Category: Uncategorized

Thomas Edison famously remarked that after making 300 attempts to produce a filament for his light bulb remarked, “I have discovered 300 things that did not work.” Such is the case here where I attempt to make a more conventional grip design for my Hovey’s Knives of China Knives and improve the blade’s hardness by using a new tempering method and fail on both counts.

 

Failing in an initial effort does not damn the project forever and eternity, as many people assume. Failure is a vital part of experimental development. There was likely never a success that was not proceeded by a series of sometimes catastrophic failures as was the case with many early flying machines. Even some of the Wright brother’s early efforts ended in crashes – after all, what did a pair of bicycle makers know about airplanes? Initially not very much, but they taught themselves by trial and error.

My not succeeded with this new design has taught me, like Edison, what I did wrong and how to improve my next efforts. I have another knife blank to experiment with, and that effort will be recorded in a video that will be added to this post.

The summer storm season has arrived and throughout the nation tornadoes, hurricanes and even violent thunderstorms will bring down trees and shrubs that will need clearing from people’s yards. One way to earn money is by helping people who cannot do it themselves remove the debris. This can start with hand tools such as axes, knives and hand saws about which I have previous videos and supplemented these hand tools with an inexpensive Portland Chainsaw from Harbor Freight.

I tested this chainsaw on a freshly fallen pecan limb (relative of the hickory tree) that fell in my back yard that was close enough to the house for two extension cords to reach. In the video below I describe how I successfully worked limbs up to 6-inches in diameter with this saw. This is some serious cutting, but the saw was up to it. The electric chainsaw has limitations. The first is the amount of extension cord that must be used to reach the tree to be cut. This needs to be heavy duty two-wire cord, not the usual household extension cord intended for lights. The limit of the size of limbs that might be managed by the saw’s 14-inch blade is limited.  Although you will likely not be able to cut, say a 12-inch trunk with that saw, you can successfully remove the limbs and leafy branches so that a professional tree-removal outfit will have much less trouble and charge less for working the tree.

Obviously you need to have power restored to work the saw, otherwise you are running off generator power which adds more costs and expense. The saw engine will pull a lot of power, and I do not know what power generator would be necessary to run it. In any rate I think that you need the homeowner to furnish the power. Using a combination of hand tools and the electric saw is the best approach. Save the saw for when you need to cut stuff that is 2-inches and larger, and use hand tools to work the 1-inch and smaller material. This way you will be able to still get work done while giving the saw a chance to cool off between cuts. Working the saw to the point of melt-down is counter productive. Also, you will need to make sure that you lubricate it often. I use mineral oil as a lube because I also occasionally use my saw to dress game animals.

Even more significant that cutting the fallen limbs is getting hung-up limbs down to a safe position before starting to work on them. In the example given in the video I pull it down with a nylon rope and my truck. I have a detachable winch for my truck which I might have used, but it was easier just to make a pull of a few hundred pounds with the truck than worry about installing and uninstalling the winch or rigging up a snatch block or tripod to get the limb on the ground. Another caution given in the video is to remove the limbs as you cut so that you do not stumble in the fallen limbs with the chainsaw.  Fortunately with the electric chainsaw it stops when you release the trigger and safely lever, but you do not want to fall on a sharp freshly cut branch either. This would be like taking a spear thrust in the torso or leg.Pay attention to what you are doing, plan things out and go slow and all will be well.

With you furnishing the saw and cords, a truck and stuff to pull things around and stacking the material at the curb, this kind of work would be $20 an hour in rural markets and more in metro areas. Now is the time to get your materials together and practice on your own.

One final caution. If you decide to get some help, only one person cuts on a branch at the time. Ultimately, the branch will shift as the weight-bearing limbs are removed. One person can see this movement start and step out of danger, but if more than one person is cutting on the branch an unexpected rotation of a major limb weighing hundreds of pounds can catch you by surprise.

 

 

Almost everyone in North America owns at least one pair of shoes or boots where the soles are coming lose or separated altogether. These can be repaired by the expedient of using a strong waterproof adhesive, Shoe Goo, to reattach the soles. The results of my efforts are a simple, but ugly repair.  If one cares to refine these techniques a better-looking result can be obtained.

 

Because of the vanishing numbers of once common shoe repair shops, there is a need for someone, perhaps you,  to specialize in these arts and do this service for your community for a cost of $10 a pair and up for more sophisticated restorations. Because I have clamps and a vise in my knife shop, I used these, a pair of pliers, an old tooth brush, some scraps of sandpaper and an old knife to repair two pairs of shoes that I owned. These shoes originally sold for $70 and $40, and I can now get months of service out of them for the expenditure of less than a dollar’s worth of glue.

Shoe Goo is available at Walmart where it is typically displayed on a vertical rack in the shoe department along with shoe polishes and accessories.

 

 

At the moment in the U.S. the stock market is booming and unemployment is breaking recent highs, but there are very troubling trends on the horizon because of a world-wide trade war, automation, supply disruptions and work being shifted abroad. Millions of American workers are going to be impacted by these trends. It is now time to take advantage of these conditions and invest in yourself with the idea of starting your own business that can profit from the coming economic realities.

Cash in some of the gains that you have made in the market, and put this money to work by taking skill-enhancement classes, renewing your professional certifications, taking some on-line business courses and researching multiple business opportunities. Don’t grasp the first straw that comes to mind. You can use the techniques described in my new book, Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife,  to evaluate these opportunities into short term, medium term and long term categories; estimate their potential costs and benefits; and determine their  potential for improving your economic well-being.

While is is likely true that a new business can be started by practically anyone, anytime, anywhere by taking advantage of the internet, there are a basic set of skills regarding manipulating the equipment and fully understanding different selling platforms that must be obtained. Many times these will be learned by doing and using self-help features built into the platforms. E-Bay for example, has instructions and gives examples of the best selling techniques, as does YouTube and every other internet selling or performing platforms.

Although the operational mechanics of handling these problems can be taught, human factors like fear of starting a business have to be overcome. This is best done by starting a business that requires minimal financial commitment like e-Bay selling or local yard care and after succeeding with these moving up to things that might require more training , experience or investment. All of these changes are best eased into when you have the cash cushion of still getting a paycheck, while preparing for the day when that paycheck may no longer arrive and your unemployment runs out. The more of a head start you can make towards getting your cash-generating enterprises running, the higher your potential returns will be.

By starting your business ventures early you can start small, but think large. Most one-man business fail because their outlook is too narrow. Many owners can think of only local sales, while their real potential is in the national and international markets. Once you find out what works locally, you can expand your reach to other locations within a city, regionally or even nationally – just like Sanders did with his Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Your business might be of any sort, but may be based on assets or services that have historically risen or fallen in value during economic down-turns. One precept that is developed in the book is, “There is nothing in life that cannot be turned into profit by an inventive mind.” The thing now is to invest in yourself to gain knowledge on exactly how to best take advantage of the coming economic downturn. You might foresee, for example, a dramatic crash in home or commodity prices and research which markets and locations will be impacted first. At a later stage you can use your accumulated cash to buy real estate or some other high value items at depressed values costs. Study the last crash and see what happened. The coming one will be similar in broad impact, but not exactly the same.  Be patient, and wait until the timing is right.

Perhaps you are interested in writing or in some aspects of the knowledge-based industries. This is the ideal time to work on your skills in writing, presentations, doing Power Points, making YouTube videos; because it is YOU that is going to have to sell YOURSELF to a doubting public.  This will include doing media appearances on radio and TV as well as establishing your own presence on social media. Learn how to do this stuff.

Those with artistic inclinations have a particularly tough time even when the economy is doing well and can face extreme hardship during times when people are not spending money on attractive, but unneeded, things. It is not selling out to convert your art to commercial purposes by approaching companies with your artistic concepts on how to sell their products. Established companies have their own art departments and connections with ad agencies. These are hard to break into. Instead, search out newer companies and make some samples to show them how your art can help them market their new products to a larger audience. You might not be able to sell your visual objects now, but getting income from commercial sources can keep you active and afloat while you establish your reputation, seek grants for public works, make it into galleries, etc. The same can also be done by performing artists doing voice-overs, making special performances to celebrate historic events, staging comedy contest, etc.

Whatever your interest or inclinations, invest in yourself now to help secure your own future.

My new book is now available as a softcover from Amazon and as an e-book at all e-book outlets. The softcover is better for readers and is complete with a Table of Contents and Index. The e-book has much of  the same content and is completely computer searchable.

 

 

 

 

My new business book for the non-business major Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife is now available as a softcover edition on Amazon.com. You can see a Create Space Preview of the book at https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1245977. As an early promotion books sold through Amazon will have a reduced price of $10.99 compared to the $19.95 regular price.

My seven-month long stent at writing, designing and producing the book is now over. I am still working on the e-book version which will be published through Book Baby and will also be available on Amazon as well as all other e-book outlets.

Publicity about the book is progressing. Yesterday I did an interview with radio host Francisca in the Boston area and am booking other radio and TV shows at the moment. I am also available for doing live events, including working directly with companies that are in transition and wish to expose their to be laid-off workers to the possibilities of starting their own businesses. There are links to these activities in another section of this blog.

It was pointed out to me yesterday that the majority of people are fearful of starting their own business because they might risk and lose the limited resources that they have. If you select your new business ventures appropriately you can mitigate these risk. I am not suggesting that everyone should attempt to start a multi-million dollar factory operation to make a particular product. That is foolish. If you have a good product idea, you make the prototype, and have others make and sell it for you. E-Bay selling, as a business, is another idea that I promote. Pick out a particular class of objects that interest you, become a world-class expert on them and buy and sell them on line. Go to trade shows, exhibit, write books about them and make that a business. This is as near a risk-free business that there is that you can do at your own home.

In the case of my own business, “Hovey’s Knives of China,” I and my bladesmith make a few custom knives based on ancient Chinese designs for modern cooks and chefs. However, the real money in this venture is selling the designs to other companies and letting them produce my unique knives worldwide. This way I can manufacture products with a minimal outlay for a shop that is attached to my own home.

If your product is of a more intellectual nature, such as writing books and magazine articles, that takes even less of an investment in physical assets, but requires just as much work so far a time is concerned. Get rich quick schemes are most often just that and often depend on a speculative bubble that will collapse. It is a far better plan to start a well through out business and steadily work at it, rather than hope for some wonderful event to fall into your lap such as playing the lottery.  Buy your lottery tickets if you are inclined, but do not base your future on the chance that you will ever win a significant jackpot.

For a limited time this book is available at a special promotion price from Amazon of $10.99.

After seven months of working with “Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife,” the final proof copy, which involved one complete re-submission of the manuscript,  has been approved. Copies of the book will first be available as the softcover edition on Amazon.com.  I may be as long as six-weeks away from having the e-book version available on Amazon and other outlets.

I am presently completing a companion workbook for  a teliseminar on this topic. This seminar will enable me to work remotely with groups of people who can sign up from any location.  These will be live events, probably in September. I may offer more complete courses as demand warrants.

For the initial one-to-two hour teliseminar, I will e-mail the workbook to participants a week prior to the seminar so that they can largely fill out the sections and add to them as the seminar progresses. Although many will not, the more of these question that can be answered before hand, the more value the seminar will have. There will be an opportunity to send me follow-up questions and for a few to be submitted  during the presentation.

To get maximum value from the combined book-workbook-teliseminar package, go ahead and buy the book. You may order it using the PayPal button below or directly from Amazon. At this stage delivery from Amazon will be faster. Having a copy of the book will be useful in completing the teliseminar and your initial work on the workbook. I will also refer to pages of the softcover book from time to time during the  live seminar. The page numbers on the e-book will be different.

To be notified of seminar dates sign up using the comment section below. The cost of the seminar is going to be about $100. Depending on the number of participants, multiple dates may be offered. Feel free to add comments about what you want to get out of such a seminar. Is it how to find the right business for you? Is it a question about financing? Do you have issues about trademarks, patents?

A new version of my cover showing a vanishing American worker fending off the perils of being downsized, merged out of a job because his position is now redundant or being dismissed in order to cut payroll to provide bonuses for company executives.

Many of those who still read books criticize us authors for minor typos and errors in our books.  They assert that for their money they should have an absolutely perfect product. The harshest criticism invariably comes from those who have never written a book, and what’s more, are not likely to ever write one. It is intellectually easy to throw darts at someone’s work while contributing nothing in return. In the case of my present book, Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife, I am now going through the proof copies of the manuscripts sent by Amazon’s Create Space who is publishing the softcover and Book Baby who will be producing the e-book.

Looking over the manuscript for perhaps the 14th time, and after having a friend proof read it and paid another to have it proof read, I found 20 errors that needed to be corrected to reconcile matters such as a consistent use of commas, capitalizations,  heading rankings, extra words that were relics of the editing process, broken words that coincidentally correctly spelled other word and mechanical issues such as missing sentences and run-together paragraphs.

This stage of manuscript proofing is not the time to do a wholesale re-write of the book or make radical changes. Nonetheless, I found one instance where I had cited the same example twice in the book, and I changed 22 words to use another example of the process that I was describing. In another case I eliminated two redundant words at the end of a sentence. On the Index, which my e-savvy editor had little use for, I asked that the title be made a chapter heading as used for the regular book chapters instead of being a line of text.

Part of the hair-pulling process of proofing a PDF file is that I do not have the software to correct it directly, but I have to make detailed notes of the changes and send these to the designer who makes the corrections, and then I resubmit the altered manuscript. This leads to the possibility of his making errors in the corrections and me having to check and correct those, send the manuscript back, receive the re-corrected manuscript and start the manuscript submission all over again.

With the resubmitted PDF there is the inherent problem that any changes in the manuscript can result in line shifts going from one page to another which can throw off the index references and potentially introduce an entirely new set of run-on paragraphs and dangling headings left as the last line on a page. This is less likely to have serious consequences if the chapter being impacted has ample blank space on the last page to accommodate the added lines or single piece of punctuation. One would hope for esthetic reasons, if for no other, that this last page has more than a word or two on it.

The sizes and the margins on each page must fit within the design parameters of the cover. This is another cause of common rejections of the manuscript as the PDF cover cannot simply be sized up or down to fit the printed pages of the book. The entire cover must be redesigned and resubmitted. This was also the case of my book. I took this opportunity to ask that the arrows on the cover be changed to black for better visibility on a small-format display. Ben Baker, a friend and fellow author who is assisting me with the book, did a remarkable job of redesign on the cover, but on the rear of the cover there was a broken line of text to be corrected. This was done and the cover was resubmitted and accepted.

With all of this we, that is Ben and I, are still not out of the woods. The cover has been approved, but now the manuscript must be approved again, just as if it were a brand new submission, taken through a mechanical review by Amazon, another proof copy approved, etc. All of this adds at least another week to the production process. I had the foresight to allow for all of these processing delays when I announced the publication of the book in August, 2018. Nothing in this book-publishing business seems to go as fast as one could wish. This is something that I have learned through publishing 18 books.

These nit-picking changes do not in any way change the significance or thrust of my book, which is to explain how and why a person should start many businesses in their lifetime to accomplish whatever goals that they have at the time. The ultimate objective is that by the time you are in your 40s and older you already have a business running quietly in the background that you can immediately put into full-scale activation when the time comes that you find yourself losing your life-time job or being abruptly terminated for reasons that you never learn. This is happening to tens of thousands of workers every week. A couple of weeks ago Toys-R-Us laid off that number, day before yesterday a large international banking firm, Citicorp, did the same. Tomorrow it could happen to you. If this is happening when the economy is is good shape, think about what will happen during the next economic downturn. It is better to be prepared and start your own business at any age, so that you can control your own financial future.

So that reviewers will write favorably of the book and libraries will buy it, these nearly insignificant issues must be dealt with; regardless of the potential significance of the book’s content. In short, the form of the message may trump function.

All of the issues that I raise, and those mentioned in other posts, are not uncommon in the book-publication process. Although easier than it once was, it still is a involved undertaking what commonly leads to back-steps as well as progress. The book is still on track for an August release and advanced copies may be ordered below:

If you are fortunate enough to already be retired and have more than ample resources, consider buying copies of this book for placement in local libraries, homeless shelters and the like. Those who find their lives in some stage of transition badly need this information. Even if I can only reach 1 out of 100,000 with this information, it can lead to improvements to individual’s lives and business start-ups that will keep America’s workers working.

 

 

Engaging passers-by in an interesting way about your product can encourage them to take a photo of it with their Smart Phone and save you money that would otherwise be spend on cards and single-sheet handout materials.

At the International Knife Show in Atlanta, I was exhibiting my knives as well as announcing the publication of my new business book, Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife.  Because the softcover version of the book was not available at the time of the show, I only had a copy of the book’s cover to represent that product.

A very successful approach was to engage teen and 20-somethings who were walking by with an opening line, “I have something for you.” In almost every one of 50 such approaches, I would attract from one to three people at a time to my booth. Although I was there to mostly promote my Hovey’s Knives of China Cooking Knives during the three-day event, I also wanted to advise this potential audience of readers about my book and how it could be useful to them.

The concept of selling books wearing a cooking smock standing behind a table filled with some rather intimidating cooking knives is an unusual way to market books. Authors are usually thought of as appearing in their worn tweeds or maybe in a sports shirt and tie, rather than demonstrating a 10-inch cooking knife and talking about business books. In addition it is a hard to sell non-fiction books of any sort to this age demographic that you actually expect them to read. Nonetheless, I was successful in attracting these potential customers, because what I said had the solid ring of a truth that they knew, but no one would talk to them about the realities of the future job market.

This truth is that they are about to enter, if not already in, the worst job market in generations so far as having any claim to job security goes. The old social contract between Employee and Employer is now long gone. In this evolving gig economy much work is going to be strictly job oriented with employees being added and dismissed as they are needed. Millions of jobs are going to be eliminated by automation in the coming decades. Even knowledge workers face the risk that they will be replaced by lower-paid workers from a variety of countries.  What sold this hard-to-sell audience, was that the only future that they could be sure of was the future that they could control with their own hands.  My book would show them step-by-step how to start a series of businesses throughout their lives to accomplish immediate objects, plan for longer term certifications and degrees, and ultimately while working at their professional jobs have their own business already running quietly in the background ready to be thrust into high gear when they got that dreaded pink slip in their 40s or older.

This message was delivered to each of them with about a minute of animated roll playing at the end.  I assumed the roll of a company personnel officer informing them that I had great news. “You don’t have to come to work tomorrow. Or any other day either. Here is your severance package. This lady will help you get gather your personal things. This gentleman with the large pistol will receive your keys, company ID and escort you to your car. You have 20 minutes to leave the property, and don’t ever come back.”

Receiving this cheerful news is almost guaranteed to send a person into one of the deepest depressions that they have ever experienced. Instead of crawling down a dark alleyway towards alcoholism, drug use, obesity and early death; you rev up your already established business, stomp on the accelerator and roar down the highway towards a golden future that you control with your own hands.

This message sold very well to this age demographic. To provide a constant reminder of my book, I suggested that they take a picture of it with their smart phones, and 49 of the 50 complied. Many were pleased that they had a chance to use their phones for a serious purpose that could impact the rest of their lives. Almost to a person, each of them wanted to shake my hand and thank me. No one, it seemed,  had ever given them such a compelling message about the future job market and how they could prepare for their own futures.  A key point was that the ultimate objective for their later-life business was to discover something that they loved to do so much that they would do the work even if no one paid them to do it and make money at it.

Results 

Not only did the teens get this message, but their parents and grandparents did too. Although smart phone use is almost 100 percent of today’s younger population; the older generation’s use is not quite so universal, but is probably on the order of 65%, I would guess. More than half of the baby boomers’ photographed my book too; not to buy it for themselves; but to give it to their grandchildren, nieces and nephews.

Encouraging the smart phone capture of business cards and printed materials  has the advantages that your information is now on a device that the younger segments of the population very commonly use. The fact that it is on their photo page means that each time they or someone else looks at their photo files, this image will show up and remind them of my product. Unlike business cards where only one is usually taken, the phone image can be shared through a person’s entire phone-texting list, if desired.

Action Plan to Get More Phone Capture of Your Print Materials

1. Create a compelling one-sheet graphic with vital information large enough to be read on a smart phone.
2. Designate a “grabber” at your table to engage your target audience, but only if you have a compelling message.
3. Your compelling message should be one product or vital service that you offer that is directly linked to your graphic material. If the person is interested you may inform him about other things your company does or other products.
4. Think of one or two critical questions regarding your product to ask the person standing before you. Tailor this question to their age group.

The e-book version of Create Your Own Job Security will be available August 1. The print date for the soft-cover edition has not been set, but advance orders may be made by using the Pay Pal button below.

In almost every case there is some production issue that rises up and bites us authors in the butt.

“He who shall not be named,” is a well-known line from the Harry Potter series of books, but I did not expect to find this sentiment in the book business. To cut production expenses, I decided to publish the softcover edition of my new business book, “Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife,” using Amazon.com’s Create Space (www.createspace.com) publishing platform. This has the considerable advantage of no up-front costs if you submit PDF files that fit their formats. However, it does grant exclusive sales rights to Amazon for the title.

I wanted my book to be able to reach other book outlets, so I elected to produce the e-book through Book Baby (www.bookbaby.com). For a fee they will design the book to fit all available platforms to allow one version of my title to be purchased by those who already had ties to Barnes & Nobles and other store front and electronic book outlets.

Within a day of each other, I had submitted the PDF to Amazon and a Microsoft Word version to Book Baby to run through their systems. The first response came from Book Baby who replied that they found numerous references to Amazon.com in my book’s text, and that this reference could cause the book to be refused by other booksellers.  They gave me the choice of either removing the reference or having reduced sales. Thus my references to Amazon became “He who shall not be named,” and I removed these references from the text by substituting the more ambiguous reference of “online bookseller.”

In order to take advantage of the reduced price offered by Create Spate for formatted manuscripts, I had hired a fellow writer to convert my book to a PDF format suitable for printing a 5 1/2 by 8 1/2-inch size book on Amazon. With my text this would give the book a total length of around 200 pages, and this was accomplished by proper font selection and interior design to give an easy-to-read book with some desirable open spaces to give it a more inviting interior appearance. Working through Create Space’s form for submitting the book and metadata (other information related to the book), the manuscript was bounced by  the automatic review process for two, unspecified, reasons.

The text and correspondence was sent back to my designer who informed me that one of their objections had to do with resolution of the book’s interior which was not really a problem, and the other was that they apparently did not like the interior formatting in the book, although there were sufficient margins, etc. He said that he had solved the problem and I resubmitted the book and completed the financial and other aspects of the book publishing contract.

Now the book is in the Create Space system and under review. There it is stew for 24 hours, or longer, while it is checked over and a review copy sent to me for final approval. I am also expecting a review copy from Book Baby for the e-book to be ready on June 21. I am now somewhat like an expectant father waiting for his children to be born. In my case I have the right to repair any errors and approve the manuscript before the book is published, something not possible for human parents who almost always must accept what they get – sorry, no returns or exchanges on kids.

So I wait. In almost every one of my 18 books, there has been some major production glitch. Sometimes these have been computer crashes, lost files, wrong ISBNs assigned, wrong cover printed with the book, etc. Such things are to be anticipated and prevented where possible, but the unexpected always seems to rise up from somewhere and bite us authors in the butt.

Advanced orders are being taken for the book and may be made below:

 

 

 

 

 

At the recent International Blade Show in Atlanta, I not only exhibited my original knives from my Hovey’s Knives of China and Billy Joe Rubideoux designs, I approached passers by about my forthcoming book, “Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife.”

While business books have the reputation of being dull, dull, dull and the least likely of all classes of books to be read by teens and 20-somethings, my new book Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife was not only welcomed, but eagerly anticipated by more than 50 teens and 20-somethings that I approached at the International Blade Show in Atlanta.

Why would anyone in this age group get away from their screen devices long enough to listen to what a garrulous old guy dressed in a cooking outfit and funny hat had to say? The reason was that I told them the harsh truth that they were about to enter the world’s worst employment market. The future is going to be working in a rapid-paced version of the gig economy with typically short-term job-focused employment where highly skilled workers will be hired as needed to do a particular task and then dismissed as soon as that task is completed. In addition, millions of jobs are going to be eliminated as automation makes human workers costly extras that are to be got off company payrolls as soon as possible. Added to this is the global reach of the present business climate where less expensive workers may be hired in India or elsewhere to allow 24-7 access to fulfill their clients’ every need.

These present and coming shifts in the employment market are well publicized and known by the younger, and upcoming, members of the workforce who were eager to receive my message that, “The only job security that you really have is that which you control in your own hands.” My new book shows how you can start an entire series of businesses throughout  your working lives to raise immediate cash, work towards that college degree or professional certification, become employed in industry; but in the meantime start and nurture your own business and have it quietly running in the background so that it can be booted into full production when you are dismissed from what you hoped would be your life-long job.

I do not care what that business is. It might be in the arts, some new invention, an IT advance, perhaps a new App, a non-profit organization or even some aspect of selling knowledge. My guidance is to select for your final business a type of work that you love so much that you would do it even if no one paid you a cent for it. Find a way to monetize it. You may have decades to perfect your business concepts, but as you do decide and register your business name, get your copyright, start on your book, write your screenplay, do your music, whatever – get everything in motion so that when the time comes to start your own business all you have to do is to give it an infusion of cash, kick the tires and roar off down the highway to success. Don’t think small. Go for the million-dollar hit. Think about how you can turn your concept into a world-wide multi-million dollar business. Nothing less is worthy of your time and effort.

This is a condensation of the theme of my book. It gets down into the nuts-and-bolts of how to do necessary things like pick out an appropriate name for your business, register copyrights, design trademarks, get patents, find partners, discover who your best workers will be and how to advertise and market your product or services world-wide at very low costs. If a person will buy only one business book in their entire lives, I make the case that Create Your Own Job Security should be that book.

If you get hung up with some part of the process, I also offer consulting. You write me an e-mail telling me what problem you want to discuss and we have a half hour or hour to discuss it over the telephone, maybe even in a conference call, and I follow up with written recommendations. My advantage is that I have worked in many fields. I am a Professional Geologist and am still active in that field. I am a decorated Combat Engineer Officer. I have written 18 books about subjects as diverse as health, architecture, geology and hunting and fishing. I have given international lectures in China and Austria on business topics. I do stand-up comedy and have a feeling for the performing arts.

Less tangible, but no less important, I read people very well. Sometimes I have highlighted problems that people have, and can solve, that they are not fully aware. We are all differently gifted and afflicted. There is no one solution to everyone’s business problems and never will be. There is no single business that will succeed for all people. My task as a business consultant to help you discover the passion within yourself and how to covert that passion into a successful business.  It is never too early to start, and it is never too late.