How to Spend Zero Dollars While Shopping With Your Spouse – The Shopping Cart Slalom

Have you ever gone shopping just to keep your spouse company then ended up buying more than they did? I hate to shop but my wife thoroughly enjoys it. Before we had a baby, some weekends she’d head out shopping and I’d do my own thing at home but now we make it a family affair.

Accidental Shopping
The problem for me is that I’ll go along to keep her company but end up buying things myself. Typically it’s something I buy on sale to resell online but occasionally it’s something I intend to keep.

Shopping Cart Slalom
This weekend we hit my “favorite place”, the mall. It never ceases to amaze me the crazed mix of cars and people streaming into these shopping centers hell-bent on consumption and debt creation. As we moved from Old Navy, to the Gap, to some baby stores I stumbled across the perfect weapon against accidental shopping.

In an effort to keep my son entertained I began weaving the stroller in and out of the clothing stands in the store. As we went along I realized that not only was he laughing and smiling but I was enjoying it as well. You may never notice when shopping but all the racks and displays make for some really neat slalom courses for carts or strollers. The fact that I had my headphones in helped to block out the noise of shopping bustle and somehow gave me immunity from the store employees’ dirty looks.

Total Savings
My son and I slalomed our way through every store we entered and I didn’t spend a single cent. Last time I visited Old Navy with my wife I left with 20 messenger bags to resell on eBay, most of which I still have. I also purchased a shirt on sale for myself that I’m sure I didn’t really need. The shopping slalom proved to be a great way to get exercise, have fun, and save money. You should try it sometime.

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Are You a Part Time or Full Time Entrepreneur?

How can you get your business off the ground if you’re still working full time for an employer? I attended an entrepreneurship & innovation networking event on Friday night as part of Entrepreneurship Week USA and ran into some interesting guys with some great ideas who are definitely full time entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs
Chris runs on online service, Athletes4Hire, that helps graduating and former collegiate athletes find their spot in the corporate world. His growing business was recently featured by Entrepreneur’s magazine.

Both an artist and a businessman, Andrew is the owner of Acronym Designs, a company that sells elegant environmentally friendly high-end furniture. His products are a little out of my price range but he knows exactly who his target market is and he’s riding the rising popularity of “green” companies and products.

As the president of podCast411, Robert Walch has become a podcasting pro. He began podcasting when it first came on the scene and has made a career of it. His success in the industry is reflected in his speaking and consulting jobs and the recent book Tricks of the Podcasting Masters that he co-authored.

Part Time vs. Full Time
These entrepreneurs found a way to make a living by being involved in things they are passionate about. They’ve found ideas and niches that allow them to dedicate their time and effort solely to their ventures.

Meeting these and other entrepreneurs made me realize the huge difference between part time and full time entrepreneurs. I thought it was tough trying to balance my day job with my outside ventures. Although the time management is challenging I realize it’s a whole different ball game than being a full time entrepreneur.

Without the security of regular paychecks and benefits they must live and breathe their business to make it a go. I admire their determination and drive but with a new baby, I don’t know that I’d be able or willing to take the same risks and commit as much time as they do at this point in my life.

Weekend Entrepreneur to Full Time Business Owner
One of the things I’ve learned from running this site and from guys like Brian Clark and Darren Rowse is the power of blogs to help small businesses reach a larger audience in a convincing, authoritative way with minimal costs. As I spoke with Robert Walch about the local opportunities for some type of blog consulting for small businesses his advice was to “keep my day job”. He thought the need was out there but it would take time to make it a viable business.

This seems to be the approach of many part time entrepreneurs nowadays. Hold onto your paycheck while you figure out how to make money on the side. After a while you’ll learn the ropes and if the opportunity presents itself you can make the move from a weekend entrepreneur to running your business full time. This is the approach I plan to take, I’d be interested to hear the stories of others who have taken either route.

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Personal Finance Articles This Week – Market Sell Off, Insurance & Haircuts Tips, March Madness, Alternative Income, Debt Reduction, Sneaky Best Buy, & Money Saving Tips

Market Sell Off
The big news in the financial world this week was the market correction that spooked us all. Sun sees the market drop as a buying opportunity and Jeremie offers us a chance to buy discounted stocks virtually as he launches his eFIPO Stock Game.

Insurance & Haircuts Tips
Gen X finance reminds us there are actually 6 types of standard coverage on auto insurance policies and offers tips on the coverage limits and premiums.

Golburu paid $12 for a bad haircut and gives some tips on how to get a better haircut. I always pay the least amount possible for my haircut and it usually shows, I’ll have to follow these tips next time.

March Madness
March Madness is upon us. Both Free Money Finance and Money Blog Site and are on the road to the final four. Money Smart Life has four entries over at Free Money Finance and is a #4 seed in the Money Blog Site bracket.

Alternative Income
We’d all love to have some extra money rolling in every month. Cheers to Lazy Man who had a 43% gain in his alternative income stream this month! Maybe he can show us how it’s done.

Debt Reduction
They say getting started is half the battle. Tricia from Blogging Away Debt took this to heart and tells her readers the steps she took to begin her battle against debt.

Sneaky Best Buy
It turns out that Best Buy may be doing their best not to honor internet prices in their stores, Binary Dollar alerts us to their bait and switch tactics.

Money Saving Tips
As a new parent, I’m finding out that kids cost a lot of money. Thanks to The Silicon Valley Blogger for showing me some ways to save money on a kid’s birthday party.

Yan at Pro Bargain Hunter continues to help us find new ways to save. His series of shopping website reviews continues, this week taking a look at ResellerRatings.

Frugal as always, the Frugal Duchess shows us some ways to score some deals at dollar stores.

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Do You Have What it Takes to Start a Business?

If you want to know how to get somewhere, ask someone who has already arrived. In a USA Today article, Jim Hopkins asked “entrepreneurs, private investors and academics which experiences, traits and skills” could help a person succeed with their own business. Their answers are listed below:

• Childhood experience
• Entrepreneurial genes
• Family support
• Money doesn’t motivate
• Passion
• Pragmatism
• Risk-taking
• Strong ethics
• Tech ease
• Tenacity
• Resources

My favorite piece of advice was that money doesn’t motivate. Scott Laughlin, director of the University of Maryland’s tech entrepreneurship program summed it up with the following quote

“Entrepreneurs are much more interested in ‘wealth’ rather than ‘riches,’ Riches are piles of money, wealth is broader, encompassing less-tangible rewards such as respect and independence.”

It makes sense that if we can focus on what we want to create and who we want to become as a business owner, we’ll be motivated to succeed and the money will follow.

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The Ten Basic Steps of Starting a Business

Startup Nation has assembled a type of how to resource for starting a business entitled 10 Steps to Open For Business.

For each one of the ten steps below, the site provides an introductory audio clip, templates and example documents, and lists of resources such as web articles, seminars, radio shows, and featured stories of entrepreneurs.

• Create a Life Plan
• Choose a Business Model
• Create a Business Plan
• Select a Structure
• Create Key Assets
• Find the Funding
• Organize Logistics
• Find Great People
• Establish a Brand
• Market and Sell

Although this is a great resource, be warned it can be overwhelming if you try and soak it all in at once. I see running a small business as a marathon, not a sprint. You don’t have to go through all the information in one night. Instead, commit to working on it for a certain number of hours each day and after a while you’ll emerge with a well thought strategy and action plan for your new business.

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JohntUnger.com – Entrepreneur Extraordinaire. Catablogging & Health Care Coverage

This final set of questions from John covers his successful use of the Internet to sell his artwork in a “catablog” format and his take on health care for the self-employed.

I first discovered your blog via a guest article on ProBlogger.com written by Brian Clark of CopyBlogger.com. A main topic of the article was your use of a “catablog” to market and sell your artwork. What percentage of your total art sales come from the art portfolio on johntunger.com?

The first year was probably only 10-20 percent of my income. The next year was probably 35% or so. Last year, about half of my income came either directly or indirectly from my blogs. In addition to selling existing art or items like the Great Bowl O Fire, I’ve had far more commission inquiries than I ever did with a static HTML website.

Two of the downsides of selling on the Internet are shipping costs and that the customer can’t actually touch and feel the product. I’ve found a good risk reversal for these issues to be offering a money back return policy. How do you handle these hurdles with your artwork, especially since items such as your Great Bowl of Fire and Le Grand Flambeau Tiki Torches are heavy items to ship?

Shipping is the most difficult problem I have with selling online. Most of my work is too heavy to ship via UPS or any other ground shipping option so I end up shipping via Fed Ex Freight. And even with a 55% discount, the costs can be high. Although the great Bowl O Fire lists the shipping cost at $150, the true cost is actually between $300-400 depending on where it’s going. I’ve learned to adjust prices to cover some of the shipping charges because it just doesn’t seem right to people to pay equal amounts for the art and the shipping. The fire bowls, for example, sell more than twice as fast since I lowered the shipping and raised the price.

I’ve decided not to offer a return policy for this exact reason… By the time an item has been shipped to the buyer and then back to me, there’s really nothing left to refund. Although I might make more sales if I had a return policy, I’ve decided that it works better for me to know that all the sales I do make are definite.

Brian Clark talks about the marketing power of the Internet for small businesses, “it’s the little guy with the unique product that can gain the most benefit from worldwide exposure.” One key here seems to be the uniqueness of product. Your art is definitely one of a kind. What kind of other products or services do you think would sell well on a catablog? What types of things would struggle?

I think it is certainly possible to sell mass produced items with a catablog. It depends on the personality of the blogger and on how well they retain readers and develop their reputation. For instance, if you were a well known book critic or movie critic, I don’t know why you wouldn’t be able to do well selling books and DVDs via Amazon’s affiliate links or their aStore program. This morning I was thinking about the viability of selling worldwide luxury real estate over a blog. I don’t know quite how you’d work the commission angle on that, but with all the real estate listings that are online I could easily see a market for a blogger who scoured the listings for the most interesting properties, maybe combined with practical posts about mortgages, rehab, home repair or on the other end, posts about the life of the glitterati who can afford the most spectacular homes.

The most common model for monetizing blogs is still advertising and affiliate sales. I never found that model terribly interesting personally, probably for the same reasons I’d rather be a moderately successful entrepreneur than take a day job at twice the income. I feel like the fact that a blog can help you build a community, network with others in your field, and reach out to niche markets makes it much more interesting to build a market for a product than to rely on clickthrough models.

So what do I think would do really well? Information products, self-published books, software, downloads of any kind (music, video, reference materials, templates)… all of these should be very easy to sell via a blog. Also things like classes, seminars or events seem like a good fit for blogs. I’m currently working on a site for a woman who arranges tourism packages in France. I think a blog is a perfect way for her to show her expertise, share interesting facts and stories, and generally engage an audience who has an interest in travel. One of her tours involves watercolor classes with a well know artist/educator in the Provence countryside. By posting photos of the places the tour goes and the pictures that they paint, I think the tour becomes a very exciting possibility for people who find the blog.

I’m not sure what kind of products I’d recommend against trying to sell through a catablog… perhaps items that can be highly customized and require a lot of fields for options, or items that are of local interest only? But even in cases where a blog may not be the solution for selling an item, I think there’s a fair chance that it can still be of use for marketing, building awareness and developing a community that is interested in learning more about what you have.

Do you have any advice for people interested in starting catablogs for their own service or product?

I think the most important thing to know going in is that it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to make it work. You not only need a great product, but you have to be able to write compelling posts, build relationships with customers and other bloggers, stay on top of online trends and services, etc. Blogs don’t write themselves (unless you’re doing well enough to pay a writer, and even that’s dicey because I think the personality behind a blog is a big part of the success).

Although catablogs have done very well for me, they’re still very much in their infancy. I have yet to find an easy way to add ecommerce to a blog. All of my catablogs use extensively modified templates and at present I’m still hand-coding Paypal buttons into individual posts. I’d love to find a third party solution to make setting up a catalog of my own items as easy as building an Amazon aStore or setting up a store on Etsy, Cafe Press or eSnips. There are great storefront and shopping cart solutions and great blog software, but as yet they haven’t quite found a perfect integration.

One thing that’s a big issue for entrepreneurs today is the topic of health care. What have you found to be the best way to provide health coverage for your family as a self-employed person?

Ah, yes. The monster rears its head. I’m still on what someone once called the “lucky boy plan,” which means, basically, I’m not allowed to get sick. Fortunately, for all my bad habits I seem to stay pretty healthy. When I lived in Chicago, I could go to Cook County for free medical care (if you don’t mind free-range TB patients wandering around and various other assorted horrors). They did a pretty good job of patching me up on my then-annual visits for stitches. I guess my idea now is still that so long as I don’t injure myself past the possibility of driving 6 hours and lying convincingly about the state I live in, I could still go there. Yeah, bad plan, I know.

Happily, my fiancée has a plan health that I will apparently be covered by automatically when we wed. I actually have mixed feelings about that, but it does seem a good thing. I’m probably getting too old to be running around uncovered. I do suspect though that one is more careful when they know they’re at risk. Ever since I lost the free hospital in CHI, I’ve not needed stitches once.

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That wraps up the interview with John Unger. Thanks to John for sharing his experiences with us, hopefully we’ve learned a thing or two from him. You can check out John’s art over at http://www.johntunger.com and his Typepad customization site at www.typepadhacks.org. Stay tuned for the next interview, you can follow them all here as we go.

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Ten Reasons Why it’s Tough to be an Entrepreneur

Being an entrepreneur comes with great rewards but it has its downsides as well. It changes your life; you find yourself with more of some things and less of others.

More Responsibility
When you make a commitment to your customers, readers, partners, employees or anyone else you interact with, you’re expected to follow through. Everyone is human and falls short sometimes but if you make a habit of it, the people you have surrounded yourself with will quickly scatter. Of course we should all be responsible with our personal interactions. Being an entrepreneur simply means you have even more relationships to be accountable for.

More Stress
If you’re like me you always have a list in your head of the things you want to be working on but can never seem to get to everything on the list. It’s easy to stress out about the things that you’d like to do but don’t have time. When I start to feel this way, I just remind myself that there is always tomorrow. I’ll work as hard and as smart as I can today, whatever I don’t get to, I’ll worry about in the morning.

More Risk
Starting your own business is an investment. Putting money into your venture is riskier than just socking it away in a savings account. Of course, the upside is much higher. A lot of elbow grease, a good product or service, and some great marketing can potentially yield a wonderful return on your investment. However, be mindful that many small businesses fail in the first several years for a variety of reasons. As you look at your financial situation and decide how much to sink into your company, remember the risk that comes with the investment.

More Decisions
You can drive yourself crazy by over-thinking all of the decisions you have to make as a small business owner. I think the key is being able to identify which decisions are critical and require some analysis vs which can be made off the cuff. Unfortunately, we usually learn this by making a bad decision and realizing its implications later on. Don’t be afraid to make a decision, the worst that could happen is that you’re wrong. As long as we learn from our mistakes we should be just fine in the long run. Of course, you can always leverage the experience of others by seeking counsel for a difficult decision. It could end up saving you a good deal of time and money down the road.

More Doubt
With more decisions comes more doubt. Since hindsight is 20/20, we may find ourselves second guessing our choices. As we try and define our business and the direction that it’s taking we may question some of our past decisions and the future viability of our plans. It seems to me this doubt is part of the learning process, we just can’t let ourselves get so caught up in second guessing that we cease to be effective decision makers.

Less Sleep
As I mentioned above, there always seems to be so much to do but never enough time to do it all. Before you know it the clock reads 2 AM and you have to get up in just 4 hours. Amazingly, I’ve found my body somewhat adapted to the lack of sleep over time and I can get by on much less than I used to. I still have to pick one or two nights a week where I get 6-7 hours to keep me chugging along.

Less Personal Time
With so much to do, you often have less time for things you used to enjoy. With limited time you have to make decisions about the free time you do have. I try and make sure my time spent working doesn’t cut into time with my family. Of course this means I usually work on things once they’re in bed, which contributes to the less sleep factor. Having less personal time may not sound very enticing, however, if you’re working on something you’re passionate about then it becomes your new hobby and you don’t miss the other things very much.

Less Money
You’ll need money to start and operate your business. Unless you have a ton of cash just lying around, and who does, this means you’ll likely have less money to work with outside your business. Of course, this is hopefully a temporary problem. While managing your cash flow becomes very important for a small business, if your investment pays off then down the road you’ll actually have more money.

Less Stability
One main difference between being an employee and an entrepreneur is that as a business owner your income is tied to the performance of your company. As an employee, you’re typically compensated even when times are bad. Not having a steady paycheck or not being covered by corporate benefits brings less stability to your finances. The flip side is that as an entrepreneur, when your business does well, you are rewarded for it, as opposed to an employer profiting from your hard work.

Less Support
As an employee of an organization you can call on its resources for assistance. When you’re in business by yourself, you don’t often have this luxury. Lack of corporate resources can be compensated for by building a good network of friends and other entrepreneurs that you can tap into when you need assistance. Luckily the Internet has made finding and participating in such communities a much easier task.

Up To You
In my opinion, the benefits of being an entrepreneur outweigh the drawbacks. I guess there is no way for you to know for sure unless you give it a try. So get started on that big idea today and decide for yourself whether being an entrepreneur is for you.

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Great Small Business Ideas for College Students

College is a great time to catch the entrepreneurial bug for several reasons. You don’t have a 9-5 job yet so other than a few classes a day you can set your own schedule. You’re surrounded by bright and motivated people you can collaborate with and you can turn to your experienced professors for advice or guidance.

I turned to Matthew Paulson of Getting Green for some advice for those in college looking to make a little extra money and get their feet wet as an entrepreneur. These ideas might not make your rich beyond your wildest dreams but they’re great for starting your own first venture. Matthew writes about money issues such as credit, financial freedom, and student loans over at Getting Green. If you enjoy this article be sure subscribe to Mathew’s feed for more great tips.

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If you are in college, you know that money can be quite hard to come by. We college students have to pay very large tuition payments every semester. When you combine this with our on average relatively low incomes, it can be quite daunting just to make it. It makes it even worse since most college students have never been taught proper money management skills and aren’t the best at handling their income yet. If you’re a college student who’s tired of work-study wages, consider one of these small business ideas.

Soda Shop
Most of the campus vending machines sell pop for 75 cents a can and a very overly inflated price. Consider heading down to the local grocery store, or better yet a local Costco or Sam’s Club, and buy some pop in bulk. You’ll probably buy it for a quarter a can or less if you get generic stuff. You can then sell those cans for 50 cents each and undercut the university. You’ll want to keep it on the down-low, since generally
university suppliers don’t like having competition.

Note Taking
Send an email out to the rest of your class and offer to take notes for them. If you can get more than a few people interested, you can actually get paid to go to your classes! Be sure to take really good notes and send out the first few days notes free with the sample email. You’re going to take notes anyway, so why not charge $25 a pop for the semester or so?

Tutoring
A lot of students have trouble in college, so why not consider being a tutor? If your university does not offer tutoring services, chances are you can make a killing off tutoring. You just need to let people know that you are out there.

Dorm Cleaning
Most college students have awfully dirty dorm rooms. Offer a cleaning service in which you come by once every couple of weeks (or one of your employees), and give their room a good once over. This means vacuuming, mopping, dusting, cleaning their bedding, taking out the trash, and the like. If you do very well, you’ll get all sorts of referrals from your happy customers.

Computer Support
Most college students have computers, offer to take care of their desktop and laptops if they have computer problems. Chances are there are plenty of geeks around the school for you to hire as employees, so why not make a business of it?

These are just a few ideas for college students to make some money while they are undergraduates. What sort of small business that you can start as an undergraduate is only limited by your imagination.

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JohntUnger.com – Entrepreneur Extraordinaire. Entrepreneurial Journey, Motivation, & Enthusiasm.

Welcome to this continuation of an interview with entrepreneur John Unger. In this portion of the interview, I ask John about outsourcing, his journey through a variety of careers, his internal motivation, and how he spreads enthusiasm. Enjoy.

Owning a small business requires you to perform many different functions. You have experience in a number of different roles, “poet and writer, a tech geek, a print and web designer, illustrator, industrial designer, musician, teacher, actor, set designer and even a paid guru once”. Do you outsource anything to other people in areas outside your expertise? If so, how do you go about it?

I do outsource things that are either beyond my capabilities, or more often when it seems like outsourcing is cheaper and more effective. For example, there are times when it makes a lot more sense to order steel pre-cut or have a shape made on a CAD/Cam plasma cutter. Although I could do the cuts by hand, it’s more accurate, efficient and ultimately cheaper to have it done in a larger fabrication facility. On the other hand, there’s a lot of stuff that could be outsourced which I prefer to do myself… all the marketing, design, writing and so forth are things I prefer to have absolute control over.

Being an entrepreneur has been a journey for you. How did you decide when it was time to move from one job or skill set to the other?

It depends on which move, really… sometimes it’s because of a new interest or opportunity, sometimes it’s more about market forces. I moved to a full-time art career after the dot-com crash because there was suddenly very little work in the design field and too many people vying for it. On the other hand, after writing my blog TypePad Hacks for about eight months I began getting quite a few inquiries about whether I was for hire. I hadn’t said I was for hire and really hadn’t intended to do blog design as a business, but when the opportunity presented itself I decided to go with it. Currently I have a steady stream of clients coming in via the blog, referrals and several companies that needed a TypePad guy to outsource custom template work to.

As you worked in these different jobs I imagine you had a lot of opportunity for both success and failure. When things don’t work out, being able to adapt your approach is an important skill for an entrepreneur. Sometimes, even with several adaptations, a project or idea just doesn’t pan out. You hate to give up on an idea right before it finally breaks through but you don’t want to spend all your time chasing a dead end. When you run into multiples failures how do you decide how long to keep adapting and trying and when to move on to something new?

Because I’m always actively engaged in more than one business, I tend to focus my energy at any given time where there is the most demand. Sometimes, a project will lay fallow for awhile and then unexpectedly take off, and sometimes a formerly successful business will experience a downturn. I rarely give up entirely on a project unless I become convinced that the only way to make a significant return is to outsource the entire manufacturing process, or when I feel that I won’t be able to make a suitable profit without sacrificing quality. Some things just can’t be done profitably at a boutique or hand-crafted scale.

Working long hours with many ups and downs can be mentally draining. Sometimes an entrepreneur has to depend purely on their motivation to get them through tough days. You talk about your source of motivation on your about page.

“I wake up most days thinking about how I want to change, fix or improve some aspect of the world. And after a couple cups of coffee I get started on it. My specialty is impossibility remediation: if it can’t be done, I’m on it.”

How much of your success do you attribute to plain hard work, driven by your motivation for improvement?

No matter how good your product or service is, it takes a lot of time, energy and work to succeed. I think that some of the keys to my success have been optimism, drive, relentless curiosity, and the fact that I take joy in the work that I do. Having a passion for your work makes it easier to get through the harder times, and it also helps get other people excited about what you do.

There are times when I hit a wall and have to take a break… Sometimes I can accomplish that by switching to a different project and making progress there. Sometimes I need to just walk away for a while and come back to it later. Sometimes you just have to give yourself permission to take some time off whether it’s a good time for it or not. Most of my work is personality-driven (creating content, design, writing, art… all of them are a byproduct of who you are and how you think). For me, the creative process never really stops, which can be as much of a curse as a blessing. When the constant noise of ideas gets overwhelming, I typically shut down for a couple days and binge on fiction or movies. It’s like a vacation from myself, or hitting a re-set button. Once I feel restored, I go back to work.

On the whole, though, what really keeps me going all the time is that I get bored really easily and need constant challenges just to feel alive. The harder the challenge, the more I tend to enjoy it.

I imagine spreading that enthusiasm to others helps them buy into your, goals which helps you be successful. What success have you had spreading enthusiasm about art, poetry, technology, and blogging to others? What tips can you offer to others about spreading excitement about their product or service?

The most important thing about spreading enthusiasm is to find some way to make the thing you’re discussing relevant to the person you’re telling it to. An example: back when I was a full time poet, I did a one day workshop on poetry at a program for juvenile delinquents. I knew it was gonna be a tough crowd… these were rural tough kids without much education and as far as they were concerned poetry was for pansies. They weren’t dumb kids, in fact, they were all probably too smart for their own good, but no one had ever given them a motivation for finding a way to channel their energy into something productive. So I spent a little time thinking about what kinds of things they probably spent their time thinking about and went in with all the best poems I could find about prison and sex.

I read them one of mine I had written for my current girlfriend, and as I told them about that, they stopped me: “wait a minute,” said one kid, “you mean to tell me you can actually get girls with poetry?” “well, it worked for me,” I said, “this time.” And then the woman who taught their basic classes chimed in by saying “Yeah, I married Bob because of a poem he wrote for me.” I’m told that for the next six months they could barely pry the pens out of the kids’ hands. Heh. I don’t know whether they wrote a single poem of any real merit, but the fact that they kept writing them could only have had a good effect. The tough guys all became poetry geeks!

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JohntUnger.com – Entrepreneur Extraordinaire. Learn from this Artist, Designer, and Catablogger.

If I had to describe John Unger in one word it would be passionate. I’ve never met John in person but I’ve enjoyed the enthusiasm that comes through in our virtual interactions. I first ran across John’s work via an article over at ProBlogger, about using a catablog to sell niche products online.

I wanted to feature John this week because he’s a great example of an entrepreneur that’s had success following his heart and passion in life. Many times entrepreneurial ideas are shot down because they don’t have enough money making potential. We all know the starving artist stereotype; they struggle to make a living off of their work. John didn’t let that stop him from finding and taking advantage of opportunities that allow him to make a good living doing what he loves.

You can read more about John’s background and accolades on his about page. I sent over a good number of lengthy questions to see what we could learn from John’s experiences and he obliged by sending back some even longer answers. Read on to delve deep into the life of an entrepreneur extraordinaire.

Being an entrepreneur can be a lot of work. On your about page you say “Relaxing makes me tense, so I tend to put in a lot of hours on diverse projects.” You run 5 different blogs in addition to creating your art. How much sleep do you get?

The first few years were pretty much 18 hour days, 7 days a week. When I’m launching a new project I usually go non-stop until it’s live. During crunch times like that, I’ll work until I pass out, get up, make coffee, and go back at it. I’m trying to find a better balance these days because I just got engaged and now have children in my life. So I take more time for family but as far as sleep goes, I still usually only manage 5-6 hours.

Do you have a system for managing your time between your different projects and interests or is it pretty much by the seat of your pants?

It’s pretty much seat of the pants but there are patterns. My daily workflow has a fairly predictable pattern: I spend the morning catching up on RSS feeds, answering emails, making phone calls and dealing with management or marketing work. Afternoons are typically spent in the studio because I like to be at my most alert when working with power tools, machinery or heavy chunks of steel. In the evening, I do more work online or focus on design, strategy etc.

As far as which project takes the forefront, that depends principally on demand and partly on what I’m most excited about at the time. If I have a major commission, such as a large mosaic mural, that will occupy a bigger part of my focus. If I’m launching a new blog or business, I’ll typically focus more on that.

Ultimately, I’m much more driven by what moves me than what pays the bills. I’ve got enough going on that the bills all do get paid, but I pour the most energy into the things that feel fresh and new to me. Generally, I’ve found that each project I fund with the proceeds of the last will eventually build it’s own momentum and begin to pay out, whether I intended it as a commercial venture or not.

A good example would be my TypePad Hacks blog. TypePad Hacks began as an attempt to get Six Apart to add features to TypePad that I thought would improve the service for small business bloggers. Most particularly, I was hoping to get them to build a storefront interface for TypePad. For me, the bottom line I was looking for was better software to use to sell my other work via my blogs.

I put about three solid months into the launch of TypePad Hacks, which I was able to fund through sales of my art. TPH is almost a year old now, and the design team at TypePad has made several of the changes I requested. In the mean time, I got busy finding ways to hack the template code of TypePad blogs in order to make many of those features available to bloggers who were willing to dig into their templates. The passion I poured into the site has paid off in many ways… I’ve made my blogs better, helped a lot of other bloggers who have then spread the word, talked with people at TypePad about working for them and developed enough of a reputation that people began hiring me to do design even though I never officially announced that I’m for hire. Work just drops out of the sky. Based on the last couple months, I’m pretty sure that the design work I’m doing because of the Hacks blog will be my most lucrative venture yet, despite the fact that I had absolutely no intention of generating income from the blog when I started it.

I guess the lesson here is that what Hugh MacLeod says about blogs is really true, “they’re a great way to make things happen indirectly.” You don’t always know where your passion and drive are going to take you, but if you’re willing to follow along and to put in the hours on quality work, the rewards will find you.

That’s it for today’s questions with John. Come back tomorrow to hear more about his entrepreneurial journey.

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