Zion, IL
By A.B. Dada
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I’ve always loved working in the United States, but lately there is a great fear I hear about from other consultants, employees and business owners: will be enter a heavy recession?

The games that the Federal Reserve has played with money supply growth and interest rate mangling is leading us in the direction of a bad recession. Historically, recessions were staved off artificially with an increase in available credit and a lowering of interest rates to instill consumer confidence in spending. Easy money, at low price, gives people a reason to buy today and pay tomorrow. This cycle might push off small recessions, but the piper eventually has to be paid. As the dollar’s value is destroyed slowly over time, foreign competitors are able to produce goods cheaper than we can at home, which gives us more reason to buy foreign than locally. Manufacturing and industrial labor in the U.S. is dying faster than ever, and even health care services are being outsource to foreigners (MRIs being read by Indian doctors at a fraction of the price of local doctors, for example).

For me, the best thing to do is to present your services internationally, even at a discount rate over your local rate. If you value your time at $35 an hour here, you might only command $10 or $15 an hour internationally, but it builds your client base and your portfolio. I worked for a foreign company for close to 6 months at an 85% discount over my local rate, but I was able to build on that opportunity to get myself to a place where I can work internationally at a 40% haircut. Over time, as the dollar devalues, I believe I’ll find myself able to work at a profit over my local rate, only because of the falling value of the dollar versus the international currency I bill in. It may take 10 more years, but the progress is good.

The biggest step you have to take before presenting yourself internationally is to have good reason to work internationally. The first good reason to make an international submittal for your services is to have a good savings and a low debt. When you’re sitting on dollars in the bank (not invested, just savings or money market), you have to protect those dollars from inflationary concerns. Ridding yourself of debt makes those dollars even more valuable to protect against inflation. If we should see deflation (the falling of prices with the dollar being progressively more valuable), you’re in good shape as a saver because your dollars will grow in true value. But if we should see inflation, you have to protect yourself by finding what you can do to have a marketable product or service that is worth more over time, not less.

In an inflationary economy, you may see a 3-4% raise annual, but inflation might rob value by 5-10% or more annually, meaning your “raise” is really a pay cut versus what you can purchase. By providing services in an international currency, one that is rising in value versus the dollar, you will protect yourself from inflation by being paid in a currency that you can convert to dollars and secure your value by taking in more dollar-value than you can by selling your services, or products, locally.

People with strong English skills (grammar, spelling, communication, etc) are VERY marketable internationally. I’ve seen an increased demand for workers in the elite travel industry to communicate with elite Americans, English, South Africans and Europeans who primarily speak English. The job is mostly “home based” meaning you do most of your work on a PC and over the phone rather than in an office. It isn’t work I would particularly like doing, but the market is there — and growing.

I’ve also found a huge amount of work available to help translate products sold internationally into English. I contacted 45 eBay sellers who sell more than US$20,000 a month online to English speakers but use horrible English to explain their listing. 5 of the sellers contacted me back asking for help in redesigning their massacred English, at a rate that I would almost accept. For them, having their marketing and advertising material make sense to English readers is a HUGE benefit, that can increase their sales significantly. I also contacted a few foreign cell phone and electronics manufacturers who also had badly designed websites, marketing material and advertisements, and I was suprised at the 7-9% response I received showing interest in English translations.

Finding foreign employers is not an easy task, and requires a lot of time and investment to contact and follow through with interested parties, but the Internet makes this job easier. Contract work might be short lived, and at a significantly lower rate than you can find today, but you definitely will build a portofolio over time that increases your value especially to employers who will have a currency that is stronger than the dollar, meaning you are cheap to them, but they are profitable to you. Ignoring the international service market is a big mistake — we’re globalizing every day, and to miss this opportunity ahead can place you at the back of the pack, after all the intelligent consultants, service providers and laborers are already in the game and way ahead of the pack.

I was talking to a long time friend and entrepreneur last night for hours over the change in the markets we chase. We’ve known each other for half my life, about 16 years, and we’ve both seen incredible profits and incredible losses over those times. His company is on the verge of falling apart, even though it has a strong calling in its market — business promotions.

His market has been cut up and spit out by deep discount web providers who can handle much more work in a much more efficient way — his personal attention and long term follow through don’t seem to be as valuable as they were a decade ago. Our conversation for many of those hours was mostly him telling me about what he thinks he needs to do to fix the downturn and save his business. My end of the conversation came in the last half hour, and I told him that he was wrong about his direction for saving his business.

He believed that he needed to keep innovating in order to reach new customers and grow his market, especially in the regions that his businesses exist (on the west and east coasts as well as in the midwest where be both live). He said that the reason why he wasn’t able to compete with the online service providers is because they were doing a better job of innovating, and he was focusing on the full service market rather than the up-and-coming market. He relied on a book he purchased in the last year, titled Dealing With Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, by Geoffrey A. Moore.

I’ve read Moore’s book, and I actually like a lot of what he has to say. The problem with Moore’s book and my friend’s business is that they’re covering two different subjects, in my opinion. Moore’s book is very successful at looking at the market of commodity goods: items that can be considered “daily use” items — computers, clothes, fast food, and the rest. My friend’s business is definitely not a commodity product, even if competition tries to offer it at commodity profit margins (slim to none).

I’m the founder of an innovation company, Deep Labs, which is a company that has to be an innovator since its market caters to other companies that require innovation. The likelihood of this market becoming a commodity-margin company is slim-to-nil: when your customers always innovate, you have to do the same. The risk taking at Deep Labs is incredibly high, but the rewards can be high as well. In the business promotion market, innovation is not as important as meeting expectation, and this is where my friend should focus his future.

When I explained to him that focusing only on innovation is too risky for the rewards he’d get, he asked me how I’d describe my solution for his market in just a few words. I told him that the most basic description is also the most in-depth one, too: downsell your solutions as time-savers and efficiency-increasers for his marketplace. Show them that what he does is not complicated or innovative in 90% of the work his firm will perform, but what differentiates his business from the online service providers is that he’s there to save his customer time while taking care of their promotional needs.

When I said those bold-faced words to him, I saw the light bulb go off in his head. Before I even had time to ask the question I was intending to ask, he answered it without a single word or prompting from me: “Is it possible that my customers are wasting time doing work they don’t have to when they deal with online service providers?” Are they cutting off their nose to spite their face? Are they wasting a few hours a week in order to save a few dollars, and how many hours a year would they save if they re-hired his firm over the online service providers?

I asked him if he ever went hours out of his way to save a few dollars on a high-end retail sale or for a coupon for a seemingly expensive item. He said he definitely did for a while, but he learned his lesson and stopped. This is a great example of a business trying to innovate (through savings promotions), but failing to focus on what their customers wanted: savings. Saving a few dollars but giving up hours to get that savings may end up costing the customers in the market more, and once they make that realization, they’ll likely not fall for the innovative promotion again. In his market, many of his customers, ex-customers and future customers are wasting hundreds of hours of year doing a job that he used to do — and they’re wasting those hours in order to save themselves a few hundred dollars.

This is one of those areas that many businesses fail to realize — and also fail to use as a selling point. My better half used to own a web design company for years that she let close up because she failed to compete properly with others in the market. Her service was top notch and her customers were always happy, but she had lost a few customers to incredibly cheap companies. Within a year of her closing up shop she started to get phone calls from her ex-clients who wanted to work with her again. I told her to take the contracts but raise her prices: the demand was back and the penalty was paid by those who tried to save a dime without realizing the long term costs to themselves. She didn’t want to get back into the market, already hurt by the few who didn’t see that businesses charge what they have to charge in order to provide the service that is expected by the customers.

My main job in all of my businesses is to be the innovator and the risk taker — but I would never do that unless I knew that I had the responsible follow-through employees or partners who could handle the other important side of any business. If you can save your customers time and money by providing your service cheaper and faster than they can do it themselves, you should never have to worry about the competition that only provides it cheaper. If you lose some customers to the cheapest competitors, always offer them that exit from your services but remind them that you’ll be available should their new service provider require that they invest more of their time in finishing the project. I’ve lost customers over the years, but very few of them have disappeared for good. I’m always surprised at the ones that come knocking on my door when they realize that cost-savings is not effective if they lose time over the deal.

Don’t innovate if you market is about saving people time and money. If someone else can save your customers as much time and money as you can, only then do you have to focus on innovating as the key element of your research and development in your market.

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A few weeks ago I found myself sitting on the couch, drinking a cup of tea and staring out the window. At 11:30am. On a Wednesday. My energy wasn’t tapped from overworking or overpartying or over-extending myself in any way. The fact is, I was slacking because life was getting very steady and stable. I’m driven best by customers who call with last minute deadlines, emergencies and big news days — I also get to charge more for those events. When self-employment settles into a regular daily habit, it can become very easy to slack.

For most people, there is a difference between taking some time off to “veg out” and slacking. If you’ve just worked harder than ever before and if your body (and friends and family) are telling you to take a break, do it. If your responsibilities are met and you’re not under any deadline pressure, nothing is wrong with taking a day or two vacation from work just to refocus and get back to working hard and profitably. Slacking, though, comes from when you’re just doing enough to earn a check, but not really doing enough to look to the future. Looking to the future to me means marketing, thanking your past customers, and following up on leads.

For an entrepreneur, slacking is part of the business, it seems. We tend to get into a steady cycle of work and fun, and eventually we find that we can work a little less and still earn as much as usual. Becoming productive and efficient at your work will leave you with much more time than you’d get in your 9-5, when you’d slack in between visits from the boss or the managers. Instead of slacking in 5 and 10 minute breaks throughout every work day, you build it up and spend that slack time when it is least warranted: when everything seems stable and things look good for the time being.

Business is never stable, and if you don’t grow, you’ll shrink. I find myself in slack mode about once every 3 months: just as I’ve picked up new customers and finished some normal projects, I’ll find myself wandering off into lazy-land. It takes a full day or two to realize it, and that is 2 days lost to no productive results. Vacation time is good because it does produce a positive result: you get much needed downtime to refocus. Slacking doesn’t do this, it just lets you forget about today, tomorrow, yesterday and everything that needs to be done or needed to be done. It is a real destroyer of many entrepreneurs who start to slack regularly, happy that they can make in 8 hours what used to take them 40.

When the day comes where there isn’t 8 billable hours of work in a week, they’ll wonder where the work went. I’ll tell you where it goes: it slipped into the walls around you when you slacked, and you’ve lost all that time not being productive in some way.

Don’t slack.

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