The Series
Introduction
1.) Internal Rate of Return
1a.) Modified Internal Rate of Return
2.) Net present value
3.) Payback (What Is Payback?, Spreadsheet Payback, Discounted Payback, Spreadsheet Discounted Payback)
4.) Average
5.) Standard deviation
Bonus!) Excel Solver

Our epic little mini-series on must-know spreadsheet formulas has covered some pretty advanced topics, mind-benders like the internal rate of return and net present value, painful but powerful math for discovering the financial prospects of a startup or business project. In comparison to these textbook beasties, calculating a payback period is literally a walk in the math park. Really — the only business math harder to calculate than payback is counting your money. And, like IRR’s and present values, startup investors, including venture capitalists, set a great deal of store by paybacks — an attractive (that is, short) payback period is yet another reason for folks with money to throw a bit your way.

Because payback is both critically important and mindlessly simple, you’d think it would be easy to do on your spreadsheet, right? Well, see, you’re trapped by your earthling way of thinking there. Spreadsheet designers in their infinite wisdom have transported payback to the twelfth dimension, so setting up a formula to automatically determine the payback period for your prospective business or project financials requires a bit of zigging and sagging.

Which is why this is such a great blog post. Because we’re going to do all the zigging and zagging for you and give you a nice, clean formula that you can paste into your financial projections.

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“It may look like a movie, but I see dollars, dollars, dollars.”

Let’s start with a bit of word association. When I say the word “Miramax,” what immediately comes to mind? You might say, “great movies,” or “Cinema Paradiso,” “Shakespeare in Love,” or “Harvey Weinstein.” All of these are fine, but for someone on the business side of films and entertainment, the first words that come to mind are “brilliant financial strategy” or “raining money.”

Why? Because when the Weinstein brothers started up their film company, their first concern was not movies or awards or glitz or glamour, but instead financial strategy, particularly a financial strategy unlike that of any other studio or distributor. Sure, you can say that films like “Il Postino,” “Cinema Paradiso,” and “Shakespeare in Love” made Miramax successful (and you’d be right, at least from a financial perspective), but lots of studios and distributors release highly entertaining, high-earning films on their inexorable path to bankruptcy (just ask Dreamworks).

In all my journeys in business, I have rarely encountered a startup, entrepreneur, or business “expert” who regards the financial end of the business as anything other than an odious housekeeping task, the strategy equivalent of washing windows. It’s all that other groovy stuff, like product development, marketing, social networking, branding, market research, and leadership that gets all the attention, effort, and energy of entrepreneurs and experts alike. Let’s be real. It’s just a lot more fun and exciting to write and read about purple cows and new rules of marketing than, say, operating margins and fixed costs.

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Social Strata thinks it can pass the unlimited paid leave test.

The Seattle-based business, Social Strata, has been around for 13 years as a social media company (one of the ancients, in other words), and they’ve decided they’re ready for it. Just yesterday, on the Live Cloud blog (which they produced), Social Strata announced that it is granting all 14 of its employees unlimited paid leave starting whenever. The folks running Social Strata, like yours truly, are huge fans of Jim Collins’ book, Good To Great, and particularly his idea of building a culture of discipline. Here’s how they explain it:

In that spirit, we decided that, if we have the “right people on the bus,” i.e., people who are passionate about what they’re doing, we don’t need to set artificial limits on the amount of time they can take off, or why they can take time off. Disciplined people will ensure that their responsibilities are handled, and still be able to recharge their batteries with time off. Undisciplined people who take advantage of the system will reveal themselves and be naturally sorted out.

Okay, your startup or small business may not be ready to grant unlimited, paid time off for all your employees — it is a huge conceptual leap to take — but you should always ask this question about your business and the folks working for you: could your business pass the unlimited paid leave test?

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The PDF version of Info Week is now available at the super-low cost of free.

Information Week is one of the two dozen or so magazines/newspapers I have read religiously over the last decade in various capacities. It has been such a rich resource of business technology news, that Steve and I had no qualms featuring it in our book, The Startup Bible (although, frankly, dealing with the folks over there at Info Week on a B2B basis is as unpleasant as dressing in a cactus). Information Week used to be available for a free subscription if, well, you were the right sort of person, and, in the last few years, all the magazine’s content has been available as Web pages. Starting with this week’s issue, however, you can sign up for the free PDF version without any hassle or muss.

And if you think I.T. ain’t your cup of joe, then you’ve got some rude surprises awaiting you and your business. Cloud computing ain’t a postmodernist fad. When, not if, you make the transition, knowing what cloud computing is about — and all its ramifications — puts you in the driver’s seat.

TweetPsych creates a profile of any public twitter account.

Ever wonder how your social networking “psychological profile” compares to that of other public twitter accounts? Now there is a site that does precisely at the low, low cost of free.

TweetPsych lists creates a psychological profile of any public Twitter account and compares it to the thousands it already has in its database. The profile identifies those “psychological” traits that are used more or less frequently by the user analyzed.

Just mosey on over to TweetPsych and place any user’s name with a public Twitter account — your own, for instance — and the site will spit out a psychological analysis in a couple seconds. The creator of the site is Dan Zarrella, the author of “The Social Media Marketing Book.”

So what does the site analyze?

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More entrepreneurs are thinking that Sarbanes-Oxley is, in fact, for dummies.

All that glitters, it seems, is not golden. In a trend not totally related to recessionary pressures, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are increasingly turning their back on the traditional brass ring of business startups, the initial public offering. Although we’ve all been saturated with stories of young entrepreneurs swimming in cash when their business goes public, according to a recent article in the San Jose Mercury News, much of the stardust has worn off the IPO dream.

A mere 18 tech companies have gone public in the last two years as compared to the two years prior to that. Even controlling for one of the worst recessions since Silicon Valley became a household word, that’s a pretty daunting dropoff, especially when you consider some of the going-gangbusters tech companies that have done the high-growth conga line in the past two years, recession or no. While the article posits several reasons for this shift, the one I keep hearing from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in my business wandering is the increased draconian regulation of public corporations.

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Malcom Gladwell explains the puzzling failure of Bill Gates and his promising startup company.

Malcom Gladwell has in the last few years become one of the favorite “elevator” intellectuals in the world of business and entrepreneurship. If you’ve ever been involved in a start-up, you’re intimately familiar with the “elevator speech,” the 30 second “kernel idea” of your business concept that you can deliver to any stranger on an average elevator ride. Gladwell, for his part, has become the expert at “elevator intellectualism,” reducing complex phenomena to elevator-ride-sized concepts. In a series of groundbreaking books such as The Tipping Point, Blink, and now Outliers, he marshalls impressive scholarship and more than a little cherry-picking case studies in support of, well, 30-second concepts. He is, to say the least, a fabulously brilliant man who deserves every ounce of his success, but it’s frequently at the expense of laying down simplistic “laws” against the pressure of innumerable exceptions.

So, as the most quotable quiptificator in the business world, it’s only suitable that Gladwell should turn to entrepreneurship in his latest, quite excellent (and quite the opposite) piece in The New Yorker about how successful entrepreneurs are essentially risk-averse rather than bold, damn-the-burritos risk-takers. However, by severely limiting his perspective to what he calls “predatory entrepreneurs,” such as Ted Turner and John Paulson, is he really saying anything useful about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial success? For a subject as complex and variegated as entrepreneurship and business success, can Gladwell . . . or anyone else for that matter . . . cherry-pick their way to immutable laws governing entrepreneurial success?

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We’re offering the Kindle edition for a buck!

To our Followers, Fans and Friends. You are getting this Press Release, before it goes out to the press. Thank you for your continued support…..

Declaring the 2010’s to be the “decade of the entrepreneur,” Shoestring Publishing is offering its flagship book, Shoestring Venture: The Startup Guide, for 99¢ on Amazon’s Kindle for a limited time to celebrate the first days of the new decade.

“The book has sold phenomenally well in both paperback and Kindle.” co-author Steve Monas asserts. “The Kindle version has sold spectacularly well . . . we are ranked number one in sales in the Web Marketing, E-commerce, and Production and Operations categories. However, we wrote Shoestring Venture to provide entrepreneurs the tools and resources to make better decisions, so what better way to celebrate the decade of the entrepreneur by giving it away.”

People interested in the Kindle promotion are encouraged to visit Amazon.com and select the special Kindle promotion when navigating to the book’s Kindle product page. The book is being sold at the regular price of $7.99, but they can select the special 99¢ promotion.

About Shoestring Venture

Shoestring Venture: The Startup Bible is a complete, up-to-date reference on all the major issues start-up and home-based business entrepreneurs face. Its focus on outsourcing sets the book apart from the common run of how-to business books. Shoestring Venture gives entrepreneurs and small business owners the tools they need to start a new business or take their current business several levels higher by exploiting the resources our interconnected world offers. The book is available online at Amazon and Barns & Noble, as well as select retailers.

New, new new! No, no, no!

Probably the most convenient aspect of blogging is that topics come knocking at your door, instead of the often-agonizing search for relevant topics when you’re on the hook for magazine or newspaper articles. And this week’s topic came a rapping at my door a week ago when my brand new laptop showed up. Blazing fast, sporting a hot new, bug-free edition of Windows 7, and a adamantine-sharp HD display (but no Blu-Ray — what’s that about?), my itchy mouse finger couldn’t wait to take this speedster out of the garage for a spin — in the same way those parking attendants take that Ferrari out for a spin in Ferris Bueller.

Alas and alack, my laptop is also my primary work computer as a CEO, a consultant, and a sometimes prolific writer. Years of power use have perfectly toned my old laptop with some pretty hefty programs, a torrent of expensive fonts, and all the funky little XP customizations that make a day of work a day of work rather than a day of frustrating distractions. While buying a new computer makes life worthwhile, it’s a pretty dandy set of time-devouring tasks if you don’t do it right. So here, from hard-won experience in the school of hard knocks called “upgrading,” are seven business tips for upgrading your computer. Business tips, mind you, not technical tips. You’ll have to troll the underworld of tech blogs to bone up on the technical stuff . . .

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We wish you the greatest success and happiness for 2010.

Depending on how mathphilic or mathphobic you are, we have either entered the last decade of the naughties or the first decade of the twenty-teens. Either way, it seems we all have big plans to close out the decade (or start the new one) with a big bang. We at Shoestring Venture are making some pretty serious big bang plans, too. Some mighty changes are brewing for the next few months, including a totally radical, simply fabulous facelift for our site, a brand-new spanking second edition of The Startup Bible (with some 150 additional pages in a much bigger format), and quite a few new books in our Shoestring Venture series, including a must-have complete guide and reference to building and using a business Web site (called, naturally, Shoestring Venture: The Website Bible).

We also have big changes happening for the Shoestring Venture blog. We’ll be focusing more on practical tips for small businesses and bootstrap entrepreneurs, book and software reviews, and, in a brand new feature, entrepreneur profiles in feature articles followed by multi-part interviews. Some new writers will be joining our blog, bringing their skills and insights into such raucous esoterica like search engine marketing, e-commerce, direct mail, finance, business funding, and other party animal favorites for the entrepreneur crowd.

We are also putting the finishing touches on the Shoestring Venture studio in order to produce the best darn video blogs in the business, covering such practical topics as spreadsheet formulas to setting up your accounting books. All for the low, low price of free, provided you’re hanging out here.

What we won’t lose, of course, is our attitude and sense of humor. So while we’re going a bit more lightly on the opinion pieces and esoterica, we will still maintain a few of our eccentric delights in the more foolish aspects of the business world. As I always say, “If you don’t have a sense of humor about these things, they’re not funny.”

Because I’ve been neck-deep in a consulting gig these last three weeks, I’ve little time for what matters, let alone leafing through all the reading material piling up neck deep in my kitchen. So I just got around this afternoon to leafing through last week’s Forbes magazine and there in living color is reason number 431 why you have to be careful about celebrity endorsements.

Accenture, which has been running some of the stupidest ads in the solar system centered around images of Tiger Woods and tendentious, break-room bobblehead poster headlines about performance or success, chose the week Tiger Woods experimented with driving into trees to run the headline, “The road to high performance isn’t always a paved road.” It’s a jaw-dropper of bad timing and a suitably brain-dead coda to one of the most brain-dead ad campaigns of recent memory. This is an ad that literally has to be seen to be believed:

As a long-time adman myself, I realize that the Forbes inventory was bought a long time before Tiger decided to try offroading in a neighbor’s front lawn — the ad was probably hot off the presses even as Mrs. Tiger was bebopping all about Mr. Tiger’s head with a nine iron. But, even so, the whole problem with the ad series is that, like so many celebrity-based ads, no-one at the agency or the business really knew what to do with Tiger. So they didn’t really do anything. The ad itself, had Tiger managed to stay on the road, is head-slappingly stupid, which, more typically than not, is what happens when folks try to enlist celebrities to sell everything from hair cream to Viagra.

So let’s take a close look at these Accenture ads and then bop over to Paris Hilton and her burger to see how to do it right when you have no idea how to use a celebrity in an ad.

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At the Church of Scientology, every disciplinary write-up is proceeded by a knock-down.

. . . you do not talk about fight club.

The Shoestring Venture first anniversary retrospective of Top Ten Bizarre Business Stories of 2009 begins, appropriately enough, with a manager that makes your boss look wonderful. Really. Tell me about the worst boss you’ve ever had and David Miscavige makes that boss look like Mother Theresa.

As first reported in the St. Petersburg Times in August, David Miscavige, the head of the Church of Scientology — one of the most successful religion businesses in the world — motivates his top management in startlingly physical ways:

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The Shoestring Venture blog is celebrating its first birthday! We have gone from zero to thousands of readers and had a walloping good time getting there.

In celebration, for the next couple weeks we’re going to get all nostalgic on you and highlight some of the highlights over the last year — the most popular, most goofy, most memorable. Because we’ve given up our regular Roundup feature, we’ve decided to bid it a fond farewell by dredging up some of the most bizarre business stories that crossed our desks. Sure, everyone else and their cousin has such a list, but how many people out there have as perverse a sense a humor as you find here?

So, if 2009 has been a tough year for you, our Top Ten Bizarre Business Stories are here to remind you that . . . it could’ve been worse.

. . . have you ever wondered what a marathon is like?

Come on, you know you’ve heard the expression a thousand times. “Running a business” or “starting a business” “is a marathon, not a sprint.” And you nod your head in agreement as if somebody has actually said something sensible. But outside of the fact that a marathon takes a few hours and a sprint a few seconds, isn’t this as helpful as saying, “Starting a business is a butternut squash, not an apple” or “Running a business is a cement driveway, not speakerphone”?

However, truth often resides in the nuttiest of hoary chestnuts. Running your own business really is like a marathon, but in far more than just the distance covered. As someone who has run 13 marathons and has rushed back into training for the upcoming LA marathon, let me count the ways . . .

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Any food will do. Like spam, for instance.

Over the past three months, we here at Shoestring Venture have been damn-the-burritos-full-speed-ahead in social networking and marketing. Business, as you all know, is a school of hard knocks and, I can tell you feelingly, social marketing is a class where the hard knocks rain down like a Mike Tyson fiststorm. Outside of the constantly changing nature of social networking in use and technology, the whole shebang has fallen off the cliff far faster than any previous Web technology.

Which means that your social network probably has very little social or network about it, but is more of a giant illusion, a grand pyramid scheme like those letters that promise you thousands of dollars if you pay the sender one dollar and pass the letter on to ten friends.

Is your social network a real? Or an illusion? If social networks are gradually becoming an illusion, how did this happen? Spam, I’m afraid. All of us out there in social network land are trying to do the same thing and so increasingly not doing what we’re trying to do.

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The Post Office makes most of its money from junk mail. So why not junk trucks? Junk post offices?

In further evidence that “Richard needs a life,” the USPS inspector general has a fascinating blog today (yes, the U.S.P.S. inspector general has a blog — tagline (I’m not joking): “pushing the envelope” (*grooooooan*) — and, as a direct marketing pro, I tend to read the thing like morning scripture). Well, back to the fascinating blog post. It seems the USPS IG, facing the same desperate flows of red ink as much of the rest of us, thinks he can throw himself a lifeline by renting out the sides of postal trucks to advertisers. FedEx and UPS, I surmise, will not be invited to this party.

In these times of doing what it takes to maintain fiscal solvency, what if the Postal Service started selling its prime advertising real estate to generate revenue? Major advertisers might welcome the opportunity to place their ad on hundreds of thousand Postal Service trucks all over the country. Or smaller advertisers could take advantage of purchasing wall-space in a post office.

While the multi-axle roadkill grinders that move mail cross-country will probably be well out of the range of a startup or small business, the idea does raise interesting possibilities for local delivery postal trucks. Now, the Inspector General is eyeballing as much cash as he can lay his mitts on, but the U.S.P.S. could be doing communities a favor by reserving some or all of local trucks to local advertising.

There are, however, some pretty significant roadblocks to the IG’s cunning plan.

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That is one tiny ad.
But it gets bigger when you click it.

This has to be some sort of Guinness world record. The New York Times Web edition this morning opened up with the tiniest banner ad I’ve ever seen. Even the Lollipop Guild will probably think this a mighty teensy ad. At around 90 pixels across and barely more than 30 pixels high, the words “banner” and “button” seem perversely grandiose. Even “ad” sounds like a fanciful exaggeration. I’m not sure if this micro-ad format has been named yet, but I nominate the word, “adicon,” as coming close to the mark. Just to appreciate the tininess of this tiny, here’s a little screen capture of the adicon’s placement:

Desperate for revenue, content producers such as The New York Times and Fox are probably looking for any way to bump up their online ad revenue (hell, desperate doesn’t even begin to describe Fox, who is now suing Google for putting links to their Web pages in Google’s search engine!), but this new micro-ad seems chock-a-block with opportunities for Web publishers, bloggers, advertisers, and (need I say it) small ad and design firms. But these opportunities come at a stiff cost. Succeeding with this new adicon format — whether you’re a publisher or advertiser — is a road fraught with menacing obstacles.

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The “In” part is now open.

LinkedIn has joined the rising tide — or should I call it incipient tsunami — of social networking sites with an API open for developers (an API, if you’re sick and tired of computer industry acronyms, is an “application programming interface” that allows other software to interact with that application — companies typically keep the API of their software under lock and key, while some license it to select developers — an open API means that practically any developer can write software for the application). We’ve seen a storm of applications for Facebook, almost all of which are time wasters, after they opened their API. I’m sure Mafia Wars for LinkedIn is not in anyone’s future, but expect an exponential increase in the usefulness of the site in the next 12 months.

And if you’re technically inclined (or your idea-inclined and have access to eLance), you may want to put your foot in this rising tide. In the research I’ve done on apps entrepreneurs, the best time to launch is when an API opens up. So maybe there is a Mafia Wars in LinkedIn’s future after all . . .

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Asus wins as the most reliable notebook computer. Guess which brand came in dead last — by a mile?

Our book has a fairly substantial discussion of the pros and cons of notebooks versus desktop computers. You just can’t beat the portability of a notebook, but you can add “more likely to break down” to the list of notebook cons. A new study by SquareTrade Research analyzed first-year failure rates for over 30,000 new laptop computers covered by SquareTrade Laptop Warranty plans. From this data, they project that 1/3 of all laptops sold last year will fail within 3 years with netbooks leading the unreliability pack.

Let’s just cut straight to the meat of the matter. According to SquareTrade’s data, almost 6% of netbooks fail in the first year, from which SquareTrade projects a 3-year failure rate of 25% (based on past data). 4.7% of conventional laptops fail in the first year with a projected 3-year failure rate of around 21%. And for those who forked over the big bucks for a premium laptop, they experienced a failure rate of 4.2% in the first year, meaning that 18.1% can expect their computer to fail in the first three years.

To put these numbers into perspective, about 2/3 of all notebook failures were hardware failures while another 1/3 were accidents. This ratio held across all categories and brands (so there’s no “bad luck” notebook).

Asus and Toshiba are by far the most reliable notebooks while Hewlett Packard outstrips the entire herd for unreliability (I’ve had two Toshiba’s which have taken several lickings and keep on ticking and had Hewlett Packard which gave up the ghost barely out of the package, so the data makes sense to me). Here’s the three year projections by brand:

Considering how buggy and incomplete Microsoft final software releases are (think Vista), I wouldn’t want to find out what Microsoft actually considers a beta version to be.

Microsoft today released a public beta of Outlook 2010 that includes heavy integration with social network sites with its new Outlook Social Connector. The feature will allow you to update your contacts directly from your social networks and, more importantly, feed updates from your social networks directly into Outlook. And, for those of you who use SharePoint, Microsoft’s collaboration software, Outlook will connect directly to SharePoint Server and update you on all the activities in your groups. Of course, most of the rest of us don’t use collaboration software and them that do don’t use Sharepoint. I’ll put this in the I’m Impressed file when Outlook can connect up with these other, more affordable collaboration solutions.

As of today, only LinkedIn integrates with the new, more socialized Outlook.

And, just in case you’re interested, here’s a list of all the new features in Outlook 2010. And, for some strange reaon I just can’t fathom, their demonstration animation on this page isn’t in Flash, which everyone has on their computer, but in some obscure, never-used format called SilverLight. What could they be thinking?