The Foolish Adventure Show | Internet Business Radio

Knowing if your business is healthy comes down to tracking and not guessing.

Over the years I’ve asked my clients some very basic business questions and only a handful knew the answers.

Questions like:

• What’s the Lifetime Value of a Customer (LVC)?
• What’s your Average Cost Per Acquisition (or new customer)?
• What’s your monthly break even point or annual break even?

Of course, there are a lot more questions to ask of a business. There really is a lot to know when running a business. So a great way to know if your business is healthy is to set up a Business Dashboard (or Instrument Panel).

First off, Izzy and I aren’t going to recommend any software that can manage your business dashboard since we don’t know your specific needs. And if you are a really small business you are probably going to be doing it the old fashioned way–manually.

This was a much bigger topic than we expected when we recorded so I left out a few specifics on what you should be tracking. This is only a partial list, but a good place to start.

(In no particular order)

• Cost Per Conversion (CPC): not to be confused with cost per click, cost per conversion is a very important number. If you spend $10 and you get 10 conversions (optin, sale or other conversion), then your CPC is $1/conversion.If you are building an email list, then you want to get optins as your conversion. You want CPC to be low enough to make a profit not just cheap. The idea is to maximize conversions, but balanced with profitability.
• Cost Per Sale: this goes along with CPC above, but is specifically tracking how much a sale costs the company. This may even be an average between new and existing customers.
• EBITDA: pronounced ib it duh is your Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization. What a mouthful. This is your profit–Revenue minus Expenses before you pay the tax man and interest on loans or getting the phantom expense of depreciation and amortization. Your actual Net Profit is revenue minus expenses including EBITDA.
• Lifetime Value of a Customer: this is a very important number. It helps keep you focused on retaining customers instead of focusing only on getting new ones. When you understand just how valuable a customer can be to your business, you’ll go out of your way to keep them.

I really wish I could go even more into the idea of a Business Dashboard so hopefully Izzy and I will create in-depth training on this topic. Listen to the show and get an understanding of how a Business Dashboard can let you know if your business is healthy and how to optimize its health.

Enjoy your Foolish Adventure,

Tim and Izzy

This episode gets us back to our roots–freedom through entrepreneurship.

Freedom is probably the number one reason people get into business for themselves.  They want choices that aren’t available to them by working for someone else.

This may be a choice on how they spend their time or what they do to earn their money or where they earn an income.

Some people may be like Tim and just have a problem with authority.  Authorities are telling you what you can and can’t do.  Most of the time they are wrong, and the times they are right they are usually only part right.

We started Foolish Adventure to help others stand up to the Status Quo and the conformity that surrounds them.  When the majority thinks you are foolish for wanting to be free (really free) it can be difficult to take action on your dreams.  We, Izzy and Tim, believe we are in a period in history where anyone who wants control over their income can get control online.

Why the focus on income?  When you have control of your income–how, when, where and why you make it, you gain access to a new world.  This new world has been around for a long time, but it was harder to access before the commercialization of the Internet.

This new world is freer than the old world.  When you can earn an income 24 hours a day, every day no matter where you live or what you’re doing, it gives you choices…and more choice equals more freedom.

If freedom is important to you–not the freedom to be comfortable, which we already have in wealthy nations, but real freedom to make your way in the world–to launch into your Foolish Adventure, then this conversation is one you’ll enjoy listening to and participating in.

Let us know what freedom means to you in the comments.

Enjoy your Foolish Adventure,

Tim and Izzy

You may not have seen these myths in your classical mythology course in college, but they are some of the most famous ones in business today.

In this episode, our Herculean heros step up to bust 5 of the most pervasive myths that are holding many business owners back from success.

Sometimes building, growing and managing a business feels like the 12 impossible labors of Hercules.  But we persist.  What can make business even more difficult is when we believe in myths that seem so true, but in reality just slow our progress.

Jump inside this episode to learn what these myths are and how to break free of them.   You may just discover the path to the golden fleece called success.

Enjoy your Foolish Odyssey,

Tim and Izzy

[edit] Bonus 6th Myth Busted!

Having been sick during the recording of this episode I completely forgot one of the biggest myths–“It Takes Money To Make Money.”

Many people use this excuse to not even try.  They don’t even calculate what the real cost to turn their idea into a business.  I’ve started a business with $0.  I went out and found a client.  Then I used that money to get biz cards and pay for web hosting and other essentials needed to promote my business.

With an online business, you can get started without owning a computer, without paying for a website or really an expense at all.  This is a tough way to start, though, but it can be done.

Use a library computer or a friends.  Start a tumblr or WordPress.com blog and get on Twitter & Facebook.  Start building a small audience and connecting with others in your niche.  Find a cool affiliate product and promote it to your small audience.  Invest the money from sales into a website of your own. Repeat over and over.  Keep reinvesting the money coming until it covers all the business expenses and starts generating a profit.  ~ t

There are a lot of people online, experts of sorts, who spout phrases like, ‘Attention is worthless so don’t buy people’s attention.’  What they are saying is spending money on advertising (any paid activity that gets someone’s attention) is worthless.

If you see someone online bad-mouthing advertising you should put it into context; either they have never used advertising or they have never used advertising successfully.  There is a third type–the social media guru who is advertising his/her product on how you only need social media to promote your business, in other words a hypocrite.

Advertising works especially online advertising.  It will take a lot of testing to get an advertising method to work for your product, but it will work if you have a good product.

Listen in to the show to learn why online advertising has the potential to double, triple or quadruple the size of your business.

Enjoy your Foolish Advertising,

Tim and Izzy

Where the rubber meets the road…

Sales. You know, that evil thing capitalists do.

We’ve been known to say the only thing it takes to be in business is to make a sale. Without selling a business is just a hobby or more accurately on its way to extinction.

Inside this episode you’ll learn tips, tricks and techniques for selling–both selling online and offline. Selling offline or at least marketing offline will become a larger percentage of most online businesses in the near future so you might as well learn to do it now.

After this episode you won’t shy away from asking for the sale.

Our tangent-driven heros — one carrying a deadly illness (the sniffles) — bring you another exciting episode of The Foolish Adventure Show! Tim and Izzy share harrowing tales of people without passion, online business mayhem, and monsters that only eat the ambidextrous.  Okay, that last one is made up.

I’m still sick from when this show was recorded so I’m making this process of posting the show more fun, well…at least for me.

This one tries to answer what to do when you aren’t that passionate about anything or you don’t want to sell what you are passionate about.  Say you love golfing, but you don’t want to make a business out of it.  All you want to do is go golf eight days a week.

What if you could harness what makes you good at something and use that to make a living online?

Well, listen to the show and find out!

Enjoy your Foolish Adventure,

Tim “I has a cold” Conley

This episode brings to you a couple of really smart and successful online entrepreneurs, Dan & Ian of LifestyleBusinessPodcast.com.

You’re about to get great information and inspiration from guys who sell–wait for it…real physical products!  Who knew that people still bought stuff you can touch.

Here at Foolish Adventure, we live off ones and zeros, but not only is it possible to sell physical products – you can even build a successful business.

What’s best about this episode is partnership.  The roundtable was meant to be physical vs. digital products, but turned more into discussing lifestyle and business building strategies, especially the power of great partnerships.

There is also discussion of an idea that Tim thinks is pure genius.  Let’s see who takes credit for it.

We all had so much fun and we felt there was so much more we could cover together we decided to do a part two soon.

Check out Dan & Ian’s podcast over at Lifestyle Business Podcast and listen to Episode #57 because it goes really well with this roundtable discussion.

Then go over to TropicalMBA for some lifestyle and business inspiration.

Next follow @AnythingIan and @TropicalMBA on Twitter.

Finally, enjoy your Foolish Adventure,

Tim & Izzy

Join in on our conversation about Decision Making and Confidence.  We talk about the pitfalls of indecision, waiting on others to make decisions for you and the problems with certainty.

Of course, we don’t just talk about the problems, but also the way we go about building our confidence through decisions plus action.

Decisions without actions are as ineffective as making no decision and letting the world happen to you.  Once you make a decision, even a little one, take an immediate action that furthers your decision.

We all need to exercise our decision-making ‘muscles’ and the more we do, the more confident we become.  We’ll soon be able to make big decisions quickly and confidently.

Enjoy your Foolish Adventure,

Tim and Izzy

This debate has gone on for a long time–basically since the Internet went mainstream.  A new version of this debate has popped up recently because several high(er) profile bloggers have started email newsletters that…OMG…you have to pay for.

Recently, a guy I read, Adam Baker of ManVsDebt, started a pay-for blog.  I paid just to check it out.  It’s called ShutUpAndHustle.com.  Baker (that’s what he goes by) charges $25 a month for people to read this blog.  (This site went live after Izzy and I recorded this)

This is the “purest” form of the Future of Blogging Is Paid Access I’ve seen.  Most of the recent converts to getting paid for what they create have been using Letter.ly, which we have mentioned before.

Izzy and I started Foolish Adventure as a free audio show and have promised that as long as we produce the show it will remain free.  We also said in the beginning that we would develop a way to earn money from it.  Six months later we created a Pay For Access site called Foolish University.  It is also a Pay For Content site since members get premium content from us as well as direct access to us in the Forum.

We’ve been preaching the Paid For Content/Access since the beginning, but it is good to see other Content Creators waking up to this idea.

Article mentioned in the show: In Over Your Head: The Future of Blogging Is Paid Access

Enjoy your Foolish Adventure,

Tim and Izzy

For Episode 40, we wanted a big topic to celebrate so we are hitting you with business breakthroughs.

Inside you’ll learn:

• what a breakthrough is and how to create one
• how to shift your mentality to make creating breakthroughs easier
• how not to fall victim to the “what ifs”
• where to get ideas for breakthroughs
• and real world examples of breakthroughs

Enjoy your Foolish Adventure,

Izzy and Tim