Attack what you want. Propose things. Go after things. Some things may come to you, but the best are waiting for you to come to them.

Don’t waste your time coming up with reasons why things can’t be done. The best way to figure out what is possible, and what doesn’t work, is to just try different things.

What is: The Future of Food?

If we were playing Food Jeopardy, you would be a big winner. We’re not, but in a sense we’re playing a much bigger game. We have been putting our planet, our oceans, and our environment in jeopardy with our food production habits over the last decades. But it’s beginning to change…

What is happening with our food? Where does our food come from, and what impact does growing it have on the Earth? More and more people are asking these questions, and the answers they’re getting are making them question everything about how they’ve been eating all their lives.

Personally, reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals had an enormous impact on my own perceptions of the food industry, and it altered my ways of eating, my relationship to food, and how I purchase food. I realize now that every purchase I make has an impact on the planet. Some people read this book, however, and it completely changes the course of their lives.

Such is the case for Tara and Craig Smith. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around what they’ve done, because it’s so ballsy and so amazing. They sold their home on the water in Marin, Tara quit her career, and they purchased 240 acres of land to start a sustainable, organic farm raising cows, chickens, pigs, and growing all manner of produce. They were so profoundly moved and affected by what they learned about food, they decided to make their own impact on the world and become food entrepreneurs.

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to visit their farm, Tara Firma Farms, nestled in the gorgeous hills of the North Bay. The farm is open to visitors almost every day, and Tara conducts wonderful, amazingly informative tours every Sunday. In talking to her, I was struck by how passionate she is about her farm, about the locavore movement, and about organic, sustainable farming. It really needs to be the future of how our food is produced, or we are going to end up ripping this planet apart. But the beauty of it is, when you learn about how this farming is done, you realize that it makes perfect sense, can produce equivalent (or better) yields, healthier meat, and wonderful fresh produce.

By practicing biointensive farming, they are able to get greater yields per square foot from their produce gardens. By moving their cattle to new patches of grass every day, the grass isn’t grazed down too far, and is able to stay healthy and nutritious. And by moving their hens onto the land recently vacated by the cattle, their hens are able to eat bugs and grubs which gives their eggs thick yellow yolks.

Honestly, I don’t have enough good things to say about Tara and Craig and their lovely farm. It truly is the future of food, and once more people have access to farms like Tara Firma, I really do believe that we will see a food revolution that will put food production back in the hands of small, local, independent farmers.

So I just wanted to thank Tara and Craig for having a dream – and making that dream a reality. And I wish the best to everyone else out there willing to make an impact on how we, as Americans, get our food.

The Benefits of a Facebook Fan Page

With over 500 million users, Facebook has firmly established itself as the king of social media. And with that comes the ability to reach, connect with, and communicate with a ridiculous number of people. You can find fans all over the planet and have interactions and conversations with them nearly instantaneously.

And that really is what Facebook gets you: the ability of your customers to directly make comments about you, about your product, and about anything that you say on Facebook. You can get instant, free feedback (good or bad.) If you have a great Facebook fan page, updated on a regular basis with interesting content that grabs a person’s attention, people will want to comment on your page, and want to interact and be involved. The ability to quickly comment on a product image, of give a thumbs-up to a status update means the barrier between you and your customers is very low. Effectively using a Facebook page can be an amazing way to create and maintain customer loyalty. And after all, as a business, keeping and maintaining customers is our main goal. Facebook can be a fabulous tool for that. (A great example is lululemon athletica.)

However, if you treat your page like a traditional one-way communication (like a commercial, just shoving product info and self-promotion spam at people) no one will be interested, people will tune out, and you will get nothing back from your customers. (As an aside, I just looked up the General Motors Facebook fan page, and while they have over 100,000 fans, they have ZERO photos posted! What a missed opportunity to put product photos up there!)

Benefits of a Traditional Email List

Email, while limited compared to Facebook in terms of customer interaction, has a few distinct advantages for a traditional small business or retail store. First, you can sign up your customers immediately while they are in your store. It’s as easy as having someone write down his name and email address. You can input it into your listserve later or do it right then. Simple and easy, and you know your content will be delivered to the customer. Additionally, content delivered to an inbox is much less likely to be missed that an update in a Facebook news feed, which can be drowned out by dozens of friend updates. As long as you limit your emails to no more than about 1/week, most people won’t remove themselves from your email list and if you are delivering useful offers they will look forward to your emails. Part of the beauty of the opt-in aspect of email is that open rates can be very high – 30% is not unreasonable to expect to achieve if you have a well-designed template and information your customers want. Clickthrough rates can even approach 10% for some emails. (Data based on the Epsilon Email Trend and Benchmarking Report show average open rates to be 22.2% and clickthrough rates to be 5.9% – very good numbers!)

Adding clickable images, html, and tracking what your customers do with the information in an email can also be very easy to do, and extremely powerful. There are so many email management services and pieces of software out there vying for your business that finding one that suits your needs (and budget) is not difficult. Of course, inexpensive is not free, and that is one of the advantages that Facebook has over email.

Shortcomings of Facebook

One of the main drawbacks of Facebook for a small business is the need for your customers to opt in from their Facebook account. Rather than being able to take their information in the store, you have to hope that your customer will go home, sign into Facebook, and remember to go to your fan page and click to become a fan. (Or, you can hope they have a smartphone and pull it out and fan your business then and there.) But Facebook does require a greater level of action on the part of your customer, and it is up to business owners to find ways to encourage their customers to take that action.

Within Facebook, it is also important to remember that your photos, updates, and news items will be competing with all the other feed items that come flowing to your customers. Friend’s updates, other business page updates, and photo tags all flow into the news feed and dilute your content, reducing the chance that your information is read and digested.

Drawbacks of email

High open rates are a huge benefit of well-composed emails. Lack of interaction is definitely one of the main drawbacks. Email by itself will only serve as an opt-in commercial; to truly be effective at retaining customers you need to be driving your subscribers to an offer or page that is compelling to them, and that will encourage them to take action. As a retail store, that could be store events, sales, customer appreciation and loyalty events, images and copy of new products to whet customer’s appetites, etc.

And to maintain an effective email campaign and list, you’ll likely want to use an email service or program to create image-filled emails with tracking metrics. Without the ability to track clickthrough of specific items, you’ll never be able to judge what is effective and most important to your customers. Email services do cost money, and you want to make sure that your money is well spent and is increasing your revenue. And you need to be pushing for email opt-ins in store to maximize the reach of your list, and decrease cost per customer.

So How Do We Maximize the Potential of these Two Forms of Promotion?

Ideally, these two ways to reach customers will complement each other, and be part of a concerted strategy to connect with, and maintain or grow your customer base. With Facebook, some of what I have seen that is incredibly effective are special offers that only reach Facebook followers. Let your Facebook fans know that an offer is for them only and they will feel special and more likely to be more aware of future updates. Contests or giveaways that encourage users to post their own photos involving your product are also amazing at generating fan response and loyalty. And if you have your fans tag themselves in photos they post to your wall, their friends will see those photos and you can draw in and reach many more potential fans.

If you do any sort of event in your store, take photos of the event! Include handouts at the event with your Facebook url and let your store guests know they can go to that page and they’ll be able to see photos from the event. Nearly everyone loves seeing photos of themselves at events and this is a great way to get people to visit your page for the first time or come back to it and comment on (or tag) photos.

To maximize the potential of an email list you first need to be mentioning it to every customer in your store or business that shows interest for your store or products. Make sure you mention that you promote special offers and sales, and never share email addresses. But there has to be incentive for someone to want to be on your list. Once you do have an established email list, establish a consistent email format (include your store web page and a Facebook link in every email) and keep the emails to a regular frequency that doesn’t exceed one email per week. Make sure there is new information (new products, and new special or offer) in every email so that your customers will look forward to seeing that email in the inbox – they open the email because they want to know about what new special offer/product/event is that week.

Both email and Facebook can be amazing resources in reaching your customers and maintaining their loyalty – if used effectively. Just understand the strengths and weaknesses of each, create a plan of attack for both, and follow through with your plan. Remember though, the ultimate goal here is to connect with your customers, have them feel loyalty to your store, and make them want to be a part of your organization and what you are doing.

Good luck!

So what does this have to do with business? Maybe nothing. But as I was staring at an example chart in Tom’s Planner today (which is a beta version of an online Gantt Chart tool) I started looking at all the steps listed in that chart. I began thinking that the real key to getting a long project isn’t about being able to execute all the individual steps. In most cases, the steps are easy, can be figured out, or can be farmed out to a VA if that’s something you’re cool with.

No, the difficult part is actually planning the whole project out. It’s figuring out how all the little pieces interact, knowing which dominoes need to fall first, and which parts of the project can run on their own while others are taken care of concurrently. Charting the path from where you are to a completed project is the difficult aspect of any project, and it’s also, not surprisingly, the most important part as well. I guess that’s why the people who are able to plan things out, manage people, fit people in to the tasks at hand, and assess the progress of the whole end up making the big bucks, and the individuals who execute the tasks get laid off when they’re not needed.

It kind of makes me miss physics.

But I think I might need to go to business school.

(I’ve also been experimenting with different ways to streamline updating content in different locations and Posterous may be an excellent tool for that.)

If you ever doubt the impact of social media -  now and in the future – take a look at this excellent short video, and wrap your head around some of those eye-popping stats. (I do have one critique though, which is that Facebook’s total time to reach 50 million viewers isn’t given – it just gives 100 million in 9 months, which ignores the years in which Facebook was primarily a tool for college kids to connect.) Regardless, still interesting stuff.

Efficient

Alright I’m filing this one under ‘business details’ because it has to do with, well, business I guess.

How do you define efficiency? What about effectiveness?

I learned some really interesting lessons last night and I met someone who I really admire and who has some amazing potential for what he is doing but has not discovered how to be effective. Let me explain. But first, some background:

I went to an entrepreneur meetup group last night in SF – something I try to when I can because of the knowledge I can generally suck up from people – and they were having a talk given by someone who left his job a few years ago and has been living an extreme example of the mobile lifestyle for the past couple years. He basically works as a consultant for all number of things, and drives to multiple towns, meeting people and expanding his personal network through face-to-face contact. I don’t think he makes much money, but what he has done allows him to live on a lower income. For example: he sleeps in his car often, uses a gym to shower at, and, being an engineer, has systems set up for where he shops and when all in order to significantly minimize his costs.

I mean, the guy is really incredible – the extent to which he has gone to facilitate his mobile lifestyle is beyond impressive. I loved hearing his stories and think that he should absolutely blog on a regular basis because even though not all of his lessons and systems will work for most people, they are just fascinating.

He has become incredibly efficient at what he does – which is meeting people face to face, possibly performing some computer-related jobs for them, and traveling and living in different towns on a very low budget. I don’t know that I could ever implement the systems he has created to generate such amazing efficiencies in stretching his cash to the maximum.

Effective

But is he effective?

If what he is doing is trying to generate an income to allow him to live his chosen lifestyle is the manner most aligned with his values and needs, I would have to say no. He’s truly an engaging guy and incredibly earnest about what he is doing, but it feels like what he is doing is tantamount to being a door-to-door salesman today in the internet and information age. No matter how good a door-to-door salesman is at getting his prospects converted into buyers, he will never be able to reach the volume of people the internet allows one to reach these days. He may have a prospect—>buyer conversion rate as high as 50% (incredibly high) but if he can only visit 30 people each day he will never be as effective at generating revenue as someone with a website collecting 5,000 visits a day with a 2% conversion rate.

And so last nights speaker got me thinking. How can I be effective in what I am doing? He certainly could by leveraging the internet, blogs, and social media to enhance and grow his personal network all across the United States and the world. And the best part is, he could do it no matter where he travels.

I wish I had as clear an idea for myself as I do for him. Oh, well, I did just discover that when you google “Aaron Burke” this blog is the #2 result. I guess I am very effective at being me. Or am I efficient? Damn.

I’m always happy to come down and visit LA, but I’m always happy to leave too. Every time I am here, it seems like it it more and more different from Northern California. The flatness of the city, the endless streets, the gorgeous cars everywhere, the sprawling residential areas lines with palm trees, and the warm nights perfect for relaxing at a bar or outdoor restaurant. The is much to like and enjoy here, but the pace of life doesn’t quite mesh with what I have become accustomed to.

This trip, more than anything, brought back a lot of memories for me and reminders of time spent in LA in years past. Visiting my best friend down here, we would fill our nights with music, good food, alcohol, and LA nightlife. My brain is soaked and imbued with the residue of flying down LA streets with windows down, or a top down, beats thumping and getting us ready for the hours are partying to come. And then the feel of emerging hours later, sky still dark but night still warm, heading back to the apartment for a Corona before bed.

I miss those LA times.

….

Business-wise, this trip was successful. We put together a solid plan for the next month and more, got our shit together, and figured out how to do some product and ad copy testing on the cheap before we pour money into a first production run. I think we may still be unsure what distribution type we want to focus on, but we’re close. And this was the first time I met one of my business partners (the wonders of Skype and video messaging had allowed me to see him and feel like I had met him without ever being within 300 miles of him.)

What amazes me so much about this process is how difficult and confusing some things seem before you do them, but how simple and self-explanatory they can seem afterwards. I come into this with a base of a lot of reading, but not much in terms of actual firsthand experience. It is worth 10 times as much as any theoretical or case study knowledge. I guess that’s why doctors have to spend so much time learning by working with real patients before they can ever practice medicine alone.

Thank god I’m not a doctor. Business is so much easier.

For anyone who has contemplated (or pursued) entrepreneurship, the type of business you want to run has to be the number one consideration before embarking on any new adventure. And it can also be the most difficult decision to make.

These days, there are multiple routes by which one can start a business, and they all have benefits and drawbacks, and no one type of business will be right for everyone. (Maybe I should start a Facebook app: Which type of business are You?) So today I’m going have a little fun and explore the main business routes for a startup, and explain why you might decide to choose one business structure over another.

Internet Business

OK, I’m obviously more than a little biased towards this type of business, considering that it what I have been exploring for a little while now. Right now, you can structure your business in essentially any way you want in an “internet business” but the #1 characteristic that truly defines an internet business is the lack of a physical location. It is possible to do 100% of your market research, product creation, product distribution, marketing, advertising, and transactions entirely within the Intersphere. Netspace. Interwebs. Cyberspace. Online.

This divorce from a physical place of business has many consequences (or benefits, I should say) but the most significant benefit is the ridiculously low overhead. Typical cost for 1 year of domain registration and hosting is around $100. Everything else can be done yourself, for free. Which means your only currency in the internet economy is time.

In the last ten years, online business have flourished, with everything from traditional retail clothing outlets selling their wares in online shops, to 1-man run single-page internet sites that have no content other than a stack of Google Adsense ads.

And then of course there are the insta-millionaires: the “internet marketers”, whose main talent is in being able to use search engines and targeted ads to drive worldwide traffic to their web sites. They target very specific niches and often create an informational product laser-focused and relevant to that niche. And then using the power of the internet to serve a global economy, they make oodles of money based on near-100% profit margins and high conversion percentages. All this translates to this: the use the internet to focus on one specific market, have a product relevant to that market, and then draw members of that market to the product, which then sells.

It’s brilliant in its simplicity, and completely antithetical to traditional business. And to me, it sounds like fun.

But I’m getting a little off topic here, so let me just summarize by saying that the benefits are no physical location needed and easy distribution if you are selling an e-product. The downsides are that if you ever decide to sell a physical product, you immediately hit up against a big problem in that now you need some sort of physical location for product manufacturing and distribution. The internet is very good at marketing, advertising, and information distribution, but very bad at getting you actual products. It takes the real world to do that. And entering the real world means losing out on a lot of the benefits of an internet business. So there is a major limitation of the internet only model.

Traditional Business Model

So in the traditional model of business, we have a physical location for our company. We have employees. We are selling a good or service that must be physically delivered to a customer. And you have a lot more of what I wouldn’t necessarily call respect, but, because people understand that business model, a majority of the population tends to take you more seriously. An actual physical location, and not just a P.O. Box, tends to carry some weight.

Consequently, it may be much easier to put together business partnerships or agreements because other companies will feel much more comfortable with your mode of business. And let’s face it: physical products are just nicer. They are substantial. They have weight. You can collect physical products. They clothe you and nourish you. I have plenty of digital music (some of which I have actually purchased, if you can believe that), but I still prefer a cd. Which in many ways is crazy, because first thing I do with that CD is rip it to MP3s, and then it gets put on my shelves likely never to be touched again.

And of course a traditional business creates jobs for others. In a way, this can be a major benefit, because now you can get input from many people, you can have other people making money for you, and your business can also start to feel like a community filled with people all working towards a similar goal. Everyone needs to feel like part of something larger than themselves, and for many people the business they work in fulfills that need for them.

So in the end, the benefits of a traditional business are a greater degree of respect awarded to you from other businesses, the ability to create and deliver tangible goods, and job creation. Those are pretty big positives. The downside, of course, is that you have to have a physical location, you actually have to deliver goods or services physically to your customer, and in most cases you need to employ others, which creates a host of issues. Manging employees and dealing with payroll, taxes, and benefits are just a few of those issues.

Even recognizing those potential downsides, there is something very compelling to me about the notion of owning my own traditional business. To be an internet entrepreneur, you may end up only owning a website and a piece of intellectual property. But to be a business owner, you are the real deal.

So Why Choose One Type of Business Over Another?

You know, it’s really hard to answer this question. Setting up an internet business is really a lot easier when you know how to do it, and requires almost no capital. Setting up a traditional business generally requires an investment of at least a few tens of thousand of dollars, because you almost inevitably will have to begin paying overhead before you ever generate revenue. For myself, I think my ideal situation would involve the creation of an internet business that becomes profitable first. And once I had that income source established, I would begin considering the creation of an actual traditional business with a specific brand and product that I could be proud of. But maybe that would just be too much of a pain in the butt.

But I’m pretty happy with the design, and it’s been a lot of fun figuring out how to do all the little things necessary to put a decent looking web site together. What I found out is that it’s really not all that hard.

So should it tickle your fancy, take a look at the site, and know that feedback is always appreciated!

Disabled and Productive