My Impressions: What's Your Business Worth?

So apparently mass e-mail marketing does work.  I ended up subscribing to Entrepreneur magazine…  They e-mailed me a discount deal: $5 for a whole year.  I believe material and labor costs more than that.  Yet, I opted for the $8 dollar electronic version (which has no variable costs).  I would’ve preferred just a PDF file instead of having to download their app and all that bullshit.  But I guess it is their way to combat piracy. 

Anyway, one of two “freebies” of subscribing to Entrepreneur is this book.  More ads!  The purpose of this book is to try to convert business owners into customers and subscribe their service at bizequity.com – a valuation tool for entrepreneurs.  There were lots of “case studies” on how their online valuation tool was amazing and helped create value to business owners.   If anybody ever uses this tool, please let me know if you found it helpful.  Sharing is caring.  All the marketing in the book seems to suggest value for small businesses with detailed records.  I highly doubt small businesses have that level of detail in record keeping…  Honestly, even large companies have shit data.  As for the rest of the book, meh, still had some value in it. 

Cover to cover (electronic) was 135 pages, I went through it in about an hour.  But I’ll save you all the advertising for the tool and you can soak up an “entire book” of knowledge in 2 minutes. 

Basically, everybody should know the value of their business, but more often than not people don’t.  There are lots of potential scenarios that could be better dealt with knowing what the business is worth:

   • Kicking people off / bringing people on the team

   • Divorcing your spouse who is also a business partner

   • Estate and inheritance planning

   • Selling / exiting

   • Negotiations

   • Getting loans and investments

The more well-informed you are, the less likely you’ll be taken advantage of. 

Unfortunately, “Wall-Street” valuations that are used on large companies may not be relevant for small businesses.  There are a lot of tax-incentives for a small business owner that may not be reflected through a discounted-cash-flow model or 6x EBIT.  Running your own business also aligns enterprise value and managerial incentive 100%.  Your enterprise IS your well-being.   There are no conflicts of interests or principal-agent problems. 

Similarly, when a small business owner asks for a loan at a bank, the bank asks:

   • How much do you make?

   • Pull credit profile

These two factors generally do not accurately reflect a new startup that has a lot of upfront investment with very little sales.  So then yada yada yada the book tells you to buy their service and they will perform magic and give you a number. 

Writing a book has become a new business model.  Blogger James Altucher explains the benefits of this writing a book business model:

   • Much more memorable handing out your book at networking events than just a business card

   • Instantly establishes you as an expert

   • You have hot leads and warm eye balls going through your [free] book that’s promoting your [not free] product

   • Quenches your thirst for attention

I guess this is one of those books.  

My Impressions: One-Minute Tips for Effective Memorizing

So I was in Asia for a bit over two weeks doing my thing, came back and got lazy.  For me, Asia trips always seem to be a mission.  Tons of friends and family to see and often times it feels a bit overwhelming.  Anyway, one of the more relaxing parts of my trip was just chilling with my MBA classmates in a book store.  Cheng Ping book store!  The biggest (?) bookstore in Taiwan that could probably be listed as a tourist hot spot.  They still have a lot of traffic and seem to be thriving (as compared to Barnes & Nobles and Borders (who?)…).

Recently, I’ve been trying to learn A LOT of things (Ruby on Rails, Japanese, Esperanto, Morse Code, Acupuncture, SQL, VBA…), I felt like the RAM and storage of my brain was starting to reach its capacity.  In grade school, I could memorize an essay word-for-word after reading it maybe 2-3 times.  Now, I can’t even memorize a sentence for a presentation if my life depended on it.  I went onto the ‘improve your brain’ section and found this book to help my memorization. 

Translation is One-Minute Tips for Effective Memorizing, and I could not find an actual English translated version.  I read the whole book in an hour while I was intra-commuting on the Hi Speed Rail. 

Basically, the author sucked at studying growing up, then found his own system of memorizing a whole bunch of stuff efficiently.  In Asia, high competition and the massive amounts of tests for students to go through growing up -> memorization and test-taking skills seem to be an important skill for one’s academic achievements. 

Challenge Your Own Beliefs

The biggest take away for me is we should question ourselves and our beliefs more.  Author gave an example of how some people say, “Yeah, I was never good at studying” or “Yeah, I have a bad memory.”  But how often do these people actually spend time studying how-to-study or study memory and practice those skills?  Studying is a skill.  Memorization is a skill.  To conclude one’s lack of talent without actually testing its limits is dismissing a lot of potential and value…

We can extend that self-challenge to other aspects such as:

   • Yeah, I gain weight easily even if I only drink water -> have you studied calories and tracked your intake/output?

   • Yeah, I suck at public speaking -> Have you took courses and actually tried to improve?  Video tapped yourself, took notes, consciously putting effort and  making changes?  Or you just said some stuff without preparation and people fell asleep?

List goes on and on.  I suggest everyone to challenge themselves and really question that self-doubt.  You may be surprised. 

Myths of Memory

Anyway, given that premise on challenging your methods of memorization, author lists out some myths of memory/study.  Some seem to make sense, some I’m not sure.  But I guess the fun is finding out what works for you.  I always find it fun to constantly challenge the authority.  But here are the author’s conclusions:

   • Is writing things down better?  Answer is, only if the actually test is a writing test.  If the test is multiple choice (which seems to be the norm now), rote memory on a flash card is probably more time efficient.

   • Is it better to remember a “whole” concept at the beginning or small compartments?  Answer is small compartments, although you may want to “understand” the whole concept at the beginning. 

   • Is sitting down to study the best way?  Answer is studying out loud while you walk around is more stimulating to the brain and activates more senses.

   • Is finding a quiet library the best place to focus?  Answer is go find somewhere with background noise (like a subway…).  You want noise, but not comprehensible noise (like music with lyrics).  

 

Color Technique

Then finally, one of the memorizing techniques I found intriguing.  Colors.  We should use more colors in our study.  Author suggests up to 4 colors: blue (take notes with blue), yellow, green, red.  Either have 4-color papers to take notes on, 4-color pens to takes notes with, or even 4-color post it’s.  Have a cascading system, e.g.:

   • Blue: never before seen material

   • Yellow: Seen but can’t remember well

   • Green: Can remember the answer within 30 seconds

   • Red: Can instantly recall the answer

For test taking people that are cramming the last few days or hours, you should focus on turning everything from green to red and just sacrifice the blue and the yellow.  But for others that have no testing pressure, this method categorizes your familiarity with the subject.  It is then a lot easier to know where you should focus on and what to study.  The only “practical” question I have not figured out is, isn’t that a lot of writing and re-writing?  Maybe someone should make an app for this.  If you have a better way, please share and show that you care. 

That’s all I got.