I’ve been a writer and/or a small business owner (lawyer) most of my life. Now I work mainly on helping small to medium sized businesses with their sales.
I understand what it is like to stare at a blank screen (and a blank piece of paper in my typewriter, back in the day) and wonder what on earth I’m going to write/type on it. I also know all the problems and distractions involved in running a small business. Over the years, especially with the growth of the internet, I have come across all the schemes and ideas that are touted every day online, and I’ve tested a good many.
Some are genuine, even though only a small minority of people would have any success with them. Some depend on succeeding in a saturated market. And some are downright daft. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned.
- If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.
- Anything promoted as not requiring any work or skill is a scam.
- Any multi-level marketing business that depends on constantly recruiting more people is a ponzi scheme and will collapse sooner rather than later.
- Investment schemes that promise returns that are substantially higher than you can get on the stock market are to be avoided.
- If a business idea doesn’t depend on initial sacrifice and work without reward then it is phoney.
- You have to give before you can expect to receive.
- There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
I may add to this list from time to time, but I think life (and business) becomes very much easier to navigate successfully if you know what I call the “realities of life”.
These are far too numerous to set out here, but, let me mention just one such reality, which everyone would do well to bear in mind when considering a business proposition.
Where does wealth come from?
I want you to distinguish between money and wealth. Money isn’t wealth. Money is just a token of wealth, a claim to a share of the nation’s wealth (yes, I favour the concept of a nation). In western countries, money can be created and destroyed by the banking system. The banking system is answerable to no-one and they can easily create money when there is no additional wealth to back it up (inflation) and destroy money (call in loans) even though there is wealth aplenty to support such money (deflation, which leads to recession). And they do. There’s a link to a bundle of free PDFs below, which explain this in more detail. But back to my main point, which is about wealth.
Wealth can be created in only three ways:
- Agriculture and horticulture. We all depend on food in order to live. Apart from fruit and veg we grow ourselves, food, for the most part, is at its basic level produced by farmers and market gardeners. In some cases, the product is not food, e.g. cotton, trees. But still the basic rule is, “No farmers = no food”. Yet farmers and market gardeners in modern times are under the thumb of huge industrial combines, the large supermarkets, who have managed to make farmers dependent on them, rather than the other way around (which is as it should be).
- Mining. This covers the extraction from the earth’s crust of all the naturally-produced minerals and other valuable resources to be found there. Think of miners, deep sea divers, and explorers/prospectors. Obvious examples are coal and oil, gold and diamonds. Less obvious are things like rare-earth minerals, salt, copper, basalt, silver, and so on. These things are valuable, and represent real wealth in their own right, though they usually need refining in some way before they can be considered fit for the use intended. This, of course, increases their value. And it leads on to our third way of wealth creation.
- Conversion of natural (or partially treated) products into finished products, AKA factory production. This process used to provide employment for millions of people in towns and cities throughout the western world. Now robots and other computerised methods take care of a lot of the work. But the outcome is the same. Comparatively cheap raw materials go in at one end, and come out at the other end transformed into valuable manufactured products.
All trades and occupations that do not fit into one of these three ways of creating wealth are dependent upon them. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, surgeons, architects, writers, artists, film makers, printers, interior designers, stock brokers/financial traders, newspaper proprietors, life coaches, website consultants, repair men, driving instructors, gardeners, sports trainers, transport and logistics managers, airline pilots, the military, tax inspectors, child minders, hotel managers and owners, car park attendants, road sweepers. This list could go on and on.
The point is that they are all dependent on the activities of others who actually produce (or discover) wealth. None of these people actually produce wealth themselves, They perform other functions that contribute to the functioning of civilization. In most cases they are essential functions, but neverless they still don’t produce wealth.
I always bear all that in mind when considering any business scheme I read about. Where is it on the scale of wealth-producing?
Ask yourself that when hearing about businesses that depend on, for example, taking advantage of someone else’s inability to spell properly by buying their eBay product that doesn’t show up well in searches because the key words are mis-spelled, and getting it for a low price, and then selling it for a much higher price with all the mis-spellings corrected so you have more bidders driving the price up. Or when buying low on Amazon and selling high on eBay.
If it doesn’t play some part in either producing wealth or facilitating the sharing of that wealth throughout the nation, then I personally would avoid it.
I will express myself in more detail from time to time on the GeganWeb .
Anyone interested in learning more about the financial racket and the true origin of money can download a free guide to it by clicking here. No upsells.