Alien Skin Software is not a normal company. Sure, we like money. Send us as much as you want. But our most important goal is to enjoy our lives. Since we spend way the hell too much time working, we try to find ways to make work fun.– Alien Skin Software, Corporate Philosophy
Man, I hope these folks keep winning.
[Donald Trump] understood a famous axiom: If you owe the bank $1 million and can’t pay, you’re in trouble, but if you owe the bank $1 billion and can’t pay, the bank’s in trouble. The moment that captured his strategy perfectly came when Trump’s CFO received an $800,000 quarterly insurance bill for Trump’s yacht, Trump Princess, which was, of course, mortgaged. He simply sent the bill to the Bank of Boston, which held the note on the boat, with a reminder that if the Princess sank uninsured, there’d be no collateral for the loan. The bank paid the bill.
– Geoff Colvin in Ex-CEOs should learn from The Donald, Wall $treet Week, 13 May 2008.
I’ve been meaning to blog some version of the “if you owe the bank $x” line for some time, but this week’s W$W article gave me extra impetus.
The broader point for businesses and executives is that there are many ways for someone to hold you hostage. Owing you too much is just one. Customers can hold you hostage if you’re their biggest client. Employees can hold you hostage if they’re the only ones who know how to do something essential for your business. Neighbors can hold you hostage if they can make your block somehow unattractive to your customers.
You can’t make all these risks go away, but you sure ought to safeguard against the ones you can if they’re big and/or likely.
Last week, one of my longtime business friends was kind enough to introduce me to one of his new colleagues over lunch. I was grateful for my friend’s effort, but a touch horrified when his words of introduction described me as still doing work that I quit doing at least two years ago.
When it comes to marketing my own business — letting good friends and colleagues know what I’m doing and what I want to be doing, and what’s different from what I used to be doing — I’ve clearly been falling down on the job. Talk about your cobbler whose kids have no shoes!
Step Number One — I’m adding “Marketing and Management Consulting” to my email signature. Steps Two and Three will be to find some clearer words about what I want to do for my clients, and to actively spread the word. I’ll keep you posted on how this self-consult works…
American businesses do all sorts of crazy things to prevent people from giving them money: they refuse cash, they refuse credit cards, they say “no” when people offer to pay up front, etc. And online — arghhh — how many times do eStores ask us to provide a ton of superfluous information before they let us buy something? (Even worse: some charitable organizations make us provide tons of registration info before we can DONATE with a credit card!)
But you’ve got to love this bathroom attendant I spotted on a recent trip to Mérida, Mexico. His job is to collect 3 pesos (~25 cents) from each person who visits the toilet. I saw him miss out on at least four customers (like the lady pictured above) because he was sleeping.
Nota bene: while he’s clearly violating the “don’t make it hard for people to give you money” principle, he may well be adhering to a higher economic ideal: “spend your time on the thing that returns the greatest value.” 
Back in March, my friend Barry Campbell and his wife started investing in their own White Trash and Minor Vices Portfolio.
As Barry explained:
Everyone says “invest in what you know.”
I’m about to put my money where my big mouth is. Carrie and I invest, mostly in index funds and ETFs, every month through Sharebuilder, which allows fractional purchases of shares in stocks and funds for a flat monthly fee.
The vast majority of our modest monthly stake goes into a total-market index fund and an aggregated bond fund.
But I’m going to make a modest investment in a stock portfolio — a mini-fund of my own making, if you will — called “White Trash and Minor Vices” (motto: don’t beat your wife, beat the Dow) the constituent stocks of which are:
- BFB - Brown-Forman Corp. Cl BHolding company for distilleries that produce Jack Daniel’s, Early Times, Canadian Mist, Southern Comfort, Finlandia, and others. Recently acquired a major stake in a Mexican tequila manufacturer.
- BUD - Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc.Brewer of cheap domestic beer; owner of theme parks.
- CHB - Champion Enterprises Inc.Major manufacturer of mobile homes and modular buildings.
For Barry’s description of the whole portfolio, click here.
How are they doing?
[November 8, 2007] The market has its ups and downs, but White Trash just keeps on gittin’-r-done.
Since its inception in March 2007, the White Trash Portfolio is up 11.1%.
…Over the same time period, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tracking the major indexes performed as follows:
Go Barry!
Excerpt from:
An Unordered List of Thoughts I Had During a Conference Call with a Potential Client Today:
- There’s no way in hell this is going to be under thirty minutes. Why are you lying to me? It’s not possible. You know it’s not possible. You are a liar, sir.
- God, I wish I’d been paying attention in college when they went over the definition of “synergistic” in English and “how to leverage it” in Business… Oh yeah, I didn’t go to college. That’s probably why I use regular words and thoughts to describe how I want to create a product and then make money on it. And why I know you can’t “leverage” anything, given that it’s a noun.
- IF YOU SAY “Drink the Kool-Aid” ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME, I’M GOING TO BURST THROUGH THE WALL AT YOUR OFFICE, KILL YOU IN A VERY UNSIGHTLY AND BLOODY WAY, AND THEN SCREAM “Oh, YEAH!”
- Facebook isn’t the internet, dipshit.
- You want four million users by DECEMBER?? You have four hundred active licenses for your product currently! Nothing - and I mean NOTHING - is going to add four zeros to the end of that number in three months short of hiring Arthur Anderson to handle the bookkeeping…
Full piece here at The Journal of Joe the Peacock. Yay.
Hat tip to Claire Doyle at Red Beret Design.
