Diary Excerpt from an Amateur Entrepreneur

Friends, today the star of Print Me Happy had a catastrophic public meltdown.
If my enormous pink printer were a toddler, it just threw an electronic tantrum so embarrassing that it required me to walk away and abandon my child in a crowd of strangers.

In about 2 hours time, I have to go and get it and bring it home.

Enough time for a blog post then.

How I saw this business working and how this business is working (or not) are such unrelated concepts that they couldn't even be thought of as third cousins. Indeed, I now believe all business ideas are in fact shimmering commercial mirages that lead the gullible into throwing money at other businesses you didn't even know existed yet.

(How do I become a business that other businesses throw money at? Now that's a question worth answering.)

The two concepts that have kept me strong throughout the delivery errors, the software glitches, the transport mishaps, the blue-screen-of-death episodes and now the epic public electronic tantrum are:

1. I must be learning something by going through all this pain.
(Devoutly religious people have flagellation, I have a deeply flawed printer from China).

2. The best way to become successful is to fail forward ie. fall over, get up try something else, short-circuit, get up unplug machine...

The other very real problem I face is that my revenue model isn't working out so well.
At the moment, I charge $4 per photo, with $1 from every photo going back to the school or charity that is running the event. People LOVE the printer, but they don't always want to buy a photo. I need to sell LOTS of photos to make decent money. So far my highest sell has been 35 photos :(

Today I decided I have to close the doors for a little while and think about how to go forward. I need to fix the technical issues, and I need to change the revenue model too.

The life of an Amateur Entrepreneur is never easy, but if you have any bright ideas or want to give me some business advice, I'd welcome it with open arms.

Here's to Print Me Happy 2.0 in a few months time.

The Future is Ordinary

Here's a thought for you: being excellent is over-rated.

As a disclaimer, I have always been a 75% achiever; never quite getting to the summit of excellence in any pursuit, but always being quite good at hanging around achiever base-camp like a serious contender.

I offer, as proof, my academic record:

My high school ENTER score: 76.5%

My undergraduate average: 75.5%

My Master's dissertation grade late last year: 74%

Perhaps I should be concerned that I'm dropping a point or two every decade or so...

Or not.

Lately, while starting up my new business, I have begun to question what purpose excellence serves, exactly? Amongst all the inspiration being sold on Instagram and now appearing as slogans on bloody Kmart homewares and just about anywhere you rest your eyeballs for too long, it's getting hard to form rational arguments about why being a better, fitter, smarter you is not an important goal. 

Honestly, the subtle persistent insistence that we all get a bit closer to excellence every time we turn on our phones or go to buy a bloody scented candle (candles with meaningful slogans tend to be more expensive too) has done physiological damage to our sense of human enjoyment. I'm close to puking every time I see something written in brush script these days, especially if it has a metallic shimmer.

Hear me reader: Excellence is for boring people. So is self-improvement of the self-absorbed type. 

Stop that shit right now.

I don't want to be excellent, and you don't either, really. Have a think about it. You just want to do the stuff you really like doing as much as you can without having to do too much of the stuff you don't like doing to pay for it. Please tell me how I am wrong in that assessment in the comments if you must.

Personally, I've solved the 'doing stuff I don't like' part of the riddle by starting my own business.  

I hear you snigger. Hear me out.

To me, the goal of running my own business does not require excellence. Competence will definitely be needed, as well as a pleasant telephone manner, but I'm not convinced that excellence is really gonna be showing up to work everyday. 

Am I unambitious then, with this lack of regard for being really good at what I do?

No. My ambition is to work for myself, enjoy it and make a decent living from it. 

In that order.

Making that happen is no easy feat, but many people have achieved it without being crowned "Young Entrepreneur of the Year".

I aim to be a competent business owner, nipping at the heels of the excellent business owners when they leave base camp, then going back to my tent for a hot chocolate and a nap once they're out of sight.

Me, enjoying hot chocolate while the excellent kids freeze their tits off.

                                                                         ---------------

Bonus Points

 

I have a confession:

I am a Scrabble nerd.

Blame my paternal grandmother and her gold-plated Scrabble board if you must (and really, we must) because as of tonight I feel as if I have entered a new level of word nerdiness: The realm of 400+ scores and googling your closest Scrabble club to check how much money I can win off the old buggers (the only type of buggers that frequent Scrabble clubs it seems) if I turn professional.

In my defence I don’t earn much right now and those over 50s are just playing for kicks.

If I’m in this, I’m in it for the money.

Tonight, my Mother and I sat down for what we thought was going to be a nice, ordinary after-dinner board game. I have never denied being competitive, and judging by the number of trophies that have accumulated in this house, neither has anyone else under this roof.

Despite the relaxed situation, what followed can only be described as a massacre unlike any seen at the Page dining table before.

Before I break it down for you, it must be said that I am no stranger to the power of the Scrabble board. Self-assured boyfriends have been humiliated at my hands; others became hopelessly enchanted by my wordplay prowess. Oh yes, boys and girls, used correctly, Scrabble is far more than a meal replacement for the social life of middle-aged people. It is an egotistical academic gauntlet — best played with a nice cup of tea and a few chocolate biscuits.

In an unexpected preliminary move, I brought out the vintage Scrabble set this particular evening instead of the whizz-bang-deluxe dark green set complete with matching cheat’s dictionary. Mum later claimed that this was the beginning of her downfall — I say let the tiles lay where they fall.

I started.

12.

Hardly auspicious.

My grandmothers’ guiding rule echoed in my head: if you can’t score more than 10, trade your letters in.

She never followed this rule particularly well herself, but it has worked for me so far.

Mum and I traded words.

She scored 11, I put down a word for 33.

I had all the good letters. The Z, the Q, the J and both blanks.

Not winning was not an option for fear of losing face. I dangerously opted to use my U without the Q in a risky move that had potential to break the game open…

and then, after Mum’s go…it happened.

The best single play of a single letter in the history of Scrabble.

No really. I googled this.

One letter used.

62 points.

Legitimate.

Ok I didn’t do a lot of googling, but it’s definitely up there. Good luck finding the world record for highest score in Scrabble using just one letter. Wikipedia has nothing.

The words were Qi, both of them. The Q was on a triple-letter square. The crowd goes wild.

Mum wants to flip the table.

Nan calls out her condolences from the lounge room where Collingwood is getting flogged by Sydney.

Mum recovers from the shock to put down another word for 18 points.

It’s back to me and I sincerely apologise before putting down a 38 pointer. Mum grimaces. She’s beat, but she’s a trooper and comes back with a 30 point reply.

Now, in Scrabble, the best thing you can do (apart from slay the scoreboard with the aforementioned magical one letter play) is put down all your letters in one go. This is very tricky to do. There’s 7 letters, not much room on the board and they don’t all mash together nicely very often. Even if they do, you have to have somewhere to put this very long string of letters.

The first time I managed it, the word was PLEASURE. I kid you not. The second time was marred in controversy because we realised that I had put down a proper noun a few turns before. Boyfriend at the time was already smarting from the fact that I was undoubtedly going to be the first person to beat him, ever, but then we had a moral dilemma as to whether I had lost the game already because of the undiscovered error.

And people think Scrabble is just a board game…

Back to me turning professional.

The next word I put down used all my letters.

MEAGERLY

It seems so insufficient when I see it typed out like that, but I claimed 50 bonus points for my trouble.

I’ll spare you the rest of the gory details, but my final score was 424.

Mum’s was a respectable 259.

My point is, beside this being a very historic moment in my life (I’ve never reached 400 in Scrabble before) I have come to a cross roads.

Do I follow my passion for beating the pants off people at Scrabble and become a World Champion whilst ignoring the fact that I will have to regularly beat old people at something they can still enjoy for my dreams to come true?

Am I turning in to an old person prematurely?

Perhaps I can start an under-50s club.

Who’s with me?

New Home for Nic

This blog has moved to nicarbysays.com

Please come visit - there's a cute caravan and everything.

That Winning Feeling

Best winning face on the internet

At about 9pm last night, I began to get a feeling. That winning feeling. Kinda how I imagine you would feel about half way through seeing all your lotto numbers come up.

Full of antici..........pation. 

Well, I never buy lotto, so that exact scenario is not likely to happen to me, but being a scrutineer at an election count is a pretty cool way to get close - especially when you are representing the candidate who is winning in a landslide. That candidate was my friend Timothy and he worked damn hard to be that winner last night. His prize is the honour of serving as a local councillor for the next four years. 

I have been support crew from almost the day I met Tim, so I feel qualified to dissect the insides of a good win. Let me tell you, it was freaking painful getting to election night. Politics is a blood-sport, and the egos that compete are gigantuan. At least all the egos housed in middle class, middle-aged, portly white man bodies. The women, the skinny conservationist types still in their hiking gear, the any-colour-other-than-white candidates (of which there were, er...maybe two for the whole city?), they all seemed to have some humility tempering their egoes. 

Which is why I have no story about overcoming the nice people to win, obviously.

Tim was up against 3 other candidates for the same area. One was the incumbent councillor, one was a local businessman and another was a person thought to be on "our" side, but then, inexplicably, decided to run against us instead. Do I need to mention which body his ego is housed in? 

Didn't think so.

Anyway, in the age of Facebook Pages and cheap shirt printing, one can go to town on their campaign. Many did. But Tim, with a budget roughly rounded up to 0, did not print anything except colour postal flyers and the lists of streets he would need to visit in order to door-knock the ENTIRE suburb. 

Tim spent no time agonizing over which font looked best on a t-shirt, oh no. No time was wasted trying to get Facebook likes for a page with a 6 week lifespan at best. Oh no. Tim's weapon of choice was his two really really long legs. He was a one man door-knocking machine.

I came down to Perth from Dowerin to help one weekend. I almost had to jog to keep up. No smokos, no coffee break. We ate lunch at his favourite Chinese food haunt (he gets given the chinese menu without asking for it, if that's any indication of the waiter-customer rapport he's got going) and kept slogging away well in to the afternoon. The day I helped out, I think we covered about 150 houses each.

Door knocking is a rather intimidating activity for the beginner. I mean, I hate being interrupted by Jehovah's Witnesses as much as the next person, so the thought of that hatred being directed at me was very distressing.

Luckily, I did not encounter a single horrible person all day. I even had some great conversations with nice people. Most importantly for Tim, we made an impression on the people we did speak to, and that translated in to votes.

Remember - there were no ads, big or small, in the local paper spruiking Tim as "A great bloke", he didn't even have placards out on the streets with his mug smiling at busloads of voters  (not a bad idea really since I personally love defacing political posters of all persuasions). Just two legs, three weeks, and lots and lots of talking.

So, back to last night. 

Well actually, it's probably important to mention the night before last night because we did go out and get pretty drunk in Freo and dance like crazies. Hence Tim was very relaxed/hung over leading up to the vote count the next night. This was a brilliant move in hindsight, because he didn't feel like getting very excited or anxious due to a slight seediness persisting

I was anxious though, because I hadn't scrutineered before and I hadn't met these other candidates before either. You just don't know who is on who's team at these vote counts. One minute you are innocently making small talk with the person next to you, the next you are on guard because they have revealed they are working for the ENEMY and you are worried they are trying to tap you for information. I was an Intello you know. I'm on to this stuff.

Personally, I was suprised there were no punch-ups in the hallway outside the vote counting room, but I guess democracy is good at putting you in your place - the results are projected on to the wall 2 metres high for everyone to see.

Alright, so let's go back to me getting "the feeling" at about 9pm.

As a scrutineer, it was my job to be a busy body and watch over the shoulders of the counters as they put the votes in the right piles. If I saw anything happen that was wrong, I could raise my concerns with the head of the table and get them to check again. It also meant I got a good idea of who was winning from the get go.

The first vote counted was for Tim, so I took that as a good omen. He was sitting in the roped off area talking to other spectators, so it was hard to catch his eye. I wanted to flash him the thumbs up about every 30 seconds after it started, but he was deliberately avoiding looking at me. 

Within 10 minutes of counting, it was clear that Tim had a lot more votes than any other candidate. He was number 4 on the ballot paper, which usually isn't a good thing, but the counting went something like this:

1,4,4,3,2,4,3,4,1,2,4,4,1

I then looked over the shoulder of the other counter:

4,3,4,1,2,1,4,4,4,3,4,2,4

That's a lot of 4's in the first 10 minutes.

About 20 minutes in, the head of the table separated the officials in to two groups: sorters in one group, counters in another. All the votes sorted for Tim were collected together and given to one person to count. All the votes for everyone else were collected and given to the other counter. It was about then that I had a seriously good feeling. Tim still wouldn't look at me and I had to fight the urge to run over and say "You're killing them!" Half the table was counting his votes, the other half was counting everyone else's.

Eventually I did run over and say just that, but I waited until after the projector had updated the running total twice. By that stage he had 48% of the vote and needed only another 50 or so to win. I felt that I could leave the scrutineering to the others and celebrate - if this was the Federal election, we would have declared victory!

After it became apparent that Tim couldn't be beaten, Mr Not-actually-on-our-side was overheard by moi (he was standing behind my chair) telling one of his supporters that he didn't mind losing to Tim, as long as it wasn't the incumbent. He'd also said, before the vote, that Mr Incumbent was his only real competition for the role as the other two candidates hadn't done any campaigning. Please, forgive me, but I couldn't help myself at this point. I piped up in my cheery voice, "Oh, I just came back from the table and I'm pretty sure Mr Incumbent is actually going to place second." The results on the screen showed Mr Not-on-our-team was currently running second to Tim, but I knew how many votes had not yet been updated and was pretty confident in my estimate.

Sure enough, the next update saw him drop to third. 

Told you it was a blood-sport.

Kids, there are three morals to this story:

One: hard work wins over flashy advertising every time.

Two: Talking to people and being nice pays off.

And three: being a little bit hung over is sometimes the best way to deal with stress.

Dowerin Week 6 - So Australian

There's something about small Australian towns; out here, the words strewth, cockie (the bird) and sheila don't feel so out of place. I went to Perth this week, but before I left I took my camera for a walk around Dowerin. 

Please enjoy the overt Australian-ness seeping out of each photo.

Insult me

I wanted to write a really funny rap for you this Friday.

It was going to be about the coffee machine at the roadhouse. I was thinking about rhyming 'a large cappuccino' with thafuckdotheyno. Or possibly "don't know lattes from elbows". 

But not today. 

I can't. 

I have too many feels about racism. 

Funny frothy rap about burnt milk was not sufficient fodder to quell my need for a cathartic, vitriolic explosion of words.

I'm still going to write a rap, because rap music and lyrics have become a largely accepted way for black musicians to vent their frustration. Let's say this is my attempt at standing shoulder to shoulder in support with everyone who has ever been belittled, abused, disregarded or overlooked because a white person didn't like the way they looked, acted, spoke or paid homage to their heritage.




You say you're true blue, you're Aussie through and through
But you think first people should just shut up and let you boo

You make my white skin crawl, with your racist drawl
But my fair skin ain't making me your complicit fool.

Peel off my privileged skin, watch me hand it in
See this happy traitor freed from her disgraceful kin

So insult me now, Abo-loving leftist cow?
Can't go back no place else, I'll stand and fight this, pow!

Your misspelt facebook trolling got me ROFL LOLing
How many Reclaim member likes is your dribble polling?

Why did you not get taught, to speak like you ought?
Did you mother, brother, sister grow up listening to News Corp?

Gonna take that power back, see my country live more black,
Hell I wanna see a spear dance, haka, tango in my christmas sack

So Goodes you just play hard, let us deal with the 'tards
Coz I know I ain't the only whitey handing out red cards

Share and like this rhyme, if you got the time,

If we let the racists win it's a freaking national crime

We used to be so great, now I'm screaming, mate
Stand with us, be the biggest, don't let Australia rhyme with hate.