Typical Deliverables

No matter what type of project you are looking to have completed the basics of what you should receive before calling it done are basically the same. Typically I ask for a zip file or DVD with the contents on it.

• Finished Artwork — whatever the desired end result is should have been accomplished and stored in one or more files or folders.
• Raw Artwork — this is typically a layered PSD graphics file or an EPS Vector Graphic. These are needed in case you ever want to change something and you use a different designer it won’t cost you money to pick up where it you left off.
• Fonts — There are thousands of fonts in existence and even though something like Helvetica is a standard font, doesn’t mean the Helvetica used is the same as the one installed on your machine. So ask them to include the fonts used to make sure you will be able to edit the text on the document in the future. This is also very important when dealing with a printed piece.
• Supporting artwork — If photos or illustrations where used in the making of the piece the original largest sized version of the stock photos should be included in case some major alterations need to be made to the design and maybe part of the photo is clipped off.

Logos.

When designing a logo you want to make sure you get a vector graphic of your logo, those are EPS, AI (adobe illustrator), SVG, and some pdf files. A vector graphic is one where the design is made up of mathematical formulas and vectors that define the image. These can be scaled as big or small as needed without losing quality. So for instance if some day you want a billboard with your logo on it, this will probably cause you to have your logo redone. A pixel graphic like a PSD, JPG, PNG, or GIF store a series of dots for whatever sized document. They do not scale well and you will notice a blocky effect known as pixelation when you try to make one bigger. This will pose a problem in the future. Some PDF files simple include a pixel graphic rather then a Vector graphic.

Anymore no many designers seem to do logo cookie sheets and band guidelines. If you find someone that does you are in luck and probably have a good designer, however I recommend you ask for one. A cookie sheet/ Brand guideline document describes how the logo should be used in different background colors, sizes, etc. For instance what does it look like in black and white, color on black, color on white. When it gets really small does part of the logo disappear? Typically the cookie sheet portion is all the typically sizes needed, already setup and ready to go.

Web Site Design

Typically you will need a PSD file as one of the deliverables. If the designer is not going to provide an html file for the design/template you will need the PSD file to aid your developer in cutting graphics. This is a process where the image is broken up into small pieces to minimize download time.

Business Cards/Print work

You will want 2 version of the finished artwork. You need a print ready version, and an editable version. In Photoshop or with PSDs you will want to make sure the text layers are converted to rasterized layers, the DPI is 300. In Adobe illustrator select the text objects and select “Convert to Outlines.” Make sure the bleeds and gutters are setup to the spec your printer requires.

These are the basics for what you need to ask for when getting a graphics designer to take on your project. If you have any questions please post them below and I will be glad to answer them.

SEO is one of the most powerful ways to get your site out there, through content creation you create a lot of hooks on the internet that help catch internet searchers. But you need to use good keywords inside your content to make this effective.

One industry standard product I’ve found extremely useful is Market Samurai. I’ve used it extensively for all my web projects and content. It has made it easy with one dashboard per project to see my current seo rank, do keyword research, analyse my competition’s seo, find places to promote my site and products to sell and monetize the site.

The most valuable piece being the keyword researching followed up by the rank tracker. I can easily generate keyword ideas and have them analyzed to find good long tail keywords to target and make a list, then add them to my rank tracker and monitor how my efforts are going and see a graph of improvements. Click on this link to Market Samurai and try it free if you like it and buy it within 7 days of trying it you will save $50.

This is a great tool to start your internet marketing and keyword research with.

If you have never tried to develop a video game let me put this into prospective. A game is a culmination of every discipline within programming you have the following aspects that companys have teams just to handle any one of these…

• Graphics
• Game Theory/Logic
• Sound
• Music
• Physics
• Object collision
• AI
• User Interface
• Data Storage
• Performance Tweaking

To build a game you need to incorporate all this into one application. On top of that if you go after a real time first person shooter not only will you have to do all that, but you will have to do it faster. You will need to be good with memory management, drawing buffers, and soo much more. Most developers still use C++ because it’s a very lean programming language and gives you direct control of your memory management allowing them to better clean up memory then say the JAVA Garbage collector can.

A lot of people don’t respect the work that goes into a game or the minds behind it. To me a video game developer is the most elite developer there is. Games have become so complicated that the lone game developer is very rare even for something like Bejeweled.

While business software is very lucrative of a profession it generally fails to test your skill anywhere near what games will. Sometime stop and think about a game and how you would go about implementing it. If you have never done one try making a really simple little game, think old school Atari or Nintendo and see if you can build a clone. This is a great challenge for those who are looking to test their might.

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In the end it’s a judgement call based on your particular factors and software needs. Here are some of the thought provoking questions you need to answer to know if building or buying is the right choice.

1. Is the component a critical piece of your application or a secondary function. Critical pieces are a more likely to be something you build rather then buy.  When your software’s core functionality depends on the module you don’t want to trust that piece to an open source project that may not survive time.
2. What happens if the component were to stop being developed could you swap something else in and continue on? Software is a fluid thing people loose interest or something else surpasses it. I’ve seen many Java and PHP Frameworks and Modules die off online that had great potential and value. If you rely on these pieces that means whatever bugs, security issues, or lack of functionality will be their indefinitely until you spend money switch components and move on,  maybe even build your own.
3. Was the component meant to do exactly what you need or would you be hacking it to work outside of how it was intended? Sometimes a component may do what you want as a side function or through Jerry rigging the thing to do it. This may use the module in a way the developer didn’t intent. If you rely on this functionality there is a good chance that this functionality will not always work as the developers won’t make conscious effort to support it. For instance using base64 encoding in the Sun’s JAVA packages, you can use it but they don’t intent you to so if they stop offering it in an update those functions will break.
4. Will it increase the costs of your software? What happens if they start charging? Paying for a component is actually a good thing, their is a higher chance it will continue to be developed and move forward if people are making money from it, where as open source the people have to be insanely passionate about it for the piece to survive time. However if you are going to have to take on  royalties or other costs you need to make sure the price point of your software after that fact is something the market will bear and leave you margins to make money. For instance the cost of scaling a Microsoft .NET application compared to a JAVA application.
5. How secure does the software component appear to be? When you use another piece of software you inhereit their security flaws and bugs. Many hackers start by trying to identify commonly used components of web sites or software get a copy of that component and try to exploit it. Typically, no random hacker is going to waste their time hacking a single site (unless they have malice towards the site), but if their is an exploit in a module and your site or app has it then you are more likely to be hacked because it’s easy. So their flaws become your flaws, and your customers will expect them to be fixed even if you have no control over it.
6. Does the module do something your teams doesn’t feel confident or competent enough to do themselves? One of the biggest factors you need to make a decision on, is if your team can manage that code on top of the rest of the code. Sometimes having an open source piece is good because other people are developing it for you. If you don’t have the talent or the time to handle that piece then you will either need to staff up or buy a piece. For instance you want to integrate Paypal or accounting with your site, you are probably better getting a prebuilt library out there to handle it then doing it yourself.
7. How much time will the component save, or cost to add? Buying a component to save time and money is in many cases a fallacy. Yes it can shave time off upfront but it doesn’t mean there is no time involved, or add time later on. You can’t for instance buy a quickbooks module and expect it to know exactly how to translate your accounting data into the way Quickbooks wants it, someone still has to code a translation, all they can do is provide a different means of talking to Quickbooks. You are better off in most cases just using the APIs Quickbooks provides directly so you know the bridge protocol will be supported in the future. And yes Quickbooks integration is going to be hell, long undocumented tedious hell. But this way you only one layer of hellish APIs instead of 2.
8. Did the makers of the component think the same way about the task as you do and your needs? The reason there are so many different software titles that do the same thing is each one does it differently. When it comes to components that can be a big deal. You may have a component that was designed to draw graphs but wasn’t designed to draw animated graphs for fractional numbers. A small difference between what you need it to do and what it does can make it unusable and a waste of time or money.

Software is a very fluid concept. No correct answer will stay correct over the software lifecycle. If you buy it, it may work great for you for 5 years, your preconditions change and you hit a wall and need to swap components. If you build it, you start with one idea in mind then the market tells you another idea is needed and you have to rework or rebuild it.

The question is really a judgement call of which one is going to be the best for your project for the longest time and least cost. Building it means you will have to maintain it, you will have to design it, and ultimately all issues are on you to resolve. Buying it means you will have to connect it, wait for someone else to maintain it if they care to, and ultimately have little control over it.

I’m more likely to build the core of the application and use 3rd party for communication protocols, or secondary functionality and stick to the fundamental language features for the core as much as possible. that way if the core needs to change significantly to meet the market needs then the software can too.

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When the markets take a hit like we have seen in the past weeks it’s because people are afraid something is going to happen so they take their money out of the market, and end up causing that something to happen. Companies become artificially deflated and the opportunity to buy large portions of a company with your money now appear. So your investing dollars can go further. Fact is in 10-20 years the cost of everything will rise, was well a good company will still be around. So when the market takes a dive that is the best time to invest.

Unless a company was already over inflated say with a PE ratio > 16 then they will make their money back. Higher PE Ratios appear to have higher volatility when the market is emotional like it is now. In the great drop we saw over the past few years one of my best buys was NiSource. At the time they were trading around $13 a share which when you compared that to previous highs and their current dividend was a great deal. I was getting a stock at about half price and the dividend was 7% per year at that time. Now it trades around $20, closing in on doubling the money in a matter of a few years.

Dollar averaging is the best way to work things, consistently put money into your investments and when the market is down that’s a great time to either add a little more or at least buy a little more with your typical investment budget.

Stocks are all about timing, the market in the short term is an emotional thing and long term a weighing device showing you what is really worth something. Keep in mind because NiSource was a good buy back then does not mean it is now, you have to look for your own opportunities using today’s data.

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Work = 10 Hours * 5 days * 52 week = 2600 hours = 108 days
Sleep = 8 hours * 365 days = 2920 hours = 122 days
Dinner = 1 hour * 365 days = 365 hours = 15 days
Drive to/from work = 45 min * 5 days * 52 weeks = 195 hours = 8.2 days
Getting ready for work = 30 min * 5 days * 52 weeks = 130 hours = 5.5 days

Total = 6210 hours = 258.75 days = 106.25 days remaining per year

So over 2/3 of your life is gone just by basic human needs and work. When you then factor in other conditions such as family time, etc the time gets even shorter.

Now imagine you watch 2 hours of tv or movies a night…that’s 730 hours or 30 days of your year.thus cutting you down to 76.25 days left.

Time is a very precious thing, infact it’s the only thing we truely have and the one thing we trade freely. We assign a price to it every hour we work but its limited to 70 maybe 80 years. So it’s important to try and find ways to reduce the hours being worked above to increase the time you can spend with people and things you care about. Maybe it’s time to go out on your own, if you are already there try to cut your work hours down to 4 a day and see what happens, or 4 a week. Be Productive but Enjoy Life, you only have 1 go around and you don’t know when it stops.

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In medieval times burning the ships was a way to say “No surrender, No Retreat.” For some this is a way of motivating themselves to do what must be done. I recommend finding another way.

Recently I am trying to help a couple people get back on their feet, mentally, physically and financially. For this article lets call the main person John Doe. In counselling John one thing that was evident to me was that he burned a bridge in their last employment. He was tired and burned out and didn’t act in an appropriate manner to move on. Instead he just walked, and after talking for a while with him about it and his job it sounded like it was one of the best jobs he had had in his industry. By the time he realized that it was too late. On top of that the company was a Big shot in town so having left there under those conditions did not do well for finding another job in his industry locally. So his only options are to look at other related industries, or move.

One thing I strived for through out my career is to build bridges not burn them. Right now the people I have worked with in through out my career have gone to work with almost every company in town and each one is like a Trojan Horse that can either open or close the gates of new opportunities.

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1. Lemonade/Cool Aid Stand – This was a favorite of mine, you simply make up some Cool-aid and setup a table in the yard and sell cool-aid by the glass. This is a great way with how cheap cool-aid and sugar are. You need to watch it and not get too ambitious more and more stories pop up of cops ticketing kids doing cool-aid stands without a license. This typically only happens around big events

2. Mow Lawns — Try going door to door up and down your street and either put printed out flyers on the door of knock on the door and talk to the people. Offer to cut the their grass for $20, they take care of gas and mower, or if your parents let you use your mower do for $30 your mower. If you find my house I’ll be your first customer

3. Shovel driveways — When it starts to snow the last thing most adults what to do is shovel the driveway, unlike kids we ache a lot more, and have to bend over to shovel. Shoveling a driveway for $20 is another great idea. Eventually you can invest in a snow blower and do more faster.

4. Paper route — There is a strong correlation to kids who had a paper route and those who were successful, warren buffet use to have a paper route for instance. This is a great learning platform since you have to wake up early deliver the papers, collect the money and such. So while other kids are getting a couple more hours of sleep your hustling.

5. Umpire local baseball games – This was something I did when I was a kid. I umpire the local youth boosters league. The pay was $10-15 a game. Best of all to me it didn’t seem like work since I loved baseball.

6. Babysitting — at a later age babysitting is another classic job for teenagers.

7. Pet Walking – put flyers on people’s door with your picture on it, letting them know how old you are and that you will walk their pet for $10.

The most important thing is to be creative. That’s the most important thing for an entrepreneur. Think of things you can either do or do better then adults. Think of things people need done and would rather not apply their time to. For me my time is worth more then $20 an hour so I would gladly pay a kid to maintain my yard rather then do it myself. Creativity is the most important skill you can work on in life find workers to do something is easy, finding the next great idea is not.

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A time honored tradition of wealth creation has been forgotten over the years as consumerism takes center stage. That is the magic of 10%. The theory is simple. With every piece of income you receive you should save 10% of the money FIRST then pay bills and everything else. When you save last you will never get around to saving, but when you auto deposit 10% of your paychecks into a savings account, after a while you will forget you did that. That money will build up quickly too.

This provides you will a safety net incase things change suddenly. Your goal ultimately should be to have 3-6 months cash in the bank and then take any cash beyond that much and invest it. A safe means of investment is to diversify your investment between , 25% Medium and 15% large cap mutual funds, 30% Government Bonds, and 30% money market.  It won’t make you insanely wealthy but you won’t lose ground. The time you have to play things the safest is later on in life. When you are young you can fail and lose it all and still have time to bounce back with plenty of market cycles to ride. However the older you get and close you get to living off your investments the safer you have to play the money game.

Realistically when you retire you need around 2-3 million dollars to live off of  at a rate of $50k-75k a year while still growing your nest egg. That’s at a modest 5% interest rate. That number is impossible to save from wage labor before you retire unless you make a 6 digit income. So to do this you need to compound the money over time. Use the rule of 72 to guide you… Whatever the interest rate is, divide 72 by the rate and that tells you how many years it takes your money to double. The higher the interest rate the more times it will double in your life time. so a 7% interest rate will double every 10 years. So is you are 30 you typically only have 4-5 doublings during your life time. however if you could get a 15% return on your money it will double every 5 years, that’s 8-10 doublings.. Let’s say you have $500 put away… at 7% that’s becomes about 8k over 50 years… at 15% that becomes about 256k over 50 years. If you had it in a 1% yield… well that’s will take 72 years to reach 1k.

This approach isn’t for everyone, but it’s a safe bet that is good for the majority of people who just want to be workers. Personally I follow many items on here myself however I play a more risky game and try to build private equity through my own start ups rather then heavy investing in other securities. It take a lot more time and energy and you have a lot more failure along the way but it have higher reward if all goes well. I have a 401k primarily as a tax shelter. Hope that gives you some ideas.

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Here are some small business ideas that can be a great beginner.

Start a Bulk Candy Vending Business — You see the candy machines in stores all over, did you know you can make 50% profit of every turn? The typical machine  cost 80-100 used on ebay and generated anywhere from $30-150 a month. The trick to this business is to reinvest your profits into additional machines and grow a larger route. It’s a very low effort business that borderlines passive income. You simply refill the machines and collect money. With 100 machines you can be earning 3000-15000 a month. Not to shabby.

Selling on eBay and Craigslist — Hit up your local thrift stores, garage sales, trash picking or business liquidators and snag some quick bargains. Then turn them around on eBay and make profit. This takes a little more effort you need to snap pictures research items and ship things. You can also learn to drop ship items to avoid shipping and having items hanging around. remember that with this business the money is made when you buy at a low price not when you sell. Things won’t necessarily go up in value so you have to get a good deal off the bat.

Snow Plow/Blower — When winter comes around and the neighborhood is covered in snow grab your snow blower and take it around to other houses ask if they want their place plowed for $20-30. Many people are willing to pay knowing how much time effort and pain it can be. With the snow blower you can finish it up in 10-15 minutes… That’s $80-120 an hour.

Network Marketing — Look at places like Amway and Avon. You help them sell their products and you get a commission. It’s pretty simple and gives you good skills with marketing and networking.

For more Business ideas check out this post.

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