[TheForge] Re: marketing

[Mike Spencer]

AndyV wrote:

> The conditions under which some of [our neighbors] live would
> probably appall some of you.  Hell, the conditions under which *we*
> live might. :)

I'll see your double-wide and raise you a two-holer. :-) :-)

If I had felt that I had to have a "respectable" place to live, proper
furniture, median or better income, good wardrobe etc. etc. I would
have just now retired from 40 years commuting to a lab or a garage
or machine shop.  I would just recently have finished paying the
vendor and the bank each $X for the nominally $X house, not to mention
proportionate taxes, insurance and maintainance commensurate with
aforesaid respectability.

If you want to run a business in a businesslike way, I have no
argument with that.  If you're creative and inventive and make
beautiful stuff, all the better.

But there's a line.  It starts out very fuzzy and eventually becomes a
ridge between hollers: If you set target revenue, target income and
set about to organize your life to produce that, your life, your time
and your state of mind will go off down one path.  If you set about to
do whatever you have a mind to do -- be it very substantial or largely
whimsical -- with whatever you have at hand, your life, your time and
your state of mind will go off down quite a different path.

Switching paths becomes harder as time goes on.  There are a number of
blacksmiths who were brokers or scientists first.  I once met a
hard-core computer weenie who had spent a decade homesteading in
back-country Alaska. (You'd never have known he wasn't just another
up-scale intern from Columbia U. except that he hadn't been able to
give up chewing tobacco, a real shocker in the halls of prestige
academe. :-) But -- baldfaced assertion without supporting hard
evidence -- the path you start on colors and usually distorts
your view of the path you jumped to.

> The funny thing about this market is that those clients with the
> most disposable cash are often the biggest pains in the ass.

On the first path, that's just a cost of doing business.  On the
second path, you may well say to yourself, "Do I need this $20K bad
enough to spend my time hanging out with self-important numb-nuts,
overbearing jerks or wealthy weasels?"

Enough. I could rant longer but you get the idea....


FWIW,
- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^