Hi everyone,

Naomi is having a little bit of a family drama, and asked me for some help. Therefore, it has fallen upon me to take up some of the slack and get a new post out. Since I know dick all about marketing, I thought I’d try something a little different.

A little while ago, Naomi wrote about Brandon and the Homeless Dude. I have to tell you that something about that title got me thinking. I can’t hear “Brandon and the Homeless Dude” without thinking that they are some kind of crime fighting team like the dynamic duo. They have become one person in my mind. You know how when you know identical twins you start referring to them by one name? Like I know James and Ian, and whenever my friends and I talk about them they become JamesandIan, all one word, as if they were the same person.

Anyway, the point is I started thinking about Brandon and the Homeless Dude as a couple. Then I started wondering what their life would be like. And I thought “Hmm, maybe this would be a good way for people to blow off some steam. Let’s have them write about the adventures of Brandon and the Homeless Dude”. So that’s what I’m going to do.

As a regular Saturday feature, I would like to publish the latest adventures of Brandon and the Homeless Dude. This is where you come in. I would like you all to e-mail me at jamie AT ittybiz DOT com with your stories as to what this duo is up to. Every week I will pick a story I like the most and publish it on Saturday, along wth the author’s name, bio, and website.

So here’s what I need from you. Think about what Brandon et al have been up to, write it down, and send it to me along with a little bio about yourself and your website and/or blog. There really is no prize that I can think of (although that may be a possibility in the future) but you can get your name up in big bright lights and it might be a fun thing to do in your spare time (what spare time? you’re asking yourself). As an idea, here’s a little story to get you all started. Keep in mind, your stories can continue in this vein or can be completely unrelated. so, without further ado, here it is (with apologies to Mr. Bob Dylan*)

Brandon and the Homeless dude were hard up for cash

Stayed up all night selling cocaine and hash

To an undercover cop who has a sister named Jude

For reasons unexplained she loved the Homeless Dude

*Sorry Bob.

By Jamie Dunford - Jul 6, 2008 in Home Based Business - 15 Comments
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In Which Jamie Welcomes the Lurkers, and Lays the Smacketh Downeth in a Nice Way

OK, first things first. Naomi had a post a few days ago, and we saw the lurkers (and I use this term nicely, it is not meant to be derogatory) come out of the woodwork. Sometimes we get so used to seeing the same names on the comments on different posts that we forget that there are other people reading these posts whom we have never met. While it is always awesome to see our regular commentators show up and put in their two cents, it was especially awesome to see so many new names in the comment section.

So lurkers: this part is for you. We want to encourage everyone to feel like they can take part in the discussion that is IttyBiz, so take this as your official welcome to the party. Please, please, please use the comment section on this post if you have any comments or suggestions on what we can do to make it easier for first-timers to feel comfortable enough to take part.

Secondly, it was previously suggested that the time may have come for us to set up some comment rules. Since unruly behaviour tends to upset my wife and therefore ruins my day, I agreed to take on this task. Please pay attention, I don’t want to have to come find you. If you haven’t already read How To Avoid Running Your Mouth Off On-line, perhaps that is the best place to start.

The rules are pretty simple.

Please treat the IttyBiz blog the way you would treat a party to which you are invited and know some but not all of the guests.

If you come to the party only to hand out your business card to everyone in attendance and then promptly leave, you will not be invited back.

If you continually and pointlessly talk smack about the host(ess) or their guests, you will not be invited back.

If you are a bigot, racist, homophobe, or goat-lover at our party, you will not be invited back.

If you are any of these things in the privacy of your own home, that’s your business.

If you contribute to the discussion at the party, you will always have a standing invitation to our party.

If you are the person who always brings more alcohol than is strictly necessary, you will always have a standing invitation to our party.

If you can voice a dissenting opinion in a thoughtful way, you will always have a standing invitation to our party.

If you treat others with respect and kindness, even when offering a criticism, you will always have a standing invitation to our party.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s our little home business party. We are the sole arbiters of who is invited and who is not. (Case in point, we have decided that two people can be sole arbiters, and there’s nothing wrong with that.) Most transgressions will likely get a warning first, but if we’re really pissed off then maybe not.

Welcome, and please enjoy the party.

Image credit : Givepeasachance

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By Jamie Dunford - May 11, 2008 in Home Business Blogging - 37 Comments
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OK, you have to stay with me on this one. I will get around to relating this to home business, I promise, but it’s going to take me a while. So go grab yourself a coffee or a Crown & Coke or whatever because here we go.

The other day I was talking to a very good friend and she said something to me that really got under my skin. She and her boyfriend are looking to buy their first house, and a couple of weeks ago they found perfection — love at first sight. They put in an offer and held their breath. This weekend they just found out that their offer was refused and the owner had sold the house to another couple.

Naturally, she was disappointed. But what really seemed to annoy me was just how much it seemed to get her down. After all, at least she had someone she loved, they both have great jobs and good health, and at least they’re in the position to buy.

I was feeling jealous because Naomi and I would like to buy a house but can’t right now.

I was feeling petty and believing that any problems Naomi and I had were much more serious than just not getting the house we wanted. After all, there are plenty of houses out there and my friend just needs to keep looking. I didn’t like that I was feeling this way so I started thinking about it. I came up with a theory.

The Re-Calibrating Happiness Scale Theory

Most of us believe that events come along with their own preset happiness quotient. If viewed objectively, most of us can rate a list of events in order of the amount of happiness they would bring the average person. Good is good, bad is bad, that sort of thing.

Let’s say I gave you three events and asked you to rate them in order of least-happiness-inducing to most-happiness-inducing — 1 being the lowest and 3 being the highest. If those three events were a funeral, getting a new job, and your own marriage, most people would rank these 1, 2, and 3 respectively.

This is all well and good, but when it comes to our own lives, we can’t be objective.

If we all have a happiness scale of -10 to 10, my -10 is not going to be the same as your -10, and your 10 is not going to be the same as my 10.

My friend is in a different stage of her life than I am. What she expects to get from her life is different from what I expect to get from my life. This is why not getting her house is a -10 on her scale — she expects that she should be able to buy a house based on where she is in her life. I can’t relate because putting an offer on house is so far beyond my scale right now, and therefore I have no expectations about it.

When I thought about it a little further, I realized that not only is my scale different from my friend’s scale, but my scale is different from my own scale of even a few months ago.

Because my life is changing, my scale is being re-calibrated based on my new circumstances and the new expectations that arise from those circumstances.

OK, we’re almost to the part where I relate this to your own home business.

In a previous life, I worked at a job where I had to deal with a lot of red tape. This used to really piss me off, especially when I kept seeing commercials for my company on TV talking about our wonderful customer service.

A -10 day at work for me was any day where my interactions with a client were hampered by red tape. Then Naomi came up with the brilliance which is IttyBiz and I quit to work with her. One of the things I clung to was with our own business, we make the decisions. No more red tape.

When I did that, my expectations about my new job role changed. I no longer expected to have to deal with red tape, and at that moment my happiness scale re-calibrated. My old concept of -10 was deleted. But while the events on your scale may change, the scale itself never does.

The scale doesn’t change.

You always have to have a -10 and a +10 and they always feel the same. You feel just as frustrated or elated at -10 or +10, only the events and your own expectations have changed.

A few months ago I was getting disappointed with working from home because it felt like it hadn’t made me any happier. I was thinking about going back to work. Guess where I was going to apply first? You got it, my old red-tape job. Naomi was able to remind me of all the reasons I wanted to leave that job, and finally I realized that I did not want to go back. I was indeed happier working from home.

The moral of the story? Any given day can be a -10 or a +10 or even a 0 or a 3 or a -2. But…

Just because you’re having a -10 day doesn’t mean you’ve made a bad choice in your life.

Some days working from home will seem like the best decision you ever made. Some days you will wonder whatever possessed you to leave the security of a 9-5 job. Once you realize that you will always have days like this — no matter what you’re doing — it’s easier to look at your life as a whole and see that it’s not as bad as you might think.

The key is not “how do I feel today?”, but “how have I been feeling since I made a change in my life?”

The secondary moral of the story (can a story have more than one moral?) is to remember that everyone has a scale, and everyone feels their -10 or +10 just as intensely as you do. Just because I may wish I had my friend’s problem doesn’t mean she’s not deeply affected by it.

So what can you do to help keep some perspective?

One little thing I’ve found that works for me is to schedule the tasks I most enjoy doing for the end of my work day. I can have a pretty good day, but if the last hour is shit then I think I had a shitty day. Ending on a positive note can turn a bad day into a good one. (Charlie from Productive Flourishing made a similar point here.)

Secondly, keep a journal. Not a “I had tuna fish on rye but we ran out of light mayonnaise” journal, just a simple little journal of how things went. This helped me when I was thinking about rejoining the rat race.

I was able to go back and read about how badly some of those days at the old job made me feel. After time and changed expectations, those bad feelings lost their edge. When I realized that some days I felt as bad as I did today, I was able to remember that the old job wasn’t as great as nostalgia would have me believe.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, try to get rid of your expectations. I don’t really follow Buddhism but Naomi tells me this is like losing your attachments. If you don’t wake up each day expecting the day to turn out a certain way then you’re less likely to be disappointed.

Less disappointments mean more happiness.

I’m sure this is not groundbreaking stuff, and it may not even be all that original. But I was at a point in our home business where I was wondering if this was really for me, and what I came up with on my own helped me get through it. As always, if you have any thoughts on how to cope with indecision or unhappiness, please let me know, I’d love to hear them.

Photocredit: netsrot

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By Jamie Dunford - Apr 17, 2008 in Home Business Psychology - 33 Comments
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OK, so I’m going to let you in on a little secret. When Naomi first mentioned that she wanted to start a home buziness, I thought she was crazy. This was a little more than just beyond anything I was used to. But she talked a good game and convinced me (maybe a sure sign she should be in marketing?), and what follows are some things I’ve had to learn while I got used to the whole fluctuating income thing.

Get ready to talk about it. A lot.

If your spouse is thinking about quitting the day job and working from home instead, it better be because they love what they are going to be doing. And what do we as humans do with the things we love? We talk about them constantly. If your partner doesn’t want to talk about their business constantly, this may be a sign that they are not into it enough. Either that or the business isn’t going as well as they’d hoped. When Naomi started talking to me about marketing (not exactly my favourite subject) I quickly realized that she didn’t necessarily need marketing to become my passion too, she just needed me to listen.

Prepare to be educated.

Having just made point number one, it’s time to add a caveat. Just listening is good, but if this is going to be a long term thing and you would like for you and your spouse to be able to continue speaking to each other, then at some point you are going to have to learn about the business your partner is running. Having an understanding spouse is key; one who doesn’t mind explaining things to you like you are a three year old, and can overlook the occasional use of a semi-colon. Because of Naomi, I (somewhat) understand things like A/B splits, press releases, target demographics, and unique sales propositions (USP’s). Just remember, he or she managed to be able to speak coherently about World of Warcraft, kite flying, or whatever your little obsession is, so the least you can do is return the favour.

Find a way to be helpful.

So now not only can you listen, but you’ve learned a few things too. Why not take these skills and apply it to the business? (Under careful supervision, of course.) Find some ways to help out with the new business. It’s fun, it can be a challenge, and you can suck up and put in some good quality time with your partner at the same time. I help Naomi out with some of the technical issues she’s had, mostly with her computer, and from time to time she’ll even allow me to post or leave comments. You may even find yourselves working together at 3 a.m. discussing the relative merits of a fictitious McFatty burger (or Burgher).

So that’s about it, really. So far so good, but if anyone has any other suggestions from their own experiences, please feel free to mention them in the comments. If you’re the work-from-home spouse, what do you want from your partner? If you’re the significant other, what do you do to make it work?

(Seriously. Comment. I have a feeling she’s thinking about revoking my blogging privileges.)

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Photocredit ReaA

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By Jamie Dunford - Apr 11, 2008 in Home Based Business - 32 Comments
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Hi everyone, Jamie from IttyBiz here. It’s about 5 am here on Tuesday morning, Jack is as asleep as he’ll ever be and Naomi is sleeping blissfully unaware that I have hijacked her little home business blog for this one post. Believe me, when she realizes it I’m sure there will be more than a few computer passwords changed around our house.

Before I get started with the real reason I called you all here, let me take care of a few administrative things that may help minimize the amount of damage I sustain when Naomi finds out about this. First - please read her post Home Business Mistakes: What Would You Do Differently?. By doing so you will ensure I will not have to hear about how I knocked her most recent post off the front page of her blog. Secondly, please do not let her know about this on Twitter. We all know how often she is on Twitter and I need the time to come up with a good alibi proving that this could not possibly be me writing this right now. Thanks for your support.

So, without any further ado, let’s get to it. The title of this piece is “Why I like My Wife”, and it will be about exactly that. Oh, and for the record I am stone cold sober right now. Not that that should be surprising or anything.

She doesn’t let me get away with any crap.

Out of all my friends and family, Naomi knows me the best. She knows me better than I know myself. This is awesome because whenever I am in a quandary she can tell me exactly what I should do. Not in a bad, domineering way, but in a “If you don’t do x you will be really pissed off with yourself”, and she is always right. Always. It’s kinda scary.

She lets me try anything.

When I had a job I really didn’t like, she was the first one to tell me to leave. Even though it was her turn to stop working and stay at home, she surprised me at work on my lunch hour one day and said to me “Guess what? I got a job. Now you can go quit yours.” I did, that afternoon. We hadn’t even really spoken about me quitting, she just knew how much I didn’t like going to work in the morning. When I wanted to try out going back to school, she was behind me all the way. When school didn’t work out, she didn’t blame me or complain about the wasted tuition money. She simply told me that school wasn’t working, it was worth a try but it was time to move on to other and better things.

She is patient.

For the last 7 months or so I have been at home and watching over Jack. She has seen me struggle at times trying to take care of our son but never once has she tried to tell me the “right” way to do it (unless of course I asked her to). She has always let me find my own way to do things and my relationship thus far with our son has been awesome because of it.

There are a lot more reasons but I am not the writer Naomi is and I won’t bother you nice people any longer. Thanks for letting me get this off my chest. Oh, BTW- if you happen to be in the London Ontario area anytime after Tues, April 8th be sure to stop by and visit me at Victoria Hospital, which is where I’ll be once Naomi has read this. She does not like surprises.

Thanks again!
Jamie

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By Jamie Dunford - Apr 8, 2008 in Personal - 28 Comments
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So we at IttyBiz have been following a post and some comment streams between what seems like my fellow home business owners James and Harry at JCM Enterprises and basically the entire free world with an internet connection. This got me to thinking, and because the comment streams were so huge I figured I’d write a post instead. But first, a disclaimer:

WARNING

The preceding and following statements represent the opinion of this blogger alone and are not necessarily those of the entire blogosphere. We take no responsibility for any debate, dispute, argument, fight, falling out, wars, acts of terrorism, or any other negative reaction that may result from these thoughts in any form. (We’re thinking about making this a standard disclaimer for our blog. Maybe we’ll copyright it and sell it to other bloggers. Speaking of income streams…)

So for those who may not have seen this, the bottom line is James took a hard but honest stance on an issue he feels strongly about. (Edited to add: The issue is PLR. At Jarkko’s smart request, here’s an explanation of that. PLR stands for Private Label Rights. By definition, it means I write it, you take credit for it, like ghostwriting. That’s the official meaning. What actually happens is I write it, sell it to a gazillion people and they all pretend it’s theirs. Either that, or I write it 600 ways to breakfast, sell it 600 times as original content, and people spam the bejesus out of the Google front page with a bunch of rewritten articles that say the exact same thing.)

The response to his comment was outrage, and at one point the blogger in question turned off comments. James has apologized for offending anyone WITHOUT retracting his original stance (way to go James!!!!) but the fallout seems to be continuing.

Basically, here’s a metaphor of what happened:

Them: Hey James, here’s a bunch of resources about how to run a pyramid scheme! You should check them out!

James: Dude, that’s a pyramid scheme. I don’t want to run a pyramid scheme.

Them: HOW DARE YOU say we’re running a pyramid scheme? [screaming and character assassination ensues.]

I’m not saying PLR is a pyramid scheme, so just settle down. You get the point. This is a metaphor.

This led me to think about the actual purpose of a blog. Now I may have missed the point entirely, but to me, the purpose of a blog is to create an online community in which we are free to share our opinions and foster debate and discussion. I understand that to some people, debate is a dirty word that makes them feel uncomfortable, but my experience has been that the average commenter (commentator?) can respond with a contrary opinion in a very mature and non-offensive manner.

I realize that this is just my opinion and that not everyone will agree with me. I also realize that I have no right to tell people how to run their blogs. However, doing things like removing comments from a post seems anti-blog to me. I have no issue with moderating first-time commenters (we all know there are very good reasons for this) as normally the blogger is only confirming that the comment is not spam. They are not erasing contrary opinions from their site.

If you do not respect or want comments then you do not want a blog - you want a website. Or a soapbox.

I believe that James and Harry handled this situation with grace and with a true spirit of open debate. James did the grown-up thing here by apologizing for offending anyone and stressing that he did not mean for his comments to be taken as a personal attack, and kudos to those bloggers who accepted the apology.

I can understand those commenters who personally attacked him and Harry when they felt they themselves were being attacked, but I have absolutely no respect for the ones who continued the attack after an apology was publicly issued. I (perhaps mistakenly) assume that we are all mature enough to be able to make our points without the personal attacks.

Moral of the Story? There’s a big difference between legal and ethical.

By engaging in activities your professional colleagues deem to be unethical, you open yourself up to criticism. If you truly believe what you’re doing is right, defend yourself to the ends of the earth. If you run away like a scared little puppy, it’s probably because you can’t defend yourself. And you can’t defend yourself because you’re in the wrong.

Bonus Moral of the Story. Don’t be a baby.

(Naomi’s busybody note:I have a few things to add. One, generally, when I’m attacked, I let the attacker do his or her thing and burn out. I don’t feel the need to wave my gun around saying, “Don’t YOU attack ME, motherf*cker!!!” Maybe that’s just me.

Secondly, one of my favorite expressions in business is “management by objectives”. When it comes to any type of corporate communication, know what the hell you’re trying to do. If you want to create a group of adoring fans and call it a “community”, fine, turn off your comments. You’ll lose the respect of everyone except your sister and your mother, but whatever.

Third, this whole fiasco was about PLR, also known as article spinning. For those of you who are not freelance writers, this involves taking an article - either one that you wrote or one you got from somewhere else - and basically changing a teensy, weensy bit of it to make it pass Copyscape tests. This is not about using an article or a publication for research. This is about changing “like” to “love” to “enjoy” or similar, every third word or so. Then you do it 600 times and resell it.

Not like any of you care, but I’m with James. According to my definition of legitimate, this ain’t it. It’s not illegal, but neither is taking a really young looking 18-year-old, dressing her up in a school girl outfit, pretending she’s 12, and marketing it as child porn. It’s dirty, but it’s legal. Just like this trumped up version of plagiarism.)

Discuss. I promise I won’t turn off the comments. You could also subscribe to the feed. Then we can duke it out in comments every day of the week.

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By Jamie Dunford - Nov 19, 2007 in Moral of the Story - 34 Comments
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