In this definition, freedom does not mean success and certainly does not mean irresponsible living. Every income source activity will require your attention at some point in time in order for that income to happen. There are three basic means of income from the perspective of this article. They are Employment, Investing and Business ownership. Bear in mind that all of these can become liabilities so its how you approach them will give you the income to achieve freedom.  Lets look at the three options in more details.

1. Employment – The most widely known means of income in today’s society anywhere is being employed. This could mean from being a contract service provider to a full time employee. In order to achieve true freedom from employment there are things you have to do in order to make it worthwhile. For example some type of jobs give you better choice in terms of freedom than others. A CEO is employed and makes a lot of money in some cases but he/she may not necessarily have the choice to just time out whenever they please. This means you have to grow your employment value and look for jobs that require your unique and valuable skills.

To achieve flexibility and good income from employment is to find your niche and grow yourself in that niche so that you employers seek you out and not the other way around. There are jobs with more flexibility than others but you will need to look for those that match your requirement over time.

2. Investing – While this means of income can be done as a full time thing as in the case with a venture capitalist, pretty much everyone has done this in some form or another. Investing is where you leverage your assets to make an income. A good example of this would be your 401k which gains some growth over time by investing in stocks or bonds of some kind. A more direct form of investing which can be very lucrative is to invest in companies directly. This is the case with Angel Investors and venture capitalist.  You can do it with friends and family or you could become more sophisticated and join special investment clubs.

The key for investing is that you put very little time into the actual income process. You may join a company board here or there but your general approach is to allow others to do most of the work.

3. Business Ownership – Most people will push the idea that business ownership is the best way to achieve financial freedom yet its probably the most risk to not doing so. The old argument stands that more risk equals more rewards. Business ownership can be very rewarding if you take the right approach. This means you do not have to lose your shirt when you approach things in a systematic way of validating your idea before too much commitment. With the Internet around, you have many options to launch a business that can reach an international market in a very short period of time.

The essentials is that business ownership gives you total control of your income source. Do you have to be a top of the line business owner? No. You can partner with others to achieve a viable business. If you want to work in the background that is fine since you have others who want to jump out in the front represent the business to the outside world.

Summary

The most important thing about income is to find out where you can add the most value and give it your all. Always be aware that there are others who will want to take advantage you in any of the above options, so keep your eyes open.

Sit down and work out a plan for long term income success. The general path is Employment->Business->Investing but it does not have to come in this order. Get mentoring and advise on how to best do this.

Funding could be broken down into three main buckets which are credit, equity or grants. Of course you can use any combination of these to achieve your financing goals. Lets look at each of these in more details.

1. Credit – this approach is normally more appropriate as working capital for an existing company or financing for a retail type business that will generate revenue fairly fast. While you can use credit for developing a new product, the difficulty is that you would need to start paying the money back immediately, so you need to plan that out well. Of course if you have no other means to fund your business then this could be a way to get started or at least get things to a point where others may want to invest.

Credit can come as personal or directly off the business credit profile. People tend to shy away from personally guaranteeing loans in case the business fail it could hurt your personal credit. There are many providers out there that try to help you obtain credit through means such as shelf corporations with trade lines. Most of these schemes are mostly hit and miss, so no real surety of success. A very good means to get good terms on business loan is to investigate the SEC regulation D funding mechanism.

Another very good option for credit is to look for SBA backed loans especially if you are in the US. In this case, the SBA act as the guarantor for the loan which helps you to get more funding and even get advice to fine tune your business plan.

The one positive point about credit is that it does help you avoid the need to give up shares and equity in your business.

2. Equity – This is basically a funding means where you give up shares in your business for funding. The most basic form of equity funding is your own money and those of friends and family. The most advanced would be the use of Venture Capital investors. Whenever you pursue the equity route to funding, you need to consider the valuation of the business. The formula is [Valuation = Offer_amount/Offer_percentage]. This means that if you want $100,000.00 in equity investment and willing to give up 25% of the business for it, the value would be $400,000.00.

The best and simplest way for starting out and wanting venture funding is to check the SEC regulation D financing mechanism. The VC route is always there but its best to have the business at the certain point to get the best deal with venture capital funding. Another alternative for early equity funding would be Angel Investors.

3. Grants – A grant is basically free money given to your business. Most times grants can be obtained through government sources whether that is federal, state or local. They tend to focus funding on areas of interest to the income such as new technology and the National Science Foundation (NSF) is one of the biggest grantor and they focus on advancing science in the US. The other source for grants would be private foundations that have specific interest and focus in similar concept to what the government is doing.

The coolest and easiest way to get grants nowadays, is the concept of crowd funding. Sites such as kickstarter.com allows you to solicit money from ordinary people that basically likes your concept. This can be very helpful for new concepts where you have very little money on your own to get things to the next level. Bear in mind, there is no equity given in this case except that for larger amounts, you would promise the giver early access to the product.

Conclusion

Most business fail because of limited funding or cash flow issues. Its very important to get your funding under control as you progress through your business development. The above options are basic a snapshot of the tools available to fund your business. Find a trustworthy funding professional to guide you through this very important step in your business development.

One simple tool I can recommend for this task is a tool called Evernote. Evernote works on your computer as a desktop application, the web and most mobile OS such as Android and Iphone. You can use evernote to bookmark important websites, you can create notebooks for each relevant topic and file information in an organized way.

A very important element apart from bookmarking is the ability to create and take notes. While it is not better than Google docs in terms of formatting and other features, the ability to share across platforms and archive this information in case your computer gets lost is very powerful.

Lets say you are on the road and some idea hits you on the spot. You can fire up the evernote application on your phone and take notes right there which could also include pictures or videos taken by the phone. If you want to start researching a new business idea, the best thing is to create a new notebook for it.  Now, you can go about writing notes as ideas hit you anywhere, bookmark or clip important websites of relevance then later you can decide how you want to process. The good news is that you have all your information per topic in one place.

Information is very important for success in any area of life nowadays and the better you organize it, your brain can remember things better or you can easily look that up whenever you need quickly. I think Evernote is one of those tools that you make your life much easier.

Check out Evernote

The first question is; what value does RIM offer to the mobile market place? In other words if you were a corporate purchaser looking for a phone platform to standardize mobile communication; what would tilt your decision in the favor of RIM? Would it be their operating system? I doubt it; would it be be their hardware? very unlikely too. I suspect one appeal the blackberry have would be the global communicator that comes with each phone.  Here are a few major factors working against RIM

1. The lack of interest from serious application developers has cause the RIM  ecosystem to fall further behind IOS and Android.

2. Corporations are increasingly allowing employees to use any mobile OS of their choice. This has come about mainly because on the consumer side people find better choices between IOS and Android phones over the RIM products.

If I was in the  position to forcefully advise RIM on a general strategy forward, I would offer two basic options (Of course these options would need more analysis than just a simple blog post). Here goes:

1. Port the blackberry communicator to all major mobile OS platforms and sell it as subscription only. This means that people can have all this capability in any device they choose to use. RIM would gain revenue from all those subscription which would now be unrestricted.

2. Move to an established and major mobile OS. This means they should get out of the OS game since that is not their core capability. The downside is that this could take time to achieve, so that is the main risk. If they decide to take this path, then they could focus on building phones that have their signature features while benefiting from the underlying OS ecosystem of Apps.

Ideally, they could pursue both of the above strategies if they can pull it off well and in the right sequence. In the end, they have to do something radical to remain viable as a communication equipment supplier long term. As a former employee of Nortel and knowing several co-workers who went to work for RIM, I kind of feel that they are heading in the same direction Nortel went which was to lose relevance to customers while having a very good engineering core.

I honestly hope they make the hard choices to get RIM back on track and offer value to potential customers.

The one source that has provided training for me is that a few years ago, I ran into an event called the 30 Day challenge. The aim of this challenge is to make your first $10 online using the techniques that is being imparted during the 30 days period. It has been expanded to about 2-3 months now with breaks in between weeks of activities. They also have a pre-season period where they provide the basic tools that they will use to accomplish this..

This is normally done every year starting August 1. I think it first started in 2005 or 2006..

Now, whats the catch? They do promote a paid membership site that provides more advance techniques and information to power your Internet Marketing pursuits. However, this basic class is extremely good for getting free information. They give you enough information to make money starting with zero knowledge, so thats commendable..

Go ahead and register at no cost and no catch.. Register for Thirty Day Challenge Now

Customer acquisition cost is how much you have to spend to get a paying customer. For example, if say twenty persons walked into your store then one person out of that twenty purchase an item then you are looking at a one out of twenty conversion rate (5%). The other discussion then is how much did you spend to get those twenty customers to walk into your store? Is it just because of your location? or was it some advertising work that you did? In looking at a new idea, its important to get an idea of this cost. Typically when the market you are entering is competitive, this cost would be generally higher. If you are coming out with a totally new product, then you need to spend a bit on promoting it as well, so there is an important discussion in understanding this cost especially for a new business. Put it this way, your goal is to get a sale as soon as possible, so getting a grip on this would be very useful. The good news is that things such as referrals could reduce this overall cost over time but initially you have to be conservative about this factor.

Product Delivery Cost would be all other cost that is related to getting the product from conception to delivery. This depends on what role you play in the process. If you are just reselling products then this cost is fairly low and may just focus on inventory and relevant logistics to getting the product into the customers hand. If you develop products, then you have to look at the whole cost of development including salaries and materials until the product is even ready for selling.

There you go. In developing your business plan and idea, you need to factor in these realistic cost especially to ensure that you will have adequate cash flow to succeed in your business. Bear in mind that these cost are already mentioned in generic business plan templates under different names but its good to look them in terms of getting paying customers and getting the product ready for delivery.

We will definitely be discussing more around this topic in the future.

Here is what I think a planner would tell me in general. Try to save a certain percentage, maximize your retirement savings and honestly hope you remain employed until retirement. One more thing, they would say you should eliminate debt including paying down your mortgage as much as possible.

While I agree with the idea of reducing debt and maximizing your savings, this approach always seem like you have to put your life on hold for the future. The recent economic recession and the way employers think nowadays does put that approach in danger and its like a sitting time bomb so to speak. The 401k investment could disappear overnight if you are not careful and to make matters worst, you could get laid off fairly easily nowadays even with very good performance.

Here is my personal financial advice to succeed in life. First you should strive to have choices in your life on how to spend your time now and in the future. This means you should not be subjected to what decision someone else can make. Of course you should save and avoid bad debt as much as you can in the process. Here are some basic things that could achieve our main objective of freedom.

1. Build and protect your personal credit score – This will be important for things such as starting a business and making some investment. Leverage this credit score for business and investment purposes.

2. Seek out good investment that outperforms the bank and 401k return rates. Anything that allows you to grow your money should be considered with proper risk evaluation.

3. Develop your career for rapid advancement. This means you cannot stay at the same level in your career to achieve the ultimate freedom. This could mean both education, mentoring, networking and simply looking out for the right opportunities.

4. Always consider starting or investing into a business venture – This could mean buying a business, starting the business as lead person or just be an investment partner in a business.

5. Protect your assets – Once you have things that you need, find a means to protect them both locally or overseas depending on how much you have and what makes you comfortable. The world economy is very edgy nowadays, so you need to diversify how you secure your wealth on a global scale.

To conclude, the best personal financial advice anyone could give you is to make sure that you can achieve financial freedom as soon as possible. This could be done through honest career advancement or investment in business ventures that ensure good economic returns. While making that transition, stick with the basics of living within your means, save as much as possible and invest in a diversified portfolio.

1. Focus Topic – The first important thing is to pick an area to focus on. For example, if you have interest in a pizza shop, start to focus in on that industry 100% from supply chain, product creation to delivery. Every thing related to that industry and market is important.

2. Research –  This would include the solutions are available, the typical consumer of the product or service and any pertinent details on the industry. The Internet can help with this a lot but its important to reach out to key people in that industry including consumers to understand likes and dislikes. Industry magazines, forums or focus groups can be invaluable with your information gathering.

3.  Problem identification – Make a list of areas that you think could be improved in that market or product. This would help you later to nail down a final solution to the problem.

4. Conversation – You need to reach out to people on this topic and discuss all the ins and outs of the industry including problems you identify and potential solutions.

5. Market Sizing – It is very important to understand the size of the market you are going after in terms of potential customers and how much you could realistically charge for your service. Services such as Google insights can really help to baseline the numbers along with the Google keyword tool. This should not be your only source of data but if these show low interest, it could mean the market is not worth pursuing. Some experts would say that the market should be worth at least US$1M using the above metrics.

6. Solution modeling – Once you identify some problems and the market data looks interesting, the next important thing would be to develop solutions for those problems identified. The solution could vary depending on the market type but one tool that could help in presenting this from a business perspective is the Business Model Canvas.

7. Go or no Go – at some point, you need to make a hard decision to go after this market or drop it. Consuming too much time on one topic where you are not making progress will only prevent you from finding that break through solution that you are after. If you decide to move forward, the next step would be called Customer development.

You can be successful in finding a very successful business idea if you immerse yourself in the topic at hand then decide what next and even when to move to the next idea. If you get trapped in a dead end idea, you will not really succeeded. The book “The Idea Hunter” is a great reference point on how to approach idea development.

Check out this tool for idea evaluation – Business idea evaluation.

This technique was started in Japan by Toyota and it has an amazing application. When you answer all the five whys in sequence the root cause always seem to be human error or mistakes. For example a manager not paying attention to making sure that employees are properly trained could cause some incompetent mistakes further down the road. There are many examples where this tool could help to achieve a positive outcome. For example if you are heavily in debt, use the five why tool to get to the bottom of that instead of blaming the government or your employers.

You can read more about this tool on wikipedia – Five Whys.

If you really want to be successful at what you do, there is always a constraint that is holding you back from that breakthrough. We tend to blame the world for such hindrance when its our own action that is causing this. Use the five whys on any situation that you face and you will be very surprised on the root cause.

1. Things not to eat – The general consensus is eat less sugar and refine carbohydrates. Pretty much all weight loss programs seem to accept these facts. The main things that fall in this category would be rice, flour, bread and many of our standard heavy food out there. Of course any sugar is bad, so reduce its intake as much as possible.

2. Good to Eat – Its very good to eat lots of vegetables as these provide your body with the essential nutrients and if you follow this religiously, you have to lose weight unless you have some other ailments. Good levels of protein and calcium is also go in the process. Also drink lots of water in the process.

3. Exercise – This one goes without saying. Of course the intensity will vary depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

Between those basic premise, there are many variations but if you follow the core of those you will do well. Lets be honest, if you need to lose weight you will need to be stricter than if you simply just wanted to main your current weight. Eating vegetables can be a challenge and could be considered boring for the most part but there is no doubt it is very good for you. There is a solution to that.

The solution is called Vegetable and Fruit smoothies. Basically, you get fresh vegetables with fruits and blend them into tasty smoothies for any meal. If you want to be aggressive in getting results, it just means you will do this more often and in fact for all meals in a given period. Even Montel Williams is promoting this concept on TV recently. A great book to read more on this topic is “Eat to Live”.

Please comment on what you think of this overall concept.