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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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Please contact me via e-mail: stephen @ hdbizblog dot com

Editor’s Note: This post is kinda long and rambling. I am talking here about what I have been up to, and what I am going to be working on in the future. If you’re just here for actionable productivity tips, skip it. If you are interested in the new direction I am taking, please read on.

There’s an old cliche that says “Entrepreneurs do what other people won’t in order to do what other people can’t.”

The suggestion there is right on the money - that the entrepreneurs who get to live the life people dream about did so because they were willing to make the sacrifices it took to make that life happen.

So the question really is: can you afford not to be an entrepreneur?

If your answer is “yes”, then your life will probably be just fine. Keep doing whatever it is that you enjoy doing. But if you really want a taste for what it means to control your own destiny and reap the benefits of taking risks, starting your own business is really the only option.

Getting a Paycheck vs Getting a Pay Out

Most of us see starting and growing a business as leading to the financial rewards of being the business owner. That’s because business owners enjoy the difference between earning a paycheck and earning the bigger reward - a pay out.

You may think those with a big paycheck, like those sports celebs with the $25 million contracts are the big winners. Not at all. It’s the person who can write that check, like the owner of the team.

Even if Kevin Garnett continues to be the highest paid player in the NBA for the next decade, he still won’t be writing the checks that his boss can.

The real cash comes from either the profits of the business on a regular basis or the eventual sale or IPO of the business down the road. Until your earnings are tied to the performance of the company, not your position, you’ll never be in the situation where you can truly enjoy the real rewards.

Give Yourself a Raise

As big as they can get, paychecks are inherently limited to what someone else is willing to pay you. If you can’t stand the idea of someone else determining what your pay scale should be, then starting a company is the fastest way to change all that.

The day you start your own company, the only person that will ever determine your income is you. If you’re as good as you think you are, the sky’s the limit.

Most entrepreneurs are stifled in their current jobs, both financially and creatively. Since salaries are often dependent on age and experience, not raw capability, your wages probably do not reflect what you are truly capable of.

Consider this: Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Steve Jobs were all around 30 when their companies went public. How much do you think that they would have been paid if they had stayed on in their salaried jobs? Clearly their ages had nothing to do with their capability, and starting their own venture was the only way to prove that.

Don’t Leave Money on the Table

When you’re working for a paycheck, you’re making yourself a bit of money, but you’re also making the company a bit of money. Every hour of your time is putting a dollar in your pocket, but it’s also putting a dollar in the owner’s pocket as well, which is good for him, not so good for you. This is the part that bothers me the most. And as I get older, it bothers me more and more.

Of course, the fastest way to double your pay is to put both of those dollars in your pocket for the same amount of effort! As the owner of the business you may have more overhead than you would as an employee, but long term you’re not only maximizing the payout on your time, you’re creating a business that will one day exceed your own value.

On the other hand, by leveraging the power of the internet, you can keep that overhead to a minimum.

Build Your Own Cumulative Value

Even if you’re incredibly well paid in your current position, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re only one person. You can only earn as much as your own time and contribution will afford you. At some point, in order to get to the next level, you need the company working for you, not the other way around.

That means taking on employees and leveraging the economies of scale. As the employer, you can infinitely scale the size of your income by adding more business and more employees. At some point the cumulative value of their contributions will far exceed what you could possibly earn as a worker bee.

Stop the Slow Bleed

No one is ever surprised to hear that you can make a great deal of money as a successful entrepreneur. They are mostly just afraid of taking that chance. People also tend to be afraid of not having that steady paycheck coming in every two weeks so that they can pay the bills.

The real chance you’re taking is in not thinking about just how much you’re losing by not being an entrepreneur yourself. When you add up how much value you’re losing by taking a paycheck every week, you start to wonder what was keeping you from taking the plunge in the first place.

In many ways, starting your own company is the only way to eliminate the risk of not being paid enough.

Starting My Own Company

That is why I have chosen to begin my own company, start working for myself and be my own boss. This new venture will start small, with a new blog and a new focus on small business development.

This blog will stay the same!

Everything that you, the readers, have asked for (and demanded!) will be here for you. The change is that the other topics that I enjoy writing and learning about (such as Leadership and New Media) are going to be found at their new home:

In Context MultiMedia dot com

Please come on over and check it out. It’s a mini blog-network aimed toward small business and developing that business by developing the entrepreneur running it. I have learned a lot over the past two years of blogging, and I am looking forward to sharing that information - helping you to help yourself. I will also be offering my services for hire, on Productivity, Social Media Consulting and more.

The primary categories that we will be addressing at the new site are:

Blogging for your business

Conversations with your market

Leadership in the New Media world

Marketing to the Long Tail, and the Head

Networking for success through Social Media

Each article, or post, will also be tagged with a more specific topic name. In this way you can not only just read posts about Blogging, for example, but you can read all of the posts that are tagged “blogging tools” or whatever topic you wish to develop today.

Click on the category links above to learn more about each specific category. I’d love to hear your feedback!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/4prntp. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

This may not look like an actionable productivity workflow post, but it is. In fact, I think that it is a very important post for three reasons:

1. It is about learning some new things that you can put into action right away.
2. It is news about one of those chances that only comes around once in a while.
3. There is a contest for all of you at the end!

I am not usually one to use hyperbole, but this is going to be good. I am going to take this course. Why?
Because I just started a new site and I want to stop working for other people (I want to just work for you, dear readers)! Also, I have been working on a media site/e-learning product of my own, and I have learned some very valuable marketing lessons from Naomi, lessons that I have been able to put into action right away.

In fact, here is my own receipt information, I just signed up myself:

Thank you for your order.

Order Receipt:

Order ID: xxxxxx331
Date: Fri Sep 05 08:57:35 -0400 2008
Payment Type: Visa
Order Status: Accepted

Self-promotion for people who hate self-promotion
$205.00 X 1 = $205.00
———————————————————————-
Product Total $205.00
———————————————————————-
Grand Total $205.00

Call this post Marketing in Context

Naomi and Havi are starting a new teleconference training course. It’s about Marketing and Promoting your business. If it’s anything like her SEO Ninja course you’re going to want to jump on it.

The course starts next Wednesday, 10 Sept, and is about:

This is a 6 week power course for creative types, small business owners, and people who are (understandably) too busy freaking out to properly live their dreams.

Six weeks of learning, soothing, ass-kicking, fear erasing, question answering, and some other things that end with “ing”.

It’s a course for people who want to get their business — sometimes referred to as “that thing that you’ve always wanted to do and maybe you might get paid a living wage for it someday but it’s not really, you know, a business business” — rocking and rolling.

It’s for people who are ready to clear out the crap that’s standing in the way of their awesome life and start having more fun and making some money doing it.

As you know, I only link to products/services that I have actually used and can personally recommend (like these [link]). Obviously this course has not happened yet, so I have not used it. But I am going to take the course. Because I know Naomi, I read her blog to learn internet marketing, and I know others that have used her personal coaching to great advantage. I trust her to provide value (and some swear words, sorry).

So, if you are interested in learning how to promote your own small business (or large business for that matter), click on that Picture up above. Or this link. Yes it is an affiliate link, and yes, I will get a little slice of the fee.

The Productivity in Context Marketing Contest

Here is the contest:
If at least 10 of you sign up for this course, I’ll make my money back and be able to pay for one of you to take the course too. So, let’s forward this article to all of the people that you know that may be interested in learning innovative marketing techniques from couple of very creative gals.

Send me an e-mail so I know that you or they signed up for the course. As soon as 10 people sign up I will select one at random and send you the course fee via Pay Pal. Remember that the course starts next Wednesday!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6cgr7q. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

A while back I was reading Turning the Future into Revenue (Hiemstra) and I came across this paragraph:

“To be strategic is to move to integrate daily work with strategic work, so that over time they will become one and the same. If one is ‘being’ strategic, then virtually all work activity can be seen and is interpreted for how it contributes to the agreed upon strategic directions. Rather than strategic work being seen as an interruption of daily activity, daily work that is not strategic is seen as the interruption.”

I was so moved by the clarity of this statement that I had to put the book down and give that some more thought. I knew that I had written about making sure that your principles point toward your goals and that your actions should follow your principles.

I had also made a practice of using my Quarterly review to make sure that I planned and executed at least one thing toward achieving my Someday/Maybe goals during the next quarter.

This paragraph took that thinking to the next level. I decided to Tweet about it, and pare it down even further.

Note: Twitter is not an interruption, it is a good, quick easy way to share some ideas.

Put Strategic Practices to Work

Since the spring, I have been working diligently on executing a strategic plan for making this blog into a much larger business venture and community. I have been working with a few teams of people on some really cool projects, and it was all coming along nicely. Then this book inspired me to take that vision further, to be bold and take a risk. Hiemstra actually lists four ways that companies (even little ones like In Context MultiMedia) can experience fundamental, transformational change.

1. Be Future Oriented
2. Be Vision Driven
3. Be Collaborative
4. Be Strategic

There it was, my whole practice, sewed up into a neat little package. I had not seen it like this before. Mainly because I am one of those people that like to make things a little more complicated than they have to be! (the rest of you with ADD will understand)

Now I had that extra push that I needed. My “future-oriented vision” had reached its tipping point, and I knew exactly what to do.

Take it further than you think you should

I had been toying with the idea of using this platform strictly for my productivity and workflow writing, and moving the other topics that I am interested to other places, such as guest-posts on other blogs. You, as readers, seemed to like that idea, since you primarily come here for the workflow tips and learning simple practices for controlling your inputs. Several of you have communicated with me privately, indication that you just don’t like the non-productivity stuff.
Okay, you’ve got it.

Productivity in Context, the blog, will become part of the In Context MultiMedia network. Keep your eyes on the new universal portal for In Context MultiMedia, here [link]. As of today that is the new home for my writings on Blogging, on Leadership and Management, and on some new topics like Networking and Conversations. Please take a few minutes to check it out:

“This resource has been specifically created to teach you how to develop your small business and yourself, from the inside and out. This is not just another blog purporting to tell you about how to grow and strengthen your business and brand, I am doing it right now. I am living it right now.

And it is time for me to pay it forward and tell you what I did, show you the steps I took, and work with you as your business grows.”

Thank you all for putting up with the non-productivity related posts over the past two years. From now on, this blog will be strictly about productivity workflow and getting your tasks done. I do trust that many of you will be interested in the new blog as well, you can find out how to subscribe here [link].

Thanks again, I look forward to hearing from you. Leave a Comment!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5pv3eo. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

This is a sneak peek at the new project:

www.InContextMultiMedia.com

I would love to hear about what you think.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5wc5ks. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen