Entrepreneurism Archives - Lazy Man and Money

I Bought (a lot of) a Company!

October 22, 2019 by Lazy Man 9 Comments

Have you ever bought a company?

I know a few people who have a bought a money-making blog. That’s rare. It’s also possible to buy some real estate and create an investment property company. That’s mostly starting a company though.

Other than those cases, I don’t see people buying companies often. However, most everyone I know has bought parts of many companies by investing in stocks or mutual funds. Often they end up owning a millionth (or even less) of a single company.

Last month, I did something that was in the middle of both buying company experiences. I bought a double-digit stake in a company. It’s a small enough stake that I’m not expected to actively manage anything in the company. It’s a large enough stake that my suggestions will be heard and given a fair shake.

It’s not a public company. I’d be shocked if you have heard of it. The business is so extremely boring that I won’t describe it here for fear that you’d simply click away and never come back.

To make things easier, I’ll call the company WidgetTech.

WidgetTech has a lot going for it. Its customers need the service it provides. WidgetTech makes a profit. Just as importantly (to me), it has a profit sharing program.

I’m not going to share specific numbers such as how much I invested and what the return is. The WidgetTech owners know and read this blog. I presume they are a private company for a reason, and I respect that.

Instead, I will say that it is somewhat similar to one of our investment properties that we bought in 2013. We got it at a bargain price and it’s appreciated 60% since then. While we have currently a mortgage on it, in a few years, the rent minus the expenses (maintenance, property taxes, insurance, association fee, etc.) will earn us decent monthly check.

I like the WidgetTech investment more than the investment property for a few reasons:

Better Returns
The amount of income that I’m making for the amount invested is better. In other words, the yield is better. This is usually the most important thing for investors. Making more money while investing less is a win, but it is elusive.
No Work
Being a landlord can be a lot of work at times. Usually it’s somewhat passive, but it isn’t 100% passive unless you have a property manager. Paying a property manager cuts into profits. With a passive stake in WidgetTech, I’m not going to get calls at 3AM about a pipe bursting.
Recession Resistant
WidgetTech has customers from all over the world paying for the product. While the United States may experience a downturn, WidgetTech’s global audience could allow it to weather a slowdown better than some investments. It’s a different kind of diversity from our other investments.
The People
I’ve had some tremendous tenants. However, it would never occur to me to go grab a beer with them, much less go on vacation with them. That relationship is very strictly business – especially because it can get messy if you have evict them down the line. In contrast, I know the WidgetTech owners well and have a great relationship with them. There is very little direct client communication as long as things are operating well, so there’s no animosity there either.

While I wrote “no work” above, I want to put more work into WidgetTech. If you’ve watched Shark Tank, you’ve seen how the sharks work to promote their companies. That work improves the profits and value for all owners. I’d like to do something similar and I think there’s room to do it.

As you can tell, WidgetTech seems like a superior investment. That’s why I’m excited about it. However, you rarely get something for nothing when it comes to investing.

There are downsides to this type of investment:

It’s Not Liquid
If you put your money in a savings or a checking account, you can get it back out easily. You might not earn a good interest rate, but you have great access to your money. If you bought stocks or a mutual fund, you could sell and get your money out easily as well. You might have to pay more taxes, but you’d still be able to get your money.
With WidgetTech, my underlying investment money is hard to get back. It would require a very significant emergency to try to get it back. I’d be looking to exhaust all my other options first. This is another reason I consider it similar to the investment property. While I could take a loan out on the property, for the most part, the money is spent. I could sell the property, but it’s not easy and I find the costs to sell often prohibitive.
Sometimes having an investment that is not liquid is a good thing. It prevents me from making rash/emotional decisions.
Risk of Company Failure
Few companies last forever, right? If the company falls on difficult times or business landscape changes, the investment could be in trouble. I feel strongly about WidgetTech’s chances to last a long, long time.

In both investment cases, I know that I’m making a financial decision that isn’t for Lazy Man today, but for Lazy Man tomorrow. In today’s world of YOLO culture, this may not make sense to some people.

However, it’s easy for me to focus on the financial picture tomorrow. I’ve personally seen how the financial decisions over the last 20 years have put us in a great financial place today.

Alternative Income and Net Worth Reports

For the last few years, I’ve been publishing my alternative income which is passive and “passive-ish” income. This investment converts a large sum of money that was earning minimal interest in a money market account into something that generates significantly more through the profit sharing plan.

That’s going to give my alternative income a good boost. It will show up in the dividends category which is essentially what this is (even if the tax treatment is different). It’s certainly close enough based on it being the income return from investment in a business.

One the net worth side, I’m going to keep the underlying money that I invested as an asset. As I wrote above, it is possible to sell even if it’s difficult. This will give our net worth a boost going forward because the income earned is much better than what the bank’s money market was paying. In a number of years, this income will be worth the same as the underlying investment (if all goes according to plan), which would effectively double the value of it in our net worth.

This is no different than buying an investment property and keeping the value of the property on the books while collecting monthly checks.

Final Thoughts

When I started this blog back in 2006, I did it with the idea of coming up with a way to create passive or alternative income that would allow me to at least equal what my wife’s military pension will be. Life has a number of roller coaster ups and downs and twists and turns over a 13 year span.

With this investment, I can confidently say that the blog’s goal has been accomplished. (Just wait until you see what happens over the next 13 years of this blog.)

Want It? Maybe You Do. (Plus an Exclusive Offer for Lazy Man Readers.)

March 1, 2018 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

I get dozens of emails every day. (Don’t we all?) Unfortunately a lot of those emails border on spam. There are people shooting out thousands of emails looking for any website owner to promote their stuff.

I’m a bit of a sucker. I write too many of these people back. Fortunately, I have a couple of form letters that makes responding to most requests very quick.

Because a lot of these are quasi-spam to start with, writing back the people is help only once in a blue moon.

Today, I’d like to tell you about one of those blue moons. The initial email wasn’t as spammy as most, but it start off with the general, “I’ve been reading your website and I’m a fan of your work.” I don’t think anyone writing me with such words have taken 30 seconds to leave a thoughtful comment on any of my articles.

The email continued on to say that the company was starting an Indiegogo campaign. The company is an alternative to Craigslist, OfferUp or any of those community sites where you might physically trade products in exchange for money. One of the reasons why an alternative is necessary is because there are a lot of scams on Craigslist. There are so many scams that Craigslist even has a page about it. You might not think that cashier’s checks could lead to a scam, but they can.

It seems like whenever we post something on Craigslist the first two people to contact us will be scammers. So I’ll all for an alternative that fixes the problem.

Introducing Want It

The company that is hoping to change all this is called Want It. Here’s a video introduction about how it works.

I hope you were able to watch that video as it really explained it better than I could.

Right off the top, I have to ask you to keep your expectations fairly low. The company is really new and the founder is bootstrapping it. This isn’t a case where they got $10 million in venture capital funding. I have some doubts about their ability to compete against the big companies and build a critical mass of listings. It’s a ginormous challenge.

There are probably dozens of reasons why Want It won’t work out. However, that describes just about every start-up in all of history, right? Instead of dwelling on the negative, let me give you two of the reasons why it will work out:

It solves a problem. I really can’t express how big this Craigslist scamming problem feels to me.
The founder himself. I’ve exchanged a lot of emails with Redmond Parker and one impression I got is that he’s all hustle all the time. One of the reasons why I chose the name Lazy Man is because I can’t seem to manage the motivation/drive to take an idea and bring it to life. Parker appears to be just the opposite to me.

Want It is raising some money through Indiegogo. They are raffling some cool items. At least people tell me they are cool, but I’m not hip enough to recognize a few of them. You may be interested in the Coachella tickets. It seems like the odds of you winning them are pretty high given the few people who have supported the campaign thus far.

I’ve made a couple of very minor suggestions to Parker and he’s agreed they are good ideas and implemented them. That’s one of the really cool things about working with a company at this stage. It reminds me when I saw Mint and Credit Karma were just offices with boxes piled up to the ceiling and not even a beta product to show off. Sometimes companies do make it big.

Want It is offering readers a “special perk” if you click through this link to the Indiegogo campaign. That perk is unlimited featured listings for life for $49. Everyone else will pay $69-79. You get to beta test the application (which is kind of a silly perk to pay for, but whatever) and entry in the raffle for the Coachella tickets.

If the company flames out, you’ll likely lost your money and get nothing. Featured listings only mean something if the company exists and does well. The raffle entries really only count if you win the raffle. So rather than looking at this as a “What in it for me?” situation, I’d like to twist it around and say, “Thinking of it as investing in a person or as investing in entrepreneurism itself.”

For full disclosure, I was going to this write up as a sponsored post, which is a fairly high rate. However, I felt strongly enough about the idea and the character/hustle of Parker that I took no money. Instead, I’ll be receiving featured listings for life and no Coachella entries (good luck to everyone else). I’ll see you at the beta test.

Hosting a Yard Sale Made Easy

August 29, 2017 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

Welcome to Limbo Week. That’s the week after camp ends, just before school begins. It’s difficult to get work done, but we’ve been learning about dinosaurs (thanks Dino Dana) and math (Cyberchase – both streaming free if you have Amazon Prime.) I also picked up some very basic Disney workbooks from DollarTree: first reading, addition/subtraction, and time/money. It’s amazing what a dollar can buy you these days!

Limbo Week is so crazy that I’m introducing it on a Wednesday! I’m going to do things a little differently today and go with a shorter article. Like Zombo Com, I can do anything during Limbo Week.

This past weekend, I found out how easy hosting a yard sale can really be. And by “I”, I mean my wife. That’s tip #1 to hosting an easy yard sale: Pass it off to your spouse… and hope he/she doesn’t read your blog that day. It wasn’t like I was just eating Bonbons on the couch, I was watching the kids and dog sitting… while eating Bonbons on the couch.

The yard sale hosting tip I wanted to share was renting a table at a community sale. One of the reasons why we don’t have a yard sale is that we’d have to create signs, advertise in Craigslist, and all that stuff to bring the traffic to us. All that just to waste 5 hours in the morning with people talking you down from 50 cents to 15 cents on everything. I have a friend who just donates everything to Goodwill and takes a tax write-off.

My wife found a community yard sale at a local church. The table fee was $30, which might be a tax deductible donation (check with your tax advisor). I figured that even if we didn’t sell anything, we’d still be helping out a charity. My wife brought a bunch of baby clothes and baby toys that we could no longer use. She ended up selling over $100 worth, to make a profit of $70. At the end of the yard sale it still looked to me like we had as much as she started with, but she assured me that it was much, much less. I suppose it would have to be because making $70 at 50 cents and a $1 here and there is a lot of selling.

Making $70-$75 isn’t exactly going to change our lives. However, the idea that someone else can reuse the products to help the environment and clear some of the garage/basement is big. It feels like a triple win for us and I’m sure the buyers feel the same way.

While on the topic of buyers, I love saving money by buying stuff at yard sales. We built a room from yard sale stuff.

I brought the kids to this yard sale for a little bit and ended up finding a very basic checkers game for $1, this Spin and Store food storage set for $2, and this Brain Quest America game for $2.

There’s another church sale in October. If the schedule lines up, we’ll be back with a lot more to sell.

The article above may have affiliate links where I may earn a small commission if you buy any of the products.

How Much Would You Pay For Online Content (Not Mine)

July 28, 2017 by Lazy Man 5 Comments

A week or two ago, my Twitter feed started blowing up with talk about a new website, Boston Sport Journal. It immediately caught my attention, because I initially started blogging with some friends on a similar-named website back in 2004. Also, I follow a LOT of Boston sports.

Think of how much you should follow something and then multiply it by a hundred. That’s what a neophyte would spend to follow as much Boston sports as I do. I’m greatly exaggerating to get the point across. And if you hate Boston sports, that’s cool and you can keep on reading. I’m going to write generically, and you can follow along as if it were something you might be interested, even if it happens to be the Jets and Yankees.

(Side Note: I want to specifically state that I was NOT paid for this review. These people probably don’t know that this website exists.)

There were three unique things about this website from the start.

1. The People Involved

The website is started by Greg Bedard, Sean McAdam, and Christopher Price. Or at least those were the first names attached. Bedard worked for Sport Illustrated for years, but I remember mostly with The Boston Globe from 2010-2013. McAdam has been covering the Red Sox in paper, radio, and TV for at least a decade now. He’s everywhere. Christopher Price is a newer name to me, but the only person who covers the New England Patriots like him is Mike Reiss.

These three journalists shouldn’t even be available. They wouldn’t be… except there been big layoffs at Sports Illustrated and ESPN. I don’t pretend to know the sports journalism industry, but it is hyper-competitive nowadays. Here are a couple of articles on that topic.

2. The Business Model

This is one of the few content website start-ups I’ve seen that are looking to charge a subscription on day one. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but people aren’t used to paying for content on the Internet. As John Oliver has covered before, this is a very bad thing.

However, we all like to save money and there’s a lot of free information out there. There’s so much that it’s impossible for anyone to keep track of what’s being published every day.

The pricing is around $5 a month, but it gets cheaper if you are willing to pay up front for a 1 year or 3 year commitment. You can even buy a lifetime membership. Students get special pricing and active duty military is free. (I didn’t see a senior discounts, which all that I can think is missing.)

Will people pay for sports content when the free model doesn’t seem to be keeping great journalists involved? That’s the elephant in the room.

The other potential problem is that there will still be ads. As they say, “We also need the right corporate sponsors to help offset our travel expenses so we can be your eyes and ears when the teams are away from Fenway, Gillette and TD Garden.”

I would think those travel expenses get quite expensive. Fortunately, as a personal finance blogger, I don’t need to travel.

3. What if the Website was Done Differently and Better?

Here is a great pitch from their about page:

Other things we can promise you:
Our coverage will be hyperlocal to Boston and New England. If it doesn’t matter to you, it doesn’t matter to us.
No clickbait articles or contrived opinions. While we will be striving to provide exclusive, interesting and unique news and analysis, we’re not going to be outlandish just to gain attention. We will mean what we say, and say what we mean. And if we don’t? Call us out on it. Our focus comes back to one thing: is it the coverage you want and deserve.
There will be no discussion about politics. We want to this to be an oasis from the outside world.
We will be interactive and accessible. Lots of Q&As, mailbags, in-game chats and Tweet-ups. Podcasts, videos and other multimedia projects are in the works. The only wall at BSJ is the paywall. Once inside, we are here for you. Want my opinion on a blown coverage from a Patriots game? Ask somewhere and I’ll give you my best insight. Same goes for the rest of the staff.
We will not clutter up your experience with annoying ads and autoplay videos. We want this to be a place where you feel at home and never want to leave. We’ll be striving to make it the best experience possible for you.

The use of clickbait on the Internet has become a real problem in my opinion. I try to stay away from that kind of stuff as best I can. (Unfortunately, sometimes I accidentally write a title that turns out to be more clickbait that I thought.)

The politics discussion should go without saying, but unfortunately that isn’t the case for one Boston sports radio station. It doesn’t help that it’s very right when the community is very left. You’d think it would hurt ratings, but it seems to be a contrived opinion and a radio version of clickbait to get calls. The callers call in and then get cut down even when they are have good opinions. However, they usually only take calls where they can easily disprove the point of view. Interestingly sports discussion has taken a backstage to his form of entertainment cesspool. (Now you know how I really feel.)

Some of the rest of their promises might sound like the kind of thing that you get here. I try to interact with you as much as possible. I eliminated most of the annoying ads (I think). Of course, I don’t charge you anything so I need to keep the ads.

Back around 2010, I had hoped to launch Be Better Now as a self-improvement website with a similar style. I couldn’t find the time or the right partners to pull the website together as I had hoped. I have high hopes that someday I will be able to make it into a great community of content and people.

In the meantime, I’ll keep an eye on Boston Sports Journal. I’m curious to see if it works.

Dog Sitting: My Two Month Review

October 14, 2015 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

A couple of months ago, I announced that I’d be jumping a new gig – dog sitting. It was a no-brainer because dogs are awesome, they love me, and we have a perfect fenced set-up for it. Oh and I noticed that I could make around $30 a day per dog. As if that wasn’t enough, the dogs will be good company for own dog.

It’s responsibility, but think it is what some professional athletes think, “I get paid money to play games… life is good!” Unfortunately, dog sitting will not be making me quarterback money any time soon.

I’m on two dog sitting services, Rover.com and DogVacay.com. I prefer DogVacay as the interface is better and the rates for hosting seems to higher. Unfortunately, I seem to find every technical glitch with DogVacay. I got an anxious dog mommy a couple of weekends ago when the DogVacay app didn’t send pictures as it claimed to have. Lesson learned: Still with good old MMS or uploading through the website.

The worst part was that their dog Vincent has been by far the most well-behaved we’ve had. It’s not that the other dogs weren’t well-behaved, but he was like a movie dog where he’d sit and ask for permission a paw wave before coming into your lap. After their stay, I wrote back that I’d give them a discount. I didn’t get a response. Oh well, you can’t please everyone.

Enough of that, let’s get to some numbers:

How much can you expect to earn dog sitting?

This is going to vary greatly depending on how many reviews you have, how you set prices, and demand in your area. The person I take my dog to when I’m on vacation usually has 4-6 dogs there and her rates are higher because she has awesome ratings and sends pictures about every half hour. (Seriously, I once got at least 20 pictures in the first two hours.) Some of the dogs are her own, but if we just to estimate $40 by 4 dogs and account for a little vacancy, it can be $150 a day. That’s more than $50,000 a year. It’s a lot of work dealing with that many dogs, but it does have income replacement potential for the top sitters.

But I didn’t title this a 2-month review to write about that person. I want to give my own data.

I have a spreadsheet that I set up. Record keeping is key. It has the dates the dog stayed, dog name, dog breed, age, owner information, vet information. I’m tempted to create a little database, just because it would be fun.

The thing I use the most though, is the money columns. I have what owners pay and what my cut is. The services take 15% for insurance and matchmaking. It automatically extends numbers based on the dates of the dogs’ stay. I then let some Excel formula do their thing. The result gives the following information:

I’ve netted (including booked) $976.65 through the end of October.
In September it was $15.27 per day due to a popular Labor Day with multiple dogs (and a lot of days with no dogs).
In October it is $10.97 per day. For some reason, Rover has come up big for me this month.
Annually, I am on a pace to net $4,193.85 or around $350 a month.

I think that $350 a month is the number I want to focus on. If that average holds up over the long term, it’s like eliminating a car payment. That’s not chump change by a long-shot.

Much of my personal finance situation this year has stayed the course. I think I’m going to add a projected dog-sitting income to my annual $200,000 in retirement income next year. I’ll probably be conservative and put it at $2,500 in case we travel more in retirement. In either case, it feels good to add another diversified income. Every little bit helps.