I was having an interesting conversation yesterday about business in general with another gentleman. It was an interesting contrast as I’m personally not the type of person who say hangs out at bars to mingle with people whereas he mentioned that he had actually met a lot of good contacts this way and it is in many ways his lifestyle.

We then started to talk about our personal experiences on whether we found that more people tend to do business with you because of your personality where they can relate to you like a friend or if demonstrating your knowledge and track record is more effective. While like anything it is always to have a good balance, it was kind of a fun conversation as we kept throwing “what if” type of thoughts to each other.

For example, for a person that is too outgoing does it prevent say more formal high figured people from wanting to speak to you? Likewise, does being too professional prevent you from getting your name out there faster as there are more casual people in existent than can spread the word about you faster?

In general, it seemed like we were both in an agreement that by being more socially involved in more pubic gathering activities you tend to acquire more personal leads/contacts whereas if you are one who focuses more on say an identity and its reputation it tends to bring more people directly to you. Realistically though, you do need both in the big picture I’d say.

For blog updates subscribe to our RSS feed.

While it’s true that being able to leverage your time is a fundamental component in creating a business or even generating an income for your lifestyle, this week reminded me so much on how it’s one thing to have people aid you for certain things and another to be completely dependent on them.

I guess an example would be if you opened up a restaurant and had absolutely no idea how to cook then you are entirely dependent on that one chef to follow through as oppose to if you were the chef who happens to own the restaurant.

While this may be an extreme generalization, I remember there was one person that I talked to who happened to be a very successful business person who came from China. He was mentioning how he believed that a reason why so many Asian people here were successful in creating a small business was largely due to the fact that many Asians try to make sure that in starting a business they are fully capable of doing everything themselves first. Therefore, hiring say more people is to save time/productivity as oppose to being a necessity in the beginning.

Again, an extreme generalization since that type of thing isn’t tied down to one’s ethic background, but the idea is true in many ways. I had an interesting day this week as I literally went through 30 hours straight without rest as I took it a bit too easy that I could simply just rely on another source to take care of a workload which didn’t turn out as planned.

While I didn’t consider myself better qualified to do the task, fortunately having basic knowledge of the solution helped the situation a lot as well. Always be prepared to jump in yourself.

For blog updates subscribe to our RSS feed.

Many times when we buy items we tend to look at just the immediate price tag of a product which lures us to spend money as we think it is such a great deal. Today I took a casual gander on Ebay as there is this electric toothbrush I was potentially interested in and how I thought this would give me an idea on a price comparison if I was to buy it from a store.

When I first did a search I found a listing for the item for about $99 with a $25 shipping rate which didn’t seem too bad considering the item was about $180 normally at retail stores.

I then saw another listing that indicated it was $81.50 and thought that was even better. However, I then looked at the shipping rate and was stunned.

As you can see, the seller was charging a shipping fee of $75.73. Granted the shipping service is different, but that is still a substantial amount. So while it looked better at first, in the end it would be way more.

I knew a person once who said he simply sold these dishes on Ebay at a loss and instead just hiked up the shipping fee which made him a lot of profit in the end. As he mentioned, for some reason people simply just focused on the price of the item itself.

Just like all those hidden charges on specific services, you really have to be aware of what you are really paying in the end.

For blog updates subscribe to our RSS feed.

I had a fun opportunity to be on a film set recently and a lot of people were participating as either a casual hobby or side engagement to their regular life I guess you can say. Now the people that were there obviously didn’t know anything about each other.

Now what was interesting was that after mingling around with others there was this one group of people that were talking to each other and one person mentioned he needed a photographer. It just happened that one person in the group was a professional photographer. The person then expressed quite loudly in a humorous way on how that’s why you should always be nice to everyone as you never know who you could be talking to.

The funny thing too was that I encountered a similar situation where I was talking to a lady who happened to be a teacher and she was struggling with Internet related matters as she couldn’t figure out what to do. Again, it just so happens that I know a lot about those types of things and she was delighted to go home and put her new found knowledge in action.

It’s kind of too coincidental in some ways too huh? But in general, never pre-judge people and treat others well as that person you are talking to could easily be the help that you are looking for either presently or in the future. Especially from a business perspective, it can’t hurt to have more connections.

For blog updates subscribe to our RSS feed.

I had to shop for a new backpack the other day as my old one has lasted for almost a decade and a half. I was just browsing around a department store and saw some interesting ones and as always I always debate about the prices as I want to get the best value for the dollar.

Some of them were in the $50 range which I thought was way too much for something that I would simply throw some items in on occasion. A comment was then made on how there was another store that sold backpacks for about $10 which should do the job and another person then automatically disregarded that and mentioned how the quality must be very bad.

The first thing that came to my mind was how price doesn’t necessarily correlate with the quality of a product. From a business point of view, in many cases you are paying for all of the marketing and overhead costs of getting that product in-front of you.

For example, if there was only one apple tree in the area and one guy has to drive twenty miles whereas another person just has to walk one block to do the same business offering the same product then odds are the last guy can sell the same product for less as his overhead is almost nothing.

I did end up just getting the $10 one and it seems fine for my needs.

For blog updates subscribe to our RSS feed.