You are in the process of bettering your life, one step at a time.  But as you start, a few minutes in the joy and fun of everything starts to wear off.  Your body starts to hurt, you start running out of breath, every muscle in your body is screaming at you to stop.  So you do.

This is completely fine, no one will fault you for it but no one will commend you for it either.  Why? The main reason is that the first step is normally the hardest.. What they don’t tell you is that after you take that first step you still haven’t changed anything about you, its just as if you did a every day activity, like going to a new restaurant to try out their food.  If you like it you will go back, but what if you went and ordered a exotic dish and hated it, you wont go back, but maybe you should.

This is a major issue with things, I love using running as a great example since it is something I hated with a passion.  I was a pretty big kid and one day I said “I’m going to run” I Forest Gumped it.

Except I didn’t run for days, I ran for five minutes and about wanted to shoot my self.  I didn’t stretch, I had been sedentary for years, my body was in no were near any shape to try and enjoy this great thing called running.  I gave up, I walked back feeling defeated and told myself “I knew I hated running”

I walked back to my door and went inside.  Drank some water and hated my self for having gone for a run and not even being able to finish five minutes.  But then something happened after only having run five minutes the rest of the day I felt a bit more perky with a tad bit more energy than I did that night.  I didn’t think anything of it.

Next day I woke up and had some decent soarness around my knees.  It felt as if my muscle had gotten stuck in between my knee and was getting compressed by my femur.  There was no stretch I could do that would make the pain go away.  This lasted for days, confirming my hate for this sport.

At the same time I had a business venture go wrong and I thought it was to the point of no return a lost investment, money down the drain.  But something magical finally happened.  I sat there for a few days trying to figure out how to get my business going again, and even though it was in the slumps and borderline bankrupt I didn’t give up on it.  I knew my method should work, at least I thought it should.  I was determined to get it going, for the love of money, for the love of life, for the love of what ever.  There was no reason I shouldn’t go ahead with it and I did! But  it failed.

I was miserable, but I had a moment of clarity, the ones that come every decade or so.  Everything takes work and sometimes the work is so miserable that you don’t see the benefits of it till far after.  I told myself that maybe I should give running a try again and change the pace of my life.  I went for another run that day… To my surprise it was horrible as well, with the knee issue coming back again except this time worse.  I was doomed to never be a runner I told myself.

So I once again decided to put away those sneakers.  It’s kinda like a blog, you start out write your first article and just sit there and wait for the visitors to come.. They don’t no matter how great you think your work is.  But the only diference is that I started the blog as a outlet as something to clense the mind, I started it because I WANT to write.  I wanted to run but my body was conspiring to make sure that I didn’t.

I finally brought myself to try running again.  This time I was able to run 6 minutes straight without dying and my knee pain wasn’t there.  It wasn’t a fun run, it was by far not a long run, and it sure as heck was not a enjoyable run.  But it didn’t hurt.

I started doing it once a week, then twice a week, and now I’m up to three times a week.  Ontop of everything I actually enjoy it now, if I don’t run I feel bad, its a addiction, some say it might he healthy others say it might be just a phase, but all I know is I enjoy it.

Same with writing a blog I started wrote my first article, not a single visitor.  I was not meant to be a writer, or start a business, or doing what ever I think because it didn’t go well the first day or week or month (note it took me almost three months to get to run more than one day a week cause I just didn’t think I was meant to be a runner and was not enjoying it) but it finally got to the point were I enjoy it, and after every run I feel more energetic the rest of the day and the run feels great, the day feels great, and life is good.  All because I wanted to run, same with this blog, or any idea or business I have ever wanted to start.  I took the first step and grudged through the misery for the final result which made it well worth it.

So put on your sneakers, pull out that keyboard, talk to your boss about a raise, start a business, or do what YOU wan and stick with it for better or worse.  The rest will work its self out.  And it not, well hey the business fails but you just have to forest gump it again in another niche ;)

So how do you go about chosing a name? I think it depends on the initial and the end goal of the plan.  I just moved to steamboat springs colorado.  I love it out here so far been a few days but I am really enjoying the small town feel thats just big enough to not feel that small.  Plus having a mountain to go skiing on does not suck (although the snow is horrible at the moment). There are a few local sites that are advertised on the radio.  Take for example steamboattonight.com.  That site is perfect for the local who wants to know what events are going on that night.  And if you live in steam boat and go out or have a business here you probably at some point or another have meet the owner.

That is a great business idea name, its geo targeted as well as exactly what you would want to do and its very easy to remember.  But now lets look at Nike, you think of that and of course you think all sorts of athletic ware to Michael Jordan at one point.  That costs a extremely large amount of money. Or a insanely great product (take google.com).

Your name also should tell what your company is about, be it innovative, conciseness, high quality, fun, crazy, reliable, etc. If anything you should write down a list of some of the attributes you picture your company having.

What you should not do is crowd source, or hire some one to try and figure it out.  You also should try and stay away from copyright (Says the man who has “playboy” in his blog, but this isn’t my company name ).  And if anything you should maybe try and find some similarities how ever far stretched they are to maybe help a consumer be able to create recognize your product, think of zappos, in Spanish zapatos is shoes, so he came up with a iteration that worked for the English speaking market.

So in the end it comes down to what you really want your business to stand for.  If you have huge dreams and maybe want something along the lines of a Berkshire Hathaway and you don’t want that to be known (note they own gieco) then any name will do.  But if you want something that will become branded then I suggest you keep it short, and easy to remember.

So in conclusion, a few points I would like to recap when your going about business names is having what you do in the name helps people who have a association with that to remember it (ex, steamboat tonight)

Avoid stuff that can get you in legal trouble, (think seo playboy).

Try and keep it original, for this blog I was thinking of mixing up the industry I do with the lifestyle I live.

And last of all, avoid names that are hard to remember or require explaining unless its something that will help remember.  A great example of this is a salesman once told me “Hello my name is Bryan, with a Y” One of the few times I remembered that name, why cause it was something easy to remember with a unorthodox twist.

My plans in 2012 are the same as every year, increase my net wealth, make more businesses, and possibly network some.  I have been on and off on the perks of a lot of this.  I know it’s “who you know” but the internet has really reduced the amount of “face to face” that is required for much of business.  This has lead me to be able to grow my business and never even actually heard the voices of some of my employees.  I still have a lot of projects that I need to get on the done list this year.  So we will see how the list shrinks and then grows again as each new idea is brought into life.

I am the outcome of what I would consider two very different styles of Entrepreneurship genetically speaking.  On my mothers side my grandmother, grandfather, and great grandfathers were Entreprenuers. And on my Fathers side my dad and grandfather were entrepreneurs.  Great Grandfather on my mothers side was a doctor in Spain who had businesses in Costa Rica.  When the Spanish civil war broke out, his political bias was on the losing side and lost everything.  It then came that my grandfather on my moms side had started a fruit business at one point having the largest Chilean fruit importation into the United States.  Till he closed up shop when he retired and lived out the rest of his life enjoying his money. Or my grandmother who got into real estate when she moved to America, she always repeated the story to me as a kid “When we came here I only a $4 week allowance from your grandfathers salary to do with everything that we needed in the house, including food.  But I always managed to save a dollar.” This got instilled into me as a child, these stories.

Then my grandfather on my dad’s side had started importing things from japan when he lived in Mexico, he could of been the radio shack of Mexico.  But then the the Mexican peso crisis happened and he lost most everything.  Then growing up my parents got divorced and seeing my dad go from having a lot of money when a business was good to being struggling when he would invest in random other business ideas he knew nothing of and lose his shirt and not have enough to send my mom child support for years.  These situations were instilled into me as well as these little things i took notice in, we were very poor.

As it so happens by the time I was 14 I had already started walking every dog in my neighborhood, this might seem like a great and ingenious thing for a kid of that age.  But I was already in the internet world playing ultima online, even paying to play it! Yet it never occurred to me you could make money on it, that slap in the face didn’t come till years later…

Anyways I digress, back to the working with family by the time I was in college my grandmother had a piece of property in a pretty pedestrian transited area in Florida.  I had suggested that one of my friends open up a deli there and that I help run it.  My grandmother decided it was a great idea and funded the project, the only issue was… she didn’t let me take part in it, nor even have a say in it or check anything.  So she basically took half my idea… Needless to say the business failed, for many reasons.  From what I would atribuite it to many factors.  I then became the black sheep of the family in my grandmothers eyes.  I led her wrong in a business decission.  She to this day has not forgiven me for this bad business I led her too.

Now I would feel bad for this mishap if I was even allowed to have part taken in the project.  I ended up being blamed for putting a chef and a person with some cash and a vacant place to work together.  My grandmother is genius level when it comes to intelligence as well as business astuteness.  But we all get it wrong some times, that deli was one of those examples.  And I ended up suffering the consequences of this because I had put person A with person B and not allowed to partake in the rest of the idea.  Had i been involved would the business have failed? There is no way of knowing.. But I do know my idea would of been fully developed not 10% of it taken and the rest never even heard or discussed.

Why? Because it’s family and sometime they see you as the kid, other times they see you as a adult, but if its something that they have a similarity too they normally think they know more.  In a lot of cases they do, in some others they don’t…

Second example is working with my dad.  I went into his company as the plant engineer, my goal was to make the business better in the time I was working there.  My salary for this? $600 USD a month.  That’s a “college graduates” starting pay (Family business hours.. ie 60-80)…

I could care less I had a free place to live, I could take the subway to work and  I loved the city.  Life couldn’t be better… Then came working with my dad.  So my dad dedicates himself to a very special type of business.  Bullet proofing cars.  He can tell you guys the story some day if you care to know.  I go into his plant knowing absolutly nothing about this business.  So I do what I always do best, dive right into the situation.  I first learned how to weld, then to use the plasma, then to actually dismantle a entire car inside and out, and have to modify the pieces and re-mantle it.  I also learned how to paint a car, as well as how the entire electrical system of cars work and putting them back together.  I did all this by hand it took me 6 month to learn his business from the ground up.  Was I master welder by the time I finished? Heck no, but I could appreciate a good weld job and knew what was difficult to do so I could put the people up to the test.  I also gained the trust and camaraderie of all the plant employees since they saw I was willing to get my hands dirty, or in some cases bloody.

Now that I knew the business like the back of my hand I go to my dad and tell him I need money to fix up the plant.  He looks at me and says “No, when you show me your carrying your weight I’ll give you money to fix things.”  This infuriated me, how could my dad not trust his own son? Needless to say I was on a mission to show him that with zero capital I could make him respect me.  First thing to go, paint.  I felt that was the one object I could possibly make them use less or get more stringent on painting requirements.

I started investigating and having painted cars before I remembered about how much paint it took me to paint areas of the cars given how much of a novice I was.  Something seemed fishy when I started going over the numbers.  I walked over to a mechanic shop down the road and asked him how much paint it takes to paint the outside of a car completely. I had calculated that based on my skills would be about 3-4 liters.  I was wrong, they can do it for 2 if they are decent to good painters.  This was surprising to me as I went back through the papers ontop of papers of transactions and cars painted and paint bought.  We had been using on average 4-5 liters per car to paint them.  There was only two options for this situation, someone was stealing or our painters/paint guns suck.  Either way it had to change.

I went home and discussed this with my dad since he works out of the office which is on the other side of town.  I told him I thought some one was stealing, he told me I was probably wrong since his painters had been with him for over 5 years and the paint costs haven’t gone up drastically.  So once again my dad thought I didn’t know what I was talking about.

So I went to the head painter whom I suspected of stealing and asked him how much paint it took to paint random things on the car since I told him that I was thinking of painting my brothers car door as a prank, he told me it would take about 200 milliliters.

I let a month go by, with the heavy grind of the business I needed him to forget I was even looking at paint.  In that mean time I worked on re-engineering the design we used to bullet proof cars and reduced the ballistic gaps by 60%.

Month passes and I go to all the painters and tell them I need them to paint each door.  I gave each of them a gun with 400 milliliters of paint.  Each painted the door… 2 of the 3 painters used 200 milliliters.. one used all 400.

I call the head painter into my office and ask him “Why are our paint costs so high?”

he looks at me and says “Well we have to modify the cars and sometimes repaint”

I reply “How many mililiters would it take to paint a door you just painted once?”

“Well at least 400 for the best painters, as you saw I took me all that to paint it in front of you”

I just look at him

After what of seemed like a eternity to him since I could tell he was visibly nervous, I reply “so why was it that the apprentice did it with half of what you did? And the other painter did it with a LOT less than the apprentice? And you specifically told me it would take 200 to paint a door”

He froze

“but I, ugh, ummm”

He was fired that night, Our costs dropped significnatly, by over 50% that next month, I then was able to use that to bankroll new guns which further cut costs by 20% more.  With the new design of the cars it took a extra day to impliment my modifications so I had to reduce the time it took for a car to get bullet proofed.  With the savings of the paint I was able to get better bending machines, as well as changing the layout of the process of cars I reduced on a level 3 by up to 4 days, considering it can take 3-4 weeks to do a level 3 I felt pretty proud of myself.  I then also got our scrap metal a 100% increase on buy price and reduced our waist by over 40%.

I also reworked the employee payment plan so they weren’t as depending on the wrath of my dads mood on bonuses and set up a system that cut my dads expenses significantly as well as made it so employees salaries were more stable and predictable for the peace of mind of them.

I also negotiated lower prices with our suppliers and even had some extend and up the amount of time we had to pay them back, and even negotiated incentives to get them paid earlier by offering us a discount if we paid w/ in x amount of time depending on the item.

Come my year anniversary working for my dad I go up to him with a list of things I have done, a list of things I would like done to the business, including a few other employees I feel he should fire as they produced absolutly nothing beneficial to the company.

My dad read the letter told me he would take it into consideration.  And then we got into a fight as to how he still had seen no benefit of anything I had done in his plant.

I quit the next day.

So, in conclusion working with family.. I don’t suggest it.

Lets see what I can remember of this year..

I guess we will actually start this year with a little layover into last year.  Since these past two years have really changed my life.  For better or worse who knows.   I would say for the better but there comes the drawback of making too much money at a young age.  Then again been there and done that, the second time around is twice as sweet.

Kinda bitter sweet that this post id’s number would be 25.   I write here finishing up  my 25th year of life… (I would say 24 days over due since I’m 26).  This year had a crazy story,  to show you what life is like.. On this day last year I had made $1.48 in online income.  It was the start of my break through in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  I was working insane hours researching and testing and site were starting to move up… Just wasn’t sure how long it would take till I got to a liveable amount.  It all seemed like a dream really, but I became really knowledgeable the year before on everything SEO i could get my hands on as well domains and values.

Then came my break through, within one month I had been able to get some sites ranking a bit higher, I was up to $8 a day! Now you may not think this is much, but at this time I decided there was only way to live poor in style.. Ski bum.  I took a job at Vail washing dishes (Although since I had won a poker tourney in Atlantic city on my road trip I was flush with cash, but busy hands make the mind work twice as fast).  Civil Engineering degree and here I am washing dishes.  Making $8 a hour, well the day hits January 27th.  That’s when I realized I was alright at what I did.  I kept working anyways as I needed the cash to bankroll more projects, more domains, more everything, since even though I had my poker cash that was my living reserve and my fall back income in case i didn’t want to wash dishes anymore.

I still remember the day I woke up checked my stats and saw that one of my sites had done more vistors by the time I had woken up than the entire day previous. That’s when I realized that I needed to make sure my products could withstand the test of time.  Cause I may have been able to get it in front of visitors for a second or two, but in the end you can have the entire budget and still make products that fail.  I learned this in college the hard way.. So I started working on making my site better.

Always dumping every penny I was making into the sites while taking occasional sanity snow board breaks.  Dedicating my entire time to my sites and thinking about what projects to do during the day all the time makes a man go insane, cause being a entrepreneur since I was a kid its always extremely difficult to not have enough resources to do everything you are thinking of.

As I started making more sites my revenue started increasing slowly but surely.  I was working on my proven methods and my strategy was working.  I was growing at a decent pace, and then I crashed into a tree while snowboarding.  Hospitalized.

That was a reality check, not the first, and I’m sure last time, I have had a near death experience or painful at the very least.  So I took some time off, smoked a crap ton of weed.  Took my Soma and my perc’s.  Nothing was enough the pain was pretty brutal, I had dislocated my femur and it took a few weeks for it to heal.

Finally got to the point were I was able to ride again.  I had just bought myself a new board and bindings and on a powder day it got stolen.   At that moment I realized it wasn’t time to yet appreciate life, needed to work a bit harder.  So I quit my job washing dishes and proceded to dedicate full time the next few months doing what I do best.

My earnings started growing 30% a month, I brought my friend Dan into this and now we are the cusp of what will probably be history.  We will incorporate in 2012, having the company be profitable since the start.  And hopefully have insane growth year over year.

I have a lot to be thankful and a lot to say but I figure that’s for other posts.  Hope everyone enjoys their new year, and remember when you are about to put anything and everything you have into a business think “I have been poor before, it does not suck” So go all in, cause if there is anything I have learned, going from having 100k by the time I was 18 from business/poker and going 100k into debt by the time you are 22 cause you made bad investment decisions and coming back out of it to be well beyond anything you had ever achived before coming out of the black, all it took was realize that being poor aint so bad after all, just got to work smart

That went well for a while, pretty much did that for a year till I got a job at dunkin donuts.  Worked there for a while when I was 15 and then when I turned 16 my mom moved up to Connecticut.  I came along for the ride, within the first few weeks I realized I was miserable here, so I moved back to Florida… (Yeah I know moved out at 16 haha).

Florida was a alright place to grow up, I actually pretty much loath the state now.  I feel that happens to most people who grow up in a place and end up going outside of it and travel I guess or something.  Although there are some places that I feel always feel like home.  Maybe it’s the friends or family that a place feel like home.  Who knows what the actual reasons for it are, I just know that when I moved out Florida felt like home so I went back.

When I was in Florida I had a bit of money and my dad said he would support me for a bit and so did my mom.  So here comes a 16 year old who has always been too nerdy (Hell at one point I was ranked top 10 in Magic the Gathering in my state, and had even played in nationals) to talk to girls who suddenly falls into poker.

Now I obsesse on things… A lot.  Before I learned poker it was Magic the Gathering (MTG) and business.  I guess at all points I have two obsessions going, ones always business, so when I was obsessing in business I started to read every book I could get my hands on that talked about business.  Come time to play poker, I start reading all the books at the time on it… I had a friend who showed me a home game that played omaha/8 10-20 limit.

Thankfully I played that game back in the day, it was a expensive lessons but helped me get my bankroll going and turned out to be one of my favorite poker games.

This lead me to start playing poker with the little money I had saved up from walking dogs, husseling people in MTG, and Dunkin Donuts.  Well I still randomly stopped by to visit my old friends at the comic shops who still played magic and at one point I had one of the owners sell me some gumball machines.  He even let me put one in his comic shop, I had no more money at the time to actually buy gumballs so I used the extremely old ones he had in it…

Needless to say in a week it had made $20, I bought it for $100.  That was a 20% ROI in a week! Life was en route to be good!

Then came the most famous line that was ever told by my economics teacher when he use to teach a “life” lesson about acquiring currency.  ”How smart ya gotta be?”

Used that $20 to buy some more gumballs, fresh ones… and then used some of my poker winnings that week ($200) to buy two more machines…. Went to two other comic shops and asked if I could put them in their shops.  This was at the time that Pokemon was hitting shelves so little kids always running around comic shops.  I started negotiating prices of revenue that the owners would get for letting me “rent” their floor space.

This led me to keep playing poker and managing my machines, all while still going to  school.  It wasn’t too much work though, as I never hated going to a comic shop and checking out the new comics, playing some games of either poker or mtg (it’s were all the cool kids hung out ).  So my days after school were always fun and gumball machines, especially mine held 1,000 gumballs so there was really no need to have to refil them often.

Now one might think that this would lead to other logical choices, but it took a while for me to realize that I could also buy Soda and Snack machines and put them in places… So then I bought some of those and put them in the comic shops that I had gumbal machines.  The owners loved it, had to do no work (this was before coke started just offering to put up machines in those places and give them a cut) and got handed checks from me once a week.

More to come later.