During the first meeting, I learned that I was talking to a sort of affiliate marketer.  I also learned that there was a startup fee, as well as a monthly fee for the program.  Once you are in the system, you can make money in two ways.

First, by selling stuff and collecting an affiliate fee.  Secondly, you can recruit others to sell the junk and collect a referral fee.  And it’s only going to cost you a set up fee of $126 and a monthly fee of $50 to keep your website running.  I don’t know about you, but this has bad idea written all over it.  Especially when I got to the second meeting.

This time there were two people involved in selling me this system.  The same person from the previous meeting, and someone higher up the food chain came to talk to me.

They began talking, and half an hour later they were repeating themselves profusely; however, their circumlocutory speech was not the real issue.  They mentioned that setting up your business, and getting sales would pay for itself in the first month.  “Okay,” I asked, “So how do you get sales on your site?”

The two looked at each other, then at me before saying, “Well, how would YOU get sales?”

I mentioned I would find some relevant keywords and bid on them in Google Adwords to direct people to my targeted pages.

The two looked at each other, then at me.  They had no idea what I was talking about.  So I asked again what they did.

The way they get products sold from their site is to buy it themselves.  Now at 10% to 50% commission that means they are buying somewhere between $100 and $500 on their sites each month.  All this was to gain some sort of PV (or Point Value in their strange little world) witch somehow gets transformed into cash back.

The money with this is made of course once you get enough noobs under you to buy their own products.  Then you will get a small chunk of change from their sales.

I asked to see the backend of one of their sites.  I wanted to take a look at how much control the pupetmasters gave them.  But of course this must lead up to another meeting!  So I’ll let you know what happens if this meeting ever does.

I feel bad for all of the people who drink the koolaid without knowing what they are getting themselves into.  Which sounds like a lot of people are doing with their ‘pie in the sky’ wishful thinking.

The environment and culture set up by Thomas Edison in his labs and Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin might be strikingly similar in many ways.

So how does “The Wizard of Menlo Park” (New Jersey) compare to a couple guys who’s company’s Menlo Park location was clear across the country and a hundred years later? (For a short time in ’98-’99 Google’s office was located in Menlo Park California) We can take a look at the objectives, practices, and general attitudes of both of these companies to find the answers.

Edison and the others at his lab created inventions and then set up companies to profit off of them. If you take a look at Google Labs, they are doing something similar with their own twist. Google has their Adwords and Adsense that they are able to leverage into many of their products, giving a revenue stream to that product. At Google, all employees are given an amount of time where it is required to work on their own projects. Every now and then we can see the larger and more developed of these projects and ideas appear at Google Labs.

The culture that was found with Thomas Edison’s workers ‘the boys’ allowed a lot of flexibility to move around from project to project. If one project was getting nowhere, you could simply open up a different notebook and jump into a whole new problem and pick up from where someone else was stumped. I can’t quite say for sure how much freedom Google gives to employees in moving around like this, but within the company sharing ideas, collaborating and otherwise transferring knowledge is highly encouraged.

Both Edison and Google place a high value on constant experimentation, testing, and improving everything; however there is a bit of cultural variance in how it was to be approached. If you wanted to go into Thomas Edison’s lab and experiment, you were welcome to. The only thing that was really required of you was to pay for the materials that you used and to clean up after yourself. Getting to know the other inventors and getting their input was an added perk.

When it comes to Google, in order to play around in their labs, you simply need to click on a link. All around the you can run tests and investigate all kinds of things online for free. If you want to go even further, you can put together programs and applications fairly easily that interact with their online software. If you don’t know how to program, with a quick search, they could help you out with that too.

Now it doesn’t really seam that the General Electric company that we know today still follows these ideas, but at one time back when it was called Edison General Electric, it was much closer to how Google operates a century later. It’s certainly not a coincidence that both GE and Google are so strong now when they both had such great beginnings. I think it’s fair to say that with Google being only a little more than a decade old, they haven’t quite written all of their beginnings yet.

Sole Proprietorship is the most basic type of entity, and also the easiest to start. The only thing required is that you think about going into business. Right then, you are now operating as a sole proprietor and can go into business. Depending on where you live you may need to get business licenses or permits depending on what your business intends to do.

The downside to Sole Proprietorships is that they do not have limited liability. So if something goes wrong and you get sued, it is possible that everything that you own personally could (and probably would be) taken away from you if the lawsuit is won.

The upside to a Sole Proprietorship is that it is a ‘pass through’ entity, This means that any earnings that you have are only taxed once. The money that you make is not taxed to the business, but only to you once as your salary. Included with this is tax deductions. When you are spending for your business, that money may be a tax break if you document it and it is justifiable for your business.

If you don’t establish a separate entity type, then this is the default type that you will assume as an individual. As you can see, the limited liability is quite the potential time bomb, even more so as you become more affluent in your life.

I am always amazed by the amount of politics involved in business. Think of the businesses that your business can’t survive without. Now think for a moment of the businesses that can’t survive without yours.

Take the company or product that you rely the most on. Now imagine that they are completely gone. They vanished overnight and there is absolutely no trace of them whatsoever. Their service is no longer available and your running out of time before your shareholders, and more importantly your customers begin to notice.

I’m sure you’ve already figured out what I’m about to ask already, but here it is regardless… “WHAT DO YOU DO NOW????”

Anyone with an entrepreneur’s mindset can tell you what must be done. Whatever it takes. It is up to you to make things work. Find alternatives, but don’t just look at the former company’s competition, there are all kinds of solutions you could be looking at.

Is this something that you can afford to do yourself? While that’s not always a financially feasible option, imagine for a second the market control that you could potentially obtain. Being as we said this is a rather important aspect of your business, something that you really rely on, let’s assume the likely scenario that you are not quite able to afford this. So what’s the plan now?

How about your network? I’m talking about both your personal contacts and your business’s professional contacts. The event of a company with a valuable disappearing off of the map (although rare!!) would not only be devastating to you, but also to your competitors and your partners. It’s fair to assume that YOUR competition isn’t going to sit around. It’s all about results and numbers.

So before you let yourself drown while wallowing in your own self pity, come up with some sort of plan. Can you be the one who unites everyone? I talked about having your company take over the service, but that could be expensive to your business. That however doesn’t mean that your network as a whole can’t arrange something where everyone benefits. And if the new service is owned by people who rely on it, you no are no longer subject to the whims of some unreliable company.

Now I’m not saying that you should wait around until some company that’s making money suddenly decides to disband before you can take action. It’s all about networking and politics. Who can help you get ahead and at the same time you can help get ahead?

One quick example is my friend Shay over at Sparkplugged.net, he is able to help me out with my weak area, web design. And meanwhile I am able to help him out with technical aspects of his site. By trading knowledge we can both get ahead. And more importantly, trust is developed between the two of us.

Both of the web-pages for Aridni and Sparkplugged are hosted by the same company and even on the same server. If for some reason there was a problem with the hosting (it’s been great so far, knock on wood!) by having two of us, we wield more power if something should occur. Granted it’s not a whole lot more, but what if our network a good portion of the people from the host! That would be a fair amount of influence. (note: I’m really happy with my host but it’s a relevant example here where a network could help build a great alliance )

Now it would be just awful to be caught off guard and need the network that you don’t have built up yet. If somebody doesn’t know you, they certainly won’t be inclined to help you out. If you haven’t even gained trust from someone, they have little incentive to offer you favors. So get out there and start recruiting your allies! What kind of trades can you offer? Remember both sides must benefit!