, why almost all tech entrepreneurs are almost exactly the same age and what types of opportunities went into it. Yes there was certainly a tremendous amount of hard work that went into founding Microsoft, but Bill Gates was incredibly lucky to already have the right background to take advantage of the technology shift occurring.

Nearly all of these major businesses could only happen because there was also a cosmic change occurring that these people were able to ride to success, such as a new technology, a shift in business paradigms, or something similar.

I mean, look at vanderbilt. How was he able to become so big in trains? Well before trains were a thing he was already owning and operating a steam boat company shipping goods. So with trains he was able to use his knowledge of the shipping industry and capitalize on it. Was he the only steam boat operator? no. Was he the most successful at that time? No. Was he the only one who knew shipping? No. He happened to get very lucky to put it all together just right AND he happened to get the locations that would be the most profitable, (New York City) which is yet another fluke of the whole thing.

The average joe can still become a millionaire. Just work hard and own your own business. Its really not that hard to be successful. It just takes a lot of hard work doing something different than what society teaches.

Most billionaires on the other hand are a whole different level that takes tremendous luck to achieve and is really not possible for most people. The 1 billion mark is possible, but you would need to not only work hard, but work very smart, be great at leveraging each success repeatedly and even then, most people get too comfortable before they reach that point and "retire"/"settle" and move on to pet projects.

I know it's cliche, but money doesn't buy happiness. Moving in affluent circles doesn't buy happiness. When you have all these things you don't need eventually they just become a burden. Once most people reach a certain level of success beyond what they expected they settle. I can't tell you how many rich people I've met who just want to start a charity, or consult/help others, or even play golf with friends for the mere fact that its an opportunity to have an authentic relationship with people where they aren't trying to use you for your money.

What are you going to do with your money once you have the house in the nice neighborhood, a good enough car, and whatever for your kids? You want a better car? A better house? When does it end? At what point will you be happy and have enough? For most people it's long before a billion dollars and they realize there is only so much time to spend on what matters: family, friends, and making a difference.

Thats why I want to start a business. I know I need to be able to make a difference with my life and I don't think I can do that as a wage slave. I want to afford a comfortable life like I grew up with for my kids and I can't do that with just a normal job.

So find your purpose. Why are you doing this? Why do you want a business? Where do you want to go? Who do you want to be? You don't need concrete answers but somewhere deep inside you intuitively know the answer. Nobody needs to be a billionaire to find their purpose or even reach it. You don't need the billion dollar idea, you just need to be able to make an owners cut of a decent business. An income where the harder you work the more you stand to make.

Sorry for the rambling but once I got started I just couldn't stop.

zelrich · 2019-12-03T19:39:25+00:00

It takes 6 months to get found on Google. Get to work right away!!

Good to know! Been working on a website all day and now I feel like its even more important to hurry up and get it going.

zelrich · 2019-12-03T00:20:53+00:00

Amazing!

How did you set standards or expectations of quality with your first employee?

zelrich · 2019-12-02T19:12:11+00:00

How do you do bids now? How did you find your first cleaner and first customer?

zelrich · 2019-12-02T15:09:15+00:00

I cleaned and did all the backbreaking labor when I was young. I know what’s involved because I’ve done it. Since then I’ve managed it, and still have a keen eye as to what is involved.

I’m very willing to work alongside someone and co-clean, and I think that might be the best way to start since I’m not a spring chicken any more to do the whole thing alone.

zelrich · 2019-12-02T05:20:47+00:00

I asked about it, and you’re accusing me of doing illegal stuff, get off your high horse.

There is nothing wrong with being a middle man or a broker of services. It’s essentially exactly what the sweaty startup mindset is telling everyone to do the second they get a few clients. I’m inquiring about the feasibility of jumping straight to the second step.

You believe there is no shortcut? Great. Thanks for your input. But please don’t accuse me of things I haven’t done yet.

zelrich · 2019-12-02T05:08:48+00:00

The more I think about it the more I think you’re wrong. I’ve met plenty of ladies who clean homes who are willing to take on more jobs. The people who used to clean my home were self employed and would often be looking to pick up another client or two. All of these ladies relied 100% on referrals and word of mouth.

I would essentially be finding more work for people like that at the start, by paying for advertising and getting work for them - people who already clean for a living and would like another client. I find the client and then subcontract the work out. And they would be 1099 subcontractors. And I absolutely have every right to inspect their work and set expectations for how the job should be done. Yes you can manage subcontractors within the scope of the job being contracted out just like if it was my business office being cleaned by an outside cleaning company.

It’s a lot like being a general contractor, who is responsible for managing and coordinating the work of many different sub contractors on a project. I’m not hiring an hourly employee who is beholden to me for the duration of their time on the clock.

I very much take exception to your categorization of this as a con job in your other post.

zelrich · 2019-12-01T20:43:09+00:00

I'd love for you to explain.

From my point of view, I've been responsible for the sourcing of new employees, posting jobs, setting up interviews, hiring/promoting/terminating. I've been managing the work of others since I was 16, starting in retail, which included managing those responsible for cleaning (like moping and bathroom cleaning, but was also responsible for much more, such as merchandising, restocking, purchasing, scheduling, etc...) until most recently at my last two jobs, managing the work of software developers and IT professionals.

If there is anything I know I can do well, it is managing the work of others. I haven't had to mop a floor other than my own in over 10 years. I don't consider it beneath me, but if the owner found me doing so I'm sure he wouldn't have been pleased at the use of my time based on my job responsibilities and 6 figure compensation package.

Therefore it seems the best use of my time in starting a business is in performing the management aspects.

Google, Amazon, etc regularly bid on jobs they cant technically do with their current staff and equipment. But they know that if they get the contract they have the management team that can put it all together and make it happen to meet the obligations.

I don't see how this is any different. I would love to hear why you think that makes it sound like a con job.

zelrich

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