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My new business book designed to show workers how to become business owners to secure their own economic futures has been accepted for exhibition at the Frankfurter Bushmesse in Germany and the International Book Fair in Miami. The Frankfurt Book Fair is the world’s largest such event for publishers and last year attracted 278,000 visitors and 7,000 exhibitors from all over the world.

The Frankfurt fair takes place in six multistory buildings arranged around a central square with each building and floor dedicated to a different function. For example, English language publishers are in Building 6. The first three floors have exhibits from publishers from Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa, United Kingdom and the U.S. while the fourth floor is for literary agents and scouts.  Building 5 is dedicated to publishers in other European languages with France and Spain being most heavily represented. Not unexpectedly,  German publishers, distributors and authors outnumber those from other countries and are most heavily represented in Buildings 3 and 4. The first three days of the show, October 10-12 are reserved for members of the trade, but the show is open to the public the last two days of the event.

Cultural and culinary activities are not neglected at the fair. There is a temporary building, the Reading Marquee, in the central square or Agora where authors give readings of their works, a section dedicated to rare books and fine arts in Building 4 and other spaces dedicated to lectures and workshops. Many of these events are available free to participants, although some require advanced registrations. Food samplings are available at the Gourmet Gallery in Building 4 as well as at Business Club Europa where working lunches can be arranged. Coincidentally, the October 10-14 dates for the event correspond with Oktoberfest celebrations that occur all over Germany.

My book Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife will be shown by Stonewall Press in Hall 6 at Stand D 126. The purpose of showing my published book is to help sell print and foreign language rights to conventional publishers. This is not an unusual arrangement for an author who has self-published a book and desires to reach a world-wide audience for his work.

An author attending such a fair is much like a gadfly who can be very easily distracted by the enormity of the event and different options clamoring for his attention. In my case I have a general plan to circulate and talk up my book, but a very specific goal of contacting U.K. publishers about the concept of creating a U.K. edition where I discuss the practical aspects of securing a trademark, patents for inventions and establishing a business according to Crown Law.  This will require my redoing several chapters of the book that detail these processes in the U.S. and also converting spellings to U.K. English. To quote Winston Churchill, “We are two countries separated by a common language.”

I have already contacted 10 U.K. publishers to set up meetings about my book at the event. Such advanced notice enables both parties to do a bit of advance planning to find out about interesting titles that are at the fair and prepare a bid for whatever rights they might wish to publish. Although based in the U.K., some publishing houses specialize in translating non-fiction books into other languages. While based on the same text, each translation is a different book with a unique ISBN and requires a different publisher-author contract. If you are a publisher who is potentially interested in the book you may contact me using the form below.  Ultimately, I would hope to publish editions in French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese.

From the more than 100 U.K. publishers, distributors and agents at the event, I selected those that concentrated on non-fiction titles and particularly those who listed business books among their titles. Some publishers said they were interested in unusual treatments of common subject materials, and my Create Your Own Job Security meets that requirement. Others said they were looking for new voices with new approaches, and again, I certainly qualify. A few mentioned “modern” and “social media.” Many of today’s publishers want, or even require, that an author has already created a “brand” or “persona” and has a following on social media, if they are not an already well-known figure in their field. With 3.7 million views on my YouTube channel, 2,000 visits a month to my blog, the publication of 18 books, a podcast radio show that still attracts listeners years after the last show was broadcast and my common appearance on talk radio shows around the country, I have accumulated a significant social media presence. I am blessed with an unusual middle name, “Hovey,” and a Google search will show pages of hits when linked with “hunt” and a significant number if linked with “business.”

A secondary purpose at the Frankfurt Book Fair is to show my other books which include one of children’s stories and my outdoor titles like X-Treme Muzzleloading and Backyard Deer Hunting: Converting Deer to Dinner for Pennies per Pound. As is obvious, I will have more than enough to do at the Frankfurt Fair.

Should you go? I would advise that if you have a book that is already written, whether it is self-published or not, to present to potential publishers that has the potential to impact a number of  lives, it might be worth the $3,000 that it would take to participate in the event. That figure includes making a contract for a company to display your book, transportation costs, room, etc., and maybe even an occasional beer – although you will not have much time for that. The less well-known you are, the more restrictive your title audience is and the less you have written, the fewer your chances are of making a significant return on your investment. To an agent or buyer, everyone in the world has a book. If you do not have your’s yet in some sort of form, that puts you way behind on the list, unless you are already a best-selling author in some category.

Miami’s International Book Fair

In contrast to the multi-dimensional  aspects of the Frankfurter Buchmesse the International Book Fair in Miami is more like a combined yard sale and street fair. Although large, with some 100,000 visitors, this outdoor event is held on a portion of the Dade College Campus in downtown Miami two blocks off Biscayne Bay Blvd. Venders are set up in tents on either side of 2nd Avenue on November 16-18 as part of a week-long event sponsored by the College.

The purpose of this fair is to introduce new books to the general public, provide libraries and other volume buyers of books a chance to look at, handle and discuss new products, and significantly, for authors to promote their works. There is a reading stage where authors present their works, but this space is generally arranged a year in advance and often restricted to best-selling authors. This fair is generally noted for its selection of fiction, and particularly children’s fiction, but publishers bring all categories of titles to the event.

This is a show-and-tell platform, rather than a place to sell individual books. Book orders may be placed on the spot or titles immediately ordered from Amazon and other on-line sources. The one exception is that signed copies may be available from some attending authors at signing events, although it is more common for well-known authors to sign previously purchased copies.

With so many authors in attendance, there is a significant press coverage of the event from TV, radio and print media. If you are an interesting personality and are aggressive, you can often garner some good coverage from the event. Often TV will have a few targeted individuals in mind when they send a crew, but the roaming “general assignment crews” will always be looking for someone to give an author’s perspective of the event or perhaps highlight someone who they think is “interesting.”

Hovey in Zhengzhou, China

Fact is, all of us authors are “interesting.” How do you stand out? I sometimes wear my cooking smock and toup, as I did in China, and this certainly attracted attention from the remainder of the suite-wearing audience. At a 4th of July event in Sidney, Nebraska, I wore overalls, a straw hat and carried a blunderbuss, before I did my gig on stage.   Within reason, be distinctive.

Many of the booths will be maned by those representing publishing houses. If you are a writer or would-be writer and are relatively local, dropping by such an event can show you what other writers are publishing, what their books look like, who did them and what publishing house might be interested in your title. Nothing is likely to happen at the event except you would be referred to an on-line site to look at their manuscript submission guidelines. Some may even have a few forms with them, but as they want to keep an already large volume of “stuff” that they must put up and take down each day to a minimum very little in the way of editorial-submission forms will have been brought to the Fair.

Editors may or may not attend, and if they do it might be only for a single day. Usually sales fairs are handled by marketing and sales, rather than from the editorial side of the business. If you attend prepare to collect some business cards and meticulously record anything said about when and how to submit your materials. Don’t wait until you have 20 or so and have to think, “What did I promise to whom.”  This is also a place to give out cards to potential buyers for your book, or better yet, have a copy for them to photograph with their smart phones.

 

Insect eaters want a new name for their activity.

Sometimes you have a product/activity that you wish to promote that has an existing name, but it is derived from difficult to pronounce or remember Greek or Latin root, and you need to come up with something else that is more user friendly. The case in point is “entomophagy” which relates to eating insects.

I can imagine some of you thinking, “Good. The more obscure the better. I am not going to eat any bugs, anywhere, anytime, anywhere; and the less said about that subject the better.”

Like it or not, insects are intentionally consumed as a regular part of the diets of millions of people worldwide and accidentally by nearly everyone else as a minor contaminant in grain-derived products. Eating Insects Athens, 2018, held at the University of Georgia was the second conference sponsored by the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture August 13-15, 2018. The first conference, Eating Insects Detroit, was held two years previously and sponsored by Wayne State University.  The Georgia conference drew participants from Universities around the country, insect growers and makers of insect-derived health-food, nutritional, novelty and snack products from the United States and Europe. I did a brief video about the conference, “Eating Insects Athens: The People and What they Do,” that you may view at: https://youtu.be/p6JRxH3wj8Y.  Planning is underway for a third conference to be held in 2020 at a location to be determined.

During the 40-odd professional presentations made over the three-day Athens conference several speakers expressed a desire to come up with a replacement name for “entomophagy,” which admittedly sounds more like some sort of deadly internal disease than anything that you would want to participate in. We writers are known to invent new words from time to time, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes not. When writing against a deadline, it is very easy to make a mental slip, particularly when writing about a new subject, and put on paper something that sounds right, but is not.

That happened to me when I hurried to put out material about the conference. I misspelled entomology, as “etomology,” which is a non-word in present usage; but perhaps would work better than entomophagy, to describe insect consumption as human and animal food. Before the word gets conscripted for some other use, I propose that it be adopted for this activity and those who work in the field of rearing and consuming insects be called “etomologists.” There are words that sound something close to this and one is etymology/ists, which are those people who study the derivation of words and their evolution over time; and of course, entomologists, those who study insects  that I wrongly rendered as etomologists.  My apologies for that, but I think that my accidental word can have considerable utility if it is now re-purposed to refer to the consumption of insects.

I also came up with a series of marketing terms to refer to the amount of insect content that a product might contain. Roasted, ground and dried insect powders, now mostly derived from crickets, have protein, calcium, iron, amino acids and other nutrients not found in plant derived protein, such as derived from beans.   To refer to the amount of such a powder that might be added to a product I came up with the terms “Inprotouch,” Inproslap,” Inproslam” and “Inproblast”  to designate increasing amounts of the nutritional additive that might be in a health bar or smoothy. The “In” is derived from insect and the “pro” from protein and the “touch,” “slap,” “slam” and “blast” states the relative amount of the product which would be spelled out in detail on the label.

This exercise in deriving new names for products should be thought of as an outrageous sounding, but real, solution to a marketing problem to inspire you to consider something of the same approach for your naming problem.

Was there, or has their been, an accidental rendering of an associated name that might be useful.? Can you abbreviate the product’s ingredients in such a way that when combined with some active word yields a name that indicates both the components and function of your product?  Such a mental effort will result in a better outcome than stringing a set of meaningless letters together derived from last names of the company’s founders or some other way. Incorporate something of the origin of your product and its amount or utility into your product’s name to achieve a better result in the marketplace.  Aim for a name that is pronounceable and memorable and you will do well – even if it is about eating bugs.

 

Insects are a commonly consumed food item in most of the world except in Europe and North America. They may be found cooked with salt and oil and sold as crunchy street snacks in South America, Africa and Asia.  Their flavors may be used to enhance the taste and texture of otherwise bland, soft foods. Protein powders made from cooked and ground insects can also be incorporated as a nutritional supplement in breads or used as a meat substitute in pastas, soups and stews.

Indigenous cultures who have migrated from their home countries will often attempt to buy their favorite snacks in the new countries and will pay a premium price for them. Additional interests have also been expressed by extreme-sports athletes who are interested in obtaining significant nutritional input from plant-based snack bars which often contain nuts, dried fruits, grains, sugar and salt. Insect-derived protein powder also contains available iron, calcium and amino acids as well as other nutrients not found in plant-based products.

Environmentalist who seek to reduce the planetary impact of water and grain production caused by commercial beef, pork and chicken production can have a product produced close to the point of consumption, that uses much less water, far less land, smaller amounts of cereal grains and can be grown in vertical indoor spaces.

I was personally surprised by how far along the commercialization of products and industry support services had come. The first conference of the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture (NACIA) was held in Detroit in 2016 and titled Eating Insects Detroit. This had followed a number of other conferences in Thailand and elsewhere sponsored by the United Nations that sought to document and promote the production and consumption of insects as human and animal feed.

In the past five years the eatable insect movement, Entomophagy, has gathered increased interest in Europe and North America with the availability of insect product on store shelves as not only novelty items, but also as foodstuffs for mainstream consumption. Presenters documented the current state of the art at the Eat Insects Athens conference August 13-15 at the University of Georgia. I have done a seven-minute overview of the conference as a YouTube video which you may see at: https://youtu.be/p6JRxH3wj8Y.

Crickets and meal worms dominate eatable insect production in the North American Market. Large-scale commercial producers like Armstrong Crickets are likely adequately supplying the present market for eatable crickets ether as frozen insects or cricket-derived protein powder. No small-scale producer is likely to be able to compete with them on price or break into established distribution circles producing crickets for bait or food. While an individual can raise crickets for his own use and perhaps supply some to his friends for fish bait or to feed pet reptiles, this is a hobby-scale activity that is unlikely to return significant profit – similar to small-scale bee keeping. I interviewed Jack Armstrong and three other participants of the conference and produced a video which may be seen at: https://youtu.be/B6WotfCQ-8o .

Raising other insects

Where individual entrepreneurs  can break new ground is raising things like Chapulines or beetles that have not yet been industrially commercialized in North America. The Chapulines are large Central American grasshoppers that are gathered from alphalpha fields and sold salted, roasted and often seasoned with a pepper sauce as snack foods in southern Mexico and Central America. Although we do have large grasshoppers in the southeastern U.S., I do not know if the particular species that are harvested that far south on the continent are also native to the drier, hotter parts of the U.S. If so, they could be raised on pivot-irrigated alphalpha in the desert areas of the U.S. and confined to, and harvested from, those operations.

Importing new insects which might become pests has obvious hurdles, similar to what happened with the imported carp that were introduced to help solve problems at fish farms and ultimately escaped to become a real problem with North American fisheries. However, if a similar-sized native grasshopper species exist, this would not be so great a hurdle. The particular species is not as significant as is the nearly 1.25-inch size of the grasshopper.  This would be a promising area for some basic science and development.

Pill bugs also known as rolly polleys in the Southeast are common in organic rich soils and rotted leaf piles. They are said to provide a red color when cooked and could be raised in large numbers. The problem with these and other soil-dwelling grubs is that they could carry potentially dangerous bacteria. If wild caught, I think that it would be a good idea to wash them to remove any clinging soil particles, and feed them out on some clean feedstocks before roasting them for consumption. I broached this feed-lot concept at the conference.

Jack Armstrong of Armstrong Crickets responded that using wild foods like grass clippings to start his crickets could introduced predator insects, fungal diseases, molds and other undesirable elements resulting in a lower survival rate for his crickets which was an unacceptable risk. The use of high-costs commercial feed compounded by major animal-feed suppliers allows him to keep his FDA certification for his products and helps insure the safety and profitability of his operation.  The highest cost in this operation is the labor required to tend, move, harvest and ship the insects. The price of the feed is a significant, but secondary, cost element.

Automation

Automating the large-scale production of insects presents challenges that have yet to be overcome. Armstrong remarked that everyone he knew who had tried automated watering systems had torn them out and gone back to hand watering because one system failure could result in the loss of millions of crickets. Automatic starting back-up generators or battery storage of solar-generated power and underground power lines could provide a safety margin for a continuous power supply, but all mechanical things will someday fail.  Reducing this failure rate to an acceptable level with a back-up capability presents some interesting design problems very similar to those faced by hospitals.

Machinery to handle live insects is a more difficult proposition. Given any opportunity many insects will attempt to escape confinement. If crowded into too small a space they may die and partly decompose before they are frozen and result in the entire batch of products being discarded. This process must be rapid, continuous and sterile – a practical, but solvable, problem.

Design

Man has a love-hate relationship with insects. Almost everyone can appreciate the beauty of a butterfly, the industry of social insects like ants and the honey made by bees. Few enjoy the sting of a mosquito, being chased by hornets or surrounded by a swarm of gnats which are getting into your eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Spiders provoke great fear in a segment of the population, others find them affectionate pets and some eat them. I am fond of spiders and appreciate the good work that they do in catching less desirable species. I consider them more as pets than food.

Insects that are recognizable as being closely related to species that we still have today were already thriving during the Carboniferous Period, 300,000,000-years ago. Roaming among the fern-rich swamps that would become the coal we burn today were cockroaches that were 12-feet long when insects underwent a period of gigantism. Fortunately these were killed off during a world-wide extinction event, and we only have their much smaller relatives today.  Man with a history in the fossil record going back only 1.5 million years is very much a new arrival on the world scene.

What insects are, their colors, diverse shapes and methods of moving have provided inspiration for the design of everything from vehicles, clothing, jewelry to crawling robots that can run, climb and fly.  Some of these now only exist in the movies, but others are rapidly approaching reality. When a class of animals has evolved for hundreds of millions of years, nature has much to teach us about design.

Marketing

Marketing eatable insect products to a sometimes fearful and suspicious public presents its challenges. The best results thus far has been to present a group of insect-derived products in a stand-alone display, rather than having insect-protein enhanced breads among other breads, high protein bars mixed with candies and protein powders in the baking isle. This approach makes two things very clear to potential buyers, A. That they are purchasing products derived from insects and not being in any way mislead about the products or what is in them and B. Separate displays allow the beneficial impacts of eating insect-derived protein to be explained. In short, the combined display has selling power that ordinary rack placement does not.

For the sake of drawing attention to insect-derived products nation wide, it is desirable for the industry to help sponsor a fine dining restaurant in at least one major city, say New York, that specializes in the production of good tasting insect-derived dishes that are fully up to the standards of fine dining – something much more advanced than sprinkling a few bugs on top of a dish. The establishment’s name should directly and easily be identified as to the type of food that is served and its derivation. A name like The Bug Palace would not be too outlandish. The contrast between this name and a fine dining experience would draw instant attention from the press and reviews, good, bad and indifferent would highlight the eatable insect moment and perhaps even spawn a TV show. The possibilities are there, they just need to be promoted.

The U.N. , the FDA, FFA and 4-H organizations can offer aid and be enlisted to help promote insect farming as a valuable crop to be harvested as a by-product of commercial organic agriculture or a off-season activity for farming operations.  Successful commercial insect production as food is labor intensive, but requires much less space and fewer resources than any other type of agriculture while returning a larger profit margin.  For example, the conversion of spaces once used for dairy-farming to insect-rearing operations could take advantage of existing structures and a history of clean food-handling practices to produce a more profitable product than milk. This potential switch in operational outlook will require retraining and a considerable marketing campaign.

Getting a book exhibited at a major international book fair is a plus for an author, and Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife will be exhibited by Stonewall Press at this year’s Frankfurt Buchmesse. The Frankfurt event is the world’s largest assembly of publishers, agents, authors, suppliers and distributors with some 278,000 people attending the five-day event last year. The first three days of the book fair are for industry members only, and during the last two days the event it is open to the public.

This is an opportunity for authors and publishers to link with their international counterparts and arrange for foreign language translation contracts, rewrites of books for foreign markets and for authors to interact with publishers and distributors from all over the world. As might be expected for a European event, the majority of the publishers are from Germany and France, but all other European countries are present. Each year a different country is highlighted and this year it is Georgia, the nation – not the state.  U.S. publishing houses will have about four percent of the booths.

Frankfurt, one of Germany’s major industrial cities and transportation hubs, was fairly well flattened during World War II. Consequently, almost all of the interior of the city is composed of modern buildings or those that were almost completely rebuilt. The more intangible features of the culture such as food, the climate and its position as one of the major crossroads of  Europe is the reason that it is one of Europe’s major financial centers. In pre-Brexit times it was considered second only to London in significance. With the U.K. leaving the European market many institutions are relocating to Frankfurt or increasing the size of their operations in the city. All of these reasons is why the book fair continues to be held in the city.

Many European cities have large facilities for trade fairs, and the interior and exterior space available in Frankfurt is one of the largest exhibition grounds on the continent. It is so large that their are four entrances that enable multiple events to be held in the center simultaneously. The book fair uses all available space with a years-long waiting list for new exhibitors.

For an author like myself who does not have a world-wide reputation, this will be very much a press-the-flesh event. The contacts with foreign publishing houses both at the Stonewall booth where my book will be exhibited and me walking the floor will be significant as will random encounters with others browsing the exhibits. I do not have to do absolutely all the selling because my book will be shown and described in a published Stonewall catalog for the event. However, I know the book and can promote it better than someone else who is also telling people about another 199 other titles.

French publishing houses publish more books that are translated from English to French than any other country with about 20 percent of last year’s titles being translated works. Germany is the second largest publisher of books in translation with the U.S. being far down the list with only a few percent of its titles translated from other languages. The market in the U.K. is interesting in that a book with technical content like mine will be more useful if some chapters are re-written for U.K. readers and some of the word usages, spellings, etc. recast in the British fashion. While not quite a translation, republishing an American book in the U.K. can require revisions and editing to yield the best result.

I was offered the opportunity to have a book signing at the event. Here I would have for a period of time a table, my books, a cardboard cutout of me beside the table where I would be signing and giving away books. Most of this activity takes place during the general admission days on Saturday and Sunday. Well known authors may sign hundreds of books, but for someone like me a signing is not worth the time tied up at a table or the extra costs and bother of transporting a larger number of books to the event. This signing would nearly double my expenses and, as I see it, bring relatively little benefit, however ego-stroking it might be. I will make more significant contacts by sitting at a local bar filled with fair-goers that I would at such a signing.

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Radio has the shortcoming of not being able to transmit visual content over the airways. One way to overcome this is to use the broadcast as the sound track to a video production and add stills and written materials over the top of the sound. Hopefully the stills can be edited so that they more or less track with what is being covered in the interview which necessitates that the person assembling the visual materials simultaneously listen to the sound track while he is installing his visuals.

In this case I was fortunate that Stone Payton, the host of Atlanta Business RadioX, gave me some practical questions which I could link with some more-or-less appropriate photos. I was also supplied with some shots taken during the event by co-host Katy Galli which were used during the introduction and exit segments. Deriving a video from a radio interview is a seldom used tool because of the extra time involved which was about 5 hours to edit, process and finalize a 30-minute video. Most radio hosts do not have this much spare time. So it often falls on the guest to make the video if it is done at all. After all, it is he that is benefiting most from the added exposure, and if he can make it more meaningful by showing a photo of a knife that he described, so much the better.

The added appeal of written material over the frames of existing photos or even on a black background can A. Add additional information that was not mentioned in the broadcast, B. Provide additional reinforcement of points that are being made by having the user both listen and see the information and C. give the user the exact written reference for a long and perhaps nearly meaningless URLs. All of these techniques were incorporated in this video.

You can judge the results from the video below:

 

I always have a fun time when I have a chance to do an in-studio interview with a radio host as I did last Wednesday with Stone Payton and his Co-Host Katy Galli. Galli was also the show’s director, sound engineer, and unexpectedly became part of the show.  She has been doing a series of interviews with sports figures who became businessmen after their playing days were over. We had an interchange about what was needed to take these radio interviews and make a book out of them.

One advantage of doing a studio recording is that the equipment is matched, compared to a telephone interview where one side may be on a sometimes scratchy phone line, with the result is that the audio quality is generally better. And, since Galli was on the sound board, the volume of the voices could be more nearly evened out during the recording.

You may hear the recording by going to the Atlanta BusinessRadioX  show page at:

https://businessradiox.com/podcast/atlantabusinessradio/hovey-smith/

Kevin Short has orchestrated over 150 purchases/sales of middle-sized businesses that have had a value of over 1 Billion dollars. He is the author of, Sell Your Business at an Outrageous Price and has his own Podcast radio show, “Think Outrageous,” which is on the AMFM247.com channel which is part of the iHeart Radio Network.  Although based in St. Louis, his broadcast circulates worldwide.

Short’s radio show is “dedicated to improving your business, workplace culture and life experiences more than you ever thought possible,” to use his own words.  The general concept that a person should start multiple businesses throughout their lives when and as needed appealed to him, and we arranged to record a show a month ago, which had to be rescheduled. I had already researched Short before the show, and I was disappointed was when I was notified a few days before we were to record. I do a number of such shows. As it turned out I recorded a show with another broadcaster in his studio in Atlanta the day before, and drove back home in time to stand by for Short’s show that was to be recorded precisely at 10:30 AM.

Studio time is valuable and usually booked a week ahead, so when a host wants his guest to call in at 10:30 he means that he wants his guest on line about five minutes before and will dump him as soon as the broadcast is over. In this case I was to call him using a conference-service line. I was provided with a number and password and at 10:24 I started the call. The number and password was accepted. At 10:30 Short was on the mike at the other end. Within 15 seconds we were Kevin and Hovey. This was to be a pre-recorded show, and we got off to an immediate start with Kevin introducing me as his guest as you can hear below:

The interview went well, and although edited out of the broadcast, I was invited back for another program at some undefined time in the future. Whether this will happen or not, I do not know, but I did broach other potential tops, such as a show on considering geologic hazards in planning subdivisions or even when buying or building your own house which is work that I do as a Professional Geologist in Georgia.

The start-over theme for TEDx Atlanta’s 2019 event had obvious connections with the subject material of my new book, Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife.  It is not uncommon for organizers of such events to request a short video so that they can better evaluate the appearance of the person on stage which is a significant part of the audience experience. Not only must the speaker have an “idea worth spreading;” but they must also be able to engage the audience with an exciting and interesting delivery. As a consequence doing a TED talk anywhere is as much performance art as content.

My, or any author’s problem, is that I have to derive something from my 200 page book that is worth delivering on a stage in 12-18 minutes and further condense it down to a one-minute video to be submitted with a single page “abstract” describing the presentation in more detail. The following video is how I met this challenge.

I published the abstract on the previous entry to this blog so that I would have a URL to put into the appropriate block of the TEDx Atlanta application form. This particular form of submission was requested by the organizers so that the material could be easily transmitted to the reviewers for judging. A first cut of applicants will be made in September. Then more material may be required for the final selection of the 20 or so that will appear in the spotlight on the red carpet of the TEDx Atlanta stage in March.

 

 

5 Steps to Create Your Own Job At Any Age

Smith,Wm.Hovey,2018,Create Your Own Job,https://createyourownjobsecurity.com, 1p.,blog,video,Profit, Sandersville, Georgia. Smith invented a new position of Information Scientist at a multi-national corporation by growing a short-term consult into the new corporate position. This and previous life experiences led him to the concept that people could, and should, create their own jobs throughout their lives to fill immediate needs and provide long-term job security.

Multi-business entrepreneurship can be done by: 1) Rank business opportunities into short, medium and long-term categories. Move those opportunities that require less capital and time up the list. 2) Rank them according to life goals, physical abilities and potential returns. 3) Pick short-term opportunities to produce immediate income and prosecute those. 4.) In the medium-term category, get professional certifications which might require college or trade school courses. Going through this step will hopefully result in obtaining a job that offers health insurance and benefits. 5.) While thus employed, work on the long-term possibilities that answer the questions, “What work is there that I enjoy doing so much that I would do it for nothing, and how can I make money at it?”

It might take years to develop an answer to these questions. When done and while still working, start a “business of passion” so that it is already established at age 40 and can be immediately ramped up to produce significant income at middle age and beyond. For example, Smith’s late-life business is Hovey’s Knives of China that makes modern cutlery in Central Georgia inspired by ancient patterns.

The TEDx Atlanta talk would include the audience listing business possibilities provoked by the presentation. These might include personal service, the arts, authorship, inventing products, IT, helping others from their life experiences or starting a non-profit. Billion-dollar businesses have been started by kitchen-table entrepreneurs as was done by the Cabela’s brothers in Sydney, Nebraska, who sold started their business in 1962 and sold it for 5.5 billion in August of 2018.

Wm. Hovey Smith held jobs in store-front businesses as a teen, obtained B.S. and M.S. degrees in Geology from the University of Georgia and the University of Alaska, published 19 books, was a decorated Army Combat Engineer Officer, worked as a Senior Geologist throughout North America and given business lectures in China and Austria. He has produced more than 700 YouTube videos and has been a radio host. His most recent book, Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife was published in June, 2018.

Lawnmower and cart with Half Dog Fred.

While commonly spoke of in corporate America, the Value Added Proposition can also be added to the simplest of businesses such as a teen mowing his neighbor’s lawns. Here I illustrate adding value by cleaning up around my yard trees using a hand clipper and saw. This enables me to free the trunks of these trees, make the yard more attractive, remove low-hanging limbs to increase mowing safety and ultimately cutting the time it takes to mow the lawn.

I discuss the details of the process on a YouTube video that you can watch below or see at: https://youtu.be/MgxFs75QPo8.

Because I am working on my own yard in rural Georgia and not bound by any sort of  homeowners’ association contract, I can maintain a burn pile in my back yard, dump my cuttings to help stop erosion in front of my house and have my dogs assist me in cleaning up the yard and doing the video.  I do yard care because it is a necessity to keep the Georgia jungle from taking my house and lot. I don’t particularly care if the grass is of uniform type, composition or color. I have at least three varieties of southern lawn grasses and likely twice as many more natural grasses, weeds and shrubs (Privet hedge) that I cut to lawn height.

If one had unlimited funds and the desire, it would likely take over $10,000 to level my lawn, sod it, put in sprinklers, clean out the weeds and bring it up to California subdivision standards – something I never intend to do.  For those who are so inclined, this brings with it the possibility of obtaining an almost unlimited amount of lawn-care related work in addition to the usual grass cutting.

I, Hector and Half-Dog Fred are quite satisfied to keep it mowed down to the extent that can easily spot rattlesnakes as they move about the yard, as they sometimes do. I think that the dogs are convinced that I also have dragons, which they accept as their sworn duty to keep away. I do not really have dragons, but I do have lizards, turtles, salamanders,  snakes, rabbits, raccoons, other species of small game as well as coyotes, deer, wild hogs, turkeys and more recently black bear. These “yard critters” come and go as they like.

Depending on one’s age, financing and ability to travel, making some extra money doing lawn care can be taken on at whatever scale is desired at the moment. The peak of the lawn-care season is during the height of the Summer when most teens are out of school and casting about for something productive to do. Cutting grass and doing lawn care is a natural outlet for some of this excess energy while putting money into their pockets. If they have the drive and desire, these sorts of activities can be expanded into a full-time business in rural, small town and subdivision America.

By offering extra services, such as cleaning up around overgrown trees, the amount of fees can be increased, and as a consequence the amount of money earned. One occasional task is mowing a person’s lawn when they are on trips or on vacation. If this is a possibility, attempt to have them let you mow it at least once before to locate hidden tree roots, sprinkler heads and any pipes or electric lines that may be at are near ground level.  One bad strike on a buried piece of pipe marking a property corner can cause hundreds of dollars of damage to a fast moving riding mower.