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Is it possible for the medium sized guys to make money?

You bet.

Network Solutions, bought for $20 million in 2003, was just sold for $800 million three years later.

And amazingly enough, this deal was done by a Persian – Iranian American Jahm Najafi.

So do the Iranians know how to play a poker hand?

It certainly looks like yes. No wonder the Israelis want the Americans to bomb the Iranians to smithereens. Competition isn’t fun.

Anyway here’s Najafi’s story:

Keep reading Network Solutions bought for million, sold for 0 million three years later

We've been contending with a pricing model for our clients at Foliovision. As Foliovision has grown outside its old bounds as a single person company doing relatively contained projects, our rates have had to rise.

It's not such a problem as we are a lot more productive.

There are two primary models: flat fee and pay-per-hour.

In principle, flat-fee is more profitable (if you charge $1000 but through automatisation can get your time to render the project down to 2 hours from 12 hours you've just made $500/hour instead of $80/hour.

On the other hand, we mainly do made-to-measure work. There is rarely the opportunity to automatise to that extent. We get exponentially better results in our markets than the competition so made-to-measure clearly works.

With made-to-measure work one can spend more time quoting and negotiating spec back and forth than working.

Gradually the client can grow to hate your emails demanding expansion of project scope and budget. Generally the (busy) client would prefer to pay more for something delivered with no hassle, complete and working. Then he or she only pays once for the project, instead of twice.

Twice is their time spent micromanaging what ends up costing more or less the same anyway.

Keep reading Pricing a Project: Hourly Billing versus Flat Fee

Contrarian business advice from Trizle is always a thrill.

For a taste, Why You Need a Chaotic Business:

Order = Bad Advice

The dude’s well-intentioned “let’s-order-everything, cuz-we’re-like-the-world’s-nerdiest-businesspeople” mindset stands as one of the several “bad, bad, bad” advices we received when we started.

Why? The mindset drives you to do nothing. Nada. Standstill. Blah.

• Instead of moving forward, you’re documenting.
• Instead of increasing sales, you’re recording every little detail of your past order.
• Instead of improving employee morale, you’re entering data of past employee feedback.
• Instead of fattening your bottom line online, you’re trying to perfect every freakin’ detail of your freakin’ website that’s going to take a freakin’ looooong time.

I think the Trizle guy has the E-Myth myth guy clearly in his targets. Michael Gerber is obsessed with turning every company into McDonalds, turning every company into a turnkey franchise.

Keep reading Chaotic Business versus the E-Myth

Sometimes a website can be setup to help one party and instead help another.

For one of my websites, I need to license some photos.

I haven’t had the right language for the contract. I looked at the contracts from the stock agencies but they were way too elaborate. I tried to find a local lawyer but none of them were competent in intellectual property. I sent somebody to contact the international law firms but they wanted thousands of dollars.

Thanks to Carolyn Wright, I now have my new contract by piecing together the parts which are supposed to worry photographers.

I did rewrite my contract to make it more fair to the photographer, allowing exhibition and print rights.

My main concern is to ensure that these images don’t turn up on other websites.

I ran across the most amazing niche website yesterday – dedicated to the possibility of a crash in house prices in the UK…. His forecast for house prices is for “a 30 to 40 per cent fall over the next three to four years”, a fall he describes as “a healthy correction”.