The Goal of Business is to Make a Profit

Robert Scoble is an A List speaker in the tech community. Despite plenty of experience I am closer to X or Y in the alphabet. One awkward subject with any speaking gig is arranging payment for expenses. Most of us have a job. We work. Work takes time. So time spent traveling (the majority) and speaking (the minority of the time on any given trip) is time spent away from billable work. Asking if money is available to fund the trip is the right thing to do. So this post is unfortunate.

I also like Robert’s shout-out to Ayn Rand (he doesn’t say that, my interp) from Scoble’s post:

It’s my responsibility to make PodTech make a profit. IT IS MY
RESPONSIBILITY TO PUT AS FEW RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS ON MY BUSINESS AS
POSSIBLE. And, yes, if there is money available to cover my expenses it
IS MY RESPONSIBILITY TO ASK FOR THEM!

Now, as someone running a business I would likely encourage Robert to be even more direct. The goal of business is "to make a profit." Not control expenses, although that is part of making a profit.

Profit enables you to hire PEOPLE. People are the force that does good. People need to eat. Therefore you should pay them. Therefore you must make a profit, hire good people, let good people make a positive impact on society.

Reconstruction: Theories/Practices of Blogging

Reconstruction: Theories/Practices of Blogging

Internet & Software – US Advertising Outlook

A 50 page PDF Morgan Stanley Internet & Consumer Software Advertising Report. (via longstation)

The Summary of the US Internet Search Market (pg 18) states:

… Accelerating Migration of Media Content (including video) to the Web, Local and Mobile Initiatives, Rollout of Yahoo!’s Project Panama and the Initial Traction from Microsoft’s AdCenter Could Drive Growth Re-acceleration in 2007

I am not sure "Re-acceleration" is a word. And I added the emphasis. And they qualify it with "could". Yet I believe what they are saying. Our little company is up significantly again in 2006 and the year isn’t over yet!

The report is full of noted gaps as shown in the graph top right of this post. And the stated gap between revenue from classifieds off line and online.

(more…)

Only Services in an Online World – the copybot cometh

Running a primarily web based biz I spend a lot of time reading and studying economics. Not the formula laden macroeconomics studies, but the real world version. How do we help our clients make a profit while we also make a profit to pay our people more. That version. So I find the copybot threat to product sales in Second Life very interesting. (SL is a virtual world where people interact).

CopyBot Roils SecondLife Economy

… Somebody in SecondLife, a popular multiplayer virtual world, created a
gadget called the CopyBot, which can make a perfect copy of any object
in the SecondLife world. (Here’s a Reuters story.)  This raises some interesting technical issues, but I want to focus today on how it effects SecondLife’s economy.

and O’Reilly’s restates the summary in his post on copybot (where I saw this first) as:

Raph’s conclusion is that infinite copying should be accepted as part
of the online world and products can’t be businesses, only services.

and from the reuters story, Revolution (who offered copies of copybot for sale) suggests this economic revision to your business plan

“Even if I pull this program, plenty of other people out there have it
or have the knowledge to create something bigger and better,”
Revolution added. “My advice is to offer the whole package when you
sell something. Don’t just offer a couch, but a couch that has several
custom poses … work one-on-one with people to create unique things, and
offer customization services instead of throwing up some prims for sale
and forgetting about it.”

Not sure where this is all going, but it will be interesting to watch. And now I will go back to selling services. (note – I emphasized the word "services" in both quotes).

Join, Recruit, or Retreat

Several years ago many folks, including me, were consistently encouraging people to "join the conversation". People were using different words, I personally still like to talk about the importance of distributed authoring.

Yet from all of my public speaking lately for PRSA and IABC chapters in Florida, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and most recently Arizona, I find myself recommending more and more to recruit.

The field is so new and training to understand the social norms of the Internet takes time. Like learning a professional sport except the pay isn’t the same. Learning is important, but I firmly believe it does not obviate the need to recruit. Find the good ones in college and get them on board. Or study like crazy.

Better yet, both.