Passion Meets Purpose

March 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Business is too hard of an occupation unless you are passionate about what you do. Shoot, having any job is exponentially more difficult if you aren’t having fun. There is great truth in what Confucius said:

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

This is where passion meets purpose: when you are doing what you love doing, serving whom you love to serve, and getting paid to do that, it’s not really work. It’s like getting paid to play baseball when baseball is your favorite hobby. Can you make a “job” out of your hobby?

Transcend the “find a need and meet it” advice and find a way to monetize your passion. You’ll make the world a better place if you do.

I have.

The road to purpose

Long story short, I started a blog in 2005. I enjoyed customizing my WordPress website so much, I dove into learning both the programming language CSS and all of the options WordPress had. I must have broken my site 200 times in my first year. I wrote over 500 posts, tried over 20 themes, and (before I knew it) I had logged over 500 hours and learned enough to freelance and consult.

Fast forward 8 years and I’ve been running a successful WordPress business helping people improve their websites, businesses, and lifestyles for over 4 years. It was a lot of work to get to this point, but it hasn’t been “work” in the traditional sense of doing a j.o.b. to get a paycheck and just going through the routine day in and day out. It’s like getting paid to play baseball – if I was independently wealthy, I’d still be doing the same thing, only for people and organizations who can’t afford the services I render for pay now.

Shift your focus

“Success in business” is too broad to allow someone to have a one-step recipe, but the foundation of building something that can last is to base a business on a passion. That passion will find an avenue to express itself to others and fill a need. Do what you love and find a way to make money doing it. Money, in this sense, is in its purest form: compensation for a job/service well done — it is an avenue to help yourself and others.

Earn. Save. Give.

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Do You Care Enough?

March 3, 2013 By Leave a Comment

One consistent thread blatantly evident in successful solopreneurs is that most of them care about more than themselves or their company. They care about something larger than them and they care about  their customers. It’s so counter-culture today that it’s noticed by everyone who deals with them and it serves doubly by becoming all the more desirable in the market.

The market isn’t a closed system. That is, there isn’t a finite amount of money that everyone is in competition for a slice of the pie. The pie grows as people are empowered to affect the market. I refer to the mechanism as “win-win-win” and it looks like this:

  • Win: You get a sale/client.
  • Win: The customer’s need/want is met or exceeded.
  • Win: That satisfaction causes them to be in a better position (whatever that is to them).

That third win is a catalyst for growth and it has no limit.
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The Easy Way or the Best Way?

February 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Business owners have two clear directions to take when they set out to make their mark: the easy way or the best way. There is a difference between quick and dirty vs. efficient, as well, so it is still possible to tow the line without wasted effort.

I see the garbage behind the scenes of hundreds of websites per year. The band-aids, the poorly adapted code from someone else, and outright stealing of code and designs. Some developers let the client shoot themselves in the foot, then right on up their leg until they hit a vital organ.

Some projects are done without any foresight about the ramifications of any decision along the way — until it all comes down like a house of cards. By the time I am brought in to fix a desperate situation, often the best thing to do is to start over, from the ground up. There is a better way; it’s called “the right way.”

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