I was shooting the shit (AKA. Talking) with a buddy of mine, in my office today. We started talking about business and happiness. The conversation was started by him recognizing my chalk board walls and the writing that is on them. (my wife and I painted 50% of the walls in our office with chalkboard paint to help us visually layout our ideas and thoughts everyday)
This particular section of the wall was designated for our “Star Customers”, the customers that do everything right and then some. This list is ongoing and ever changing to help us identify what makes up our Star customers and how we can get more of them.

For us, a Star customer recognizes growth potential in themselves and their business, they want to learn and better themselves rather than having someone spoon feed them everything. Knowing this, we can manipulate our current business systems to reward these Star customers. This is not standard business logic, “rewarding customers, it will never work, we’ll lose money on that”, says corporate America.

We’re starting to see this ‘new agey’ business logic with a lot of young business owners because they’ve seen how happy customers (and employees) make for an extremely profitable and Happy business.

Maybe I’m noticing this new model in more businesses recently because I’m reading Tony Hsieh’s (CEO of Zappos) new book, “Delivering Happiness” (http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com), which is absolutely incredibly! This book is an overview of Tony’s life (Personally & Professionally), with his wins and losses along the way. He’s inspired me to be better at focusing on happiness instead of money, and then the money will take care of itself.

I’m striving to make every business I’m involved with a true success (according to my customers and employees), not Gross Profits. My wife & I are super passionate about this and challenge you to look at life this way. Take a look at Tony’s new book and tell us what you get of it, here’s the Amazon link if you’d like to buy it and check it out (http://www.amazon.com/deliveringhappiness).

Make others Happy in Life and you will be too!
Have an Awesome Day!
~Chais Meyer

After a recent technological disaster, I realized that there really is a HUGE difference between skill and luck (and I’ve been lucky A LOT).

I took on a project for a local Doctor and I came up severally short! I was asked by this doctor to JailBreak his iPhone (allowing it to work on a competitor to AT&T’s phone network)…
This is normally no big deal and I’ve ALWAYS come out ahead on technology projects like this, without a flinch! To help somebody Jailbreak their iPhone, I charge $150 for the knowledge, actually  JailBreaking it, and filling in the voids that Jailbroken software has for the iPhone; I make them work like they should.

For people that understand technology, especially when it comes to iPhone Jailbreaks, this is NOT a very complicated task. The really smart people out there are the ones that come up with the Jailbreaking software in the first place, guys like me just use their knowledge to benefit from (of course I am actually providing a good service to people that don’t feel comfortable doing it to their phones in the first place).

So why did I find out that there’s such a big difference between skill and luck? Well, I’ve always taken for granted the skills that goes into creating this Jailbreaking software (A new jailbreak is created every time a new version of the iPhone software comes out…that’s how it works, they stay in sync). I’ve always assumed that whenever a new version of the iPhone software comes out, there will always be people smarter than Apple and they will go ahead and create a iPhone fix for us everyday folk.
On this day, my mindset was no different and I decided to upgrade this customer’s iPhone to the latest Apple Software. I figured that a Jailbreak had already been created and it would be pud for me to go to the next step. I upgraded the iPhone to 3.1.3 and then proceeded to look for the matching Jailbreak software…I started having trouble finding the appropriate software I needed, so I dug a little deeper. Before I knew it, I’d been researching on the internet for 2 hours for a fix and I realized a fix DOESN’T EXIST!

No problem right? I can just undo what I’ve done and go to an older version of this fix…right? WRONG! This particular iPhone software upgrade changes things inside the phone that CAN NOT be undone! THERE IS NO FIX OUT THERE! Even the biggest brains in the iPhone tech world are saying that they’re not sure if this version of the iPhone software will ever be able to be Jailbroken.

What does this mean to me? What does this mean for this Doctor who put the fate of his iPhone in my hands?
It means that I fucked up…big time! I made a completely Rookie mistake by upgrading the iPhone before knowing if there was a fix out there! This Doctor CAN NO LONGER use this $600 phone for an unknown amount of time…it is essentially an iPod now. All because I thought I was skilled in iPhone Jailbreaks, because I’ve never messed before, I thought I was invincible!

At that moment I realized there’s a BIG difference between Skill & Luck!
I had been extremely lucky at every point until that moment. Luck, that relied on other peoples skill to make the impossible possible!

I still am not able to fix this guy’s iPhone, and I don’t know if I will ever be able to. I may have to buy this $600 piece of equipment from him (because I jumped the gun on a very simple thing)!
I learned a very important lesson that day, Never jump into something just because you haven’t failed at it before…Make sure to do your research, which allows you to under promise and over deliver!

Please learn from my mistake(s): Know what you’re talking about and know what process goes into accomplishing ‘your goals’…before you find yourself in a sticky situation!

Thanks for reading and hopefully learning!
Have an Awesome Day!
~Chais Meyer

I started this blog with the mindset that I would tell everyone about the good, the bad, & the dirty of business (starting a business specifically). This blog slowly developed to much more than that. It started containing stories about our life and our connections with businesses and people. The tough part about sharing situations from OUR life is what people in our life think of when they read a story that may have to do with them (or at least a situation that involved them). And let’s face it…There is irony in honesty! Most people can’t handle the truth.

If I choose to be completely honest about any situation or real life example, some part of me chooses not to care about how others (the people that are in the stories) are affected or what they’re feeling. If I’m not completely honest with myself or you, why even have a blog in the first place? I’m not the national media that filters what they do or don’t say (sugarcoating or distorting the truth). In fact, I despise national media just for that reason. I am sharing my true situations with you, no matter what the comfort level.

So…for any or all of you out there that would prefer not to read a story that references you or a situation that involves you, it may be best if you stop reading from here on out. This blog is about my wife and I, and how we go through OUR lives, personally and professionally.

For Everyone Else…
…Have an Awesome Day & we’ll talk soon!
~Chais Meyer

I was watching a video on TED.com today where Tim Farris talks about smashing fear and ‘how to feel like the incredible hulk’.

See this video below:

His talk started to get me thinking about how, so many times in my life I end up over-complicating things (as many of us do). And It is really interesting to me that we believe ‘what we have always done, has to be the right way’, just because we don’t know another way. Like…Who says having a cell phone with the ability to check/respond to my emails actually makes me more productive? Maybe I’m just wasting more time than anything. If I set up a one hour segment to read and respond my email a day (and that’s it), maybe I would get a lot more done because I would be focused to accomplish the task at hand.

I just love that Tim’s thoughts and ideas have helped me see that not everyone is supposed to follow the status quo, and not everyone has to fit into a mold. Identify your loves to live them, identify your fears and conquer them. I think we all could get a little inspiration from Tim.

Have an Awesome Day!
~Chais Meyer

We finally sold our home…well, sort of. (This picture is of our ‘home purchasers’ and myself, my wife couldn’t attend the key hand off).

About 3 Months ago, we wrote a post about our home and how we couldn’t afford to own it anymore. We had the choice of finding some way to sell it or have our mortgage company foreclose on us. My wife and I didn’t want to go down without a fight, so we took the drastic measure of moving in with my ‘rents (that’s the cool term for parents), staying in their basement and out of our home that we loved so much.

We had to call our mortgagor and tell them that we were unable to make our mortgage payments and we needed some help. The gave us a 3 month break from payments so we had some time to try to solve our problem (come up with our unpaid mortgage amount or sell our home…or else). During that time, Shawna and I have been racking our brains to try and figure out a solution that would not only get us out of this mess, but hopefully put some money into our pocket as well (we did put tons of hours into our home, fixing it up from when we originally purchased it 3.5 years ago).

What we did (with the help of God) was have a lawyer draw up a ‘Lease to Own Contract’ (that we are giving to you for free at the bottom of the page) and found a married couple that was interested in having their monthly rent payments go towards the purchase of a home. Along the way I believe we found a short term market niche for real estate investments.

The Details (let’s call the person paying us the TENANT):

• the TENANT will pay a monthly payment to us, (which will include $ that will go towards the principal for them to purchase the house from us, the interest for us taking the risk and acting as their bank, homeowners insurance in case the house catches on fire and the property tax)
• When we receive that monthly payment, we will then pay the bank that we have our mortgage through, which will cover our principal, interest, homeowners insurance and property tax
• The official home ownership (the paperwork that says Shawna and I own the home) won’t change until the TENANT decides to pay us outright for the home or goes through the 20 years of payments as we’ve set up.
• Why would the TENANT want to do something like this? Well, first off there is no need for them to get a mortgage from a bank (which is nice if you currently don’t fit the criteria to get a mortgage). They don’t have to do anything different from paying rent like they normally would (it’s easy). It is their home unless they decide to move or not make their monthly payments (all the money that they’ve payed every month does not go back to them if they decide to terminate our contract).
• Why is this good for us? We make positive cash flow every month $60 a month extra we can apply towards our home principal. We can pay our bills. If the TENANT carries the payments to the full 20 years without paying the home off in advance, we will make $40,000 extra in interest (that’s a nice little investment). We don’t have to do any of the landlord responsibilities because it is their home and they are responsible for everything that breaks down, etc.
• We also had them pay a $3,000 (non refundable) down payment to start this process. This payment goes directly towards the principal of their home and we get enough up front money to pay off our past mortgage payments (the bank won’t foreclose)!

How is this a market niche? When our nation is going through home sale hardships (because it’s hard to get a mortgage), why not purchase 10-20 forclosed homes and duplicate this process? be a landlord without the responsibilities of fixing up and maintaining the property. And if you really wanted to protect yourself, you could create something about a pre-payment penalty in the contract. It could say, if the TENANT pays off the total home value before 50% of the contract term has been complete, there is a penalty of “BLANK” %. Something like that.

We just wanted to let you in on how we got ourselves out of a sticky situation. If you would like to download this contract in an editable (Microsoft Word) format, Please Click Here. Also, if you would like to use an Amortization Chart (like what we used to help create this contract) Please Click Here.

Please note, this document was designed and created specifically for our situation, so not everything will apply to you. We still recommend having a property lawyer look at this contract after you have edited it. It will still be considerably less expensive having them proof it than creating a new contract.

If you can benefit from our experiences, please take advantage of them.
We are thanking God and Enjoying the day! Have an Awesome day yourself.
~Chais & Shawna Meyer

PS. If you don’t have Microsoft Office which is needed to edit these document types, go to Open Office’s website and download their Open Source program for your computer. It’s free and does the same things Microsoft does.

Okay, this is going to be a little bit of a rant along with some praise (just a little fore warning).

I installed Quickbooks 2009 for windows on my mac today (that right there is ironic). The install went great and the video demonstrations were pretty cool. They taught me how to do all the basic crap, customize Quickbooks for myself, blah, blah, blah… The part that I had a really hard time with (meaning I was super annoyed) was registering my product.

I know, I know…registering my product? I’m really growing up in the world aren’t I…no more pirated software. I now have software that I can actually register (without any sort of crack). “Since I have this legal software, the registration process will be a breeze” I thought.

As it turns out, the registration process was harder than setting up my entire company file in Quickbooks and 5 times more time consuming. Here were the steps:

1. You must register to use quickbooks past 30 days, otherwise it won’t function anymore
2. To register you have to call into quickbooks, no more online simple registration (it requires an authorization code or something).
3. I make a call into quckbooks to their “Product Registration line” (a special number for ONLY product registrations…if that’s true why did I wait 20 minutes on hold?)
4. Wait 20 minutes on hold while listening to pleasant Intuit advertisements
5. Finally get through to their AMAZING India Phone support and the man greets me, “Our Ju Habbing A Goojd jDay!?!
6. He and the conversation are very pleasant (despite me having to ask him about 15 times, “can you repeat that please?”).
7. Until…He tries to sell me some additional support options…
8. …He continues to try to sell me additional support options…
9. …He keeps trying to sell me additional support options (I am not even screwing with you).
10. Literally, 5 minutes later (Chais, calm down and take a breath…the phone call is over), he gives me my Authorization #.
11. YAY!!! I Cheer because I can finally hang up!

Wow, I just spent 30 minutes on a phone call trying to register my $199.95 retail legal product (no wonder people steal software, it’s cheaper and they don’t mess with phone crap. By the way, I don’t agree with software piracy!). What has happened to customer service? Oh, I forgot…Customer service is always a phone call away with Intuit, for $69.95 a phone call (or just $39.95 a month)!

Now that I’m registered, I am going to use quickbooks for my sole proprietership business as well as my other businesses. Well it is a pain in the ass the figure out the sole proprieter part of things if you use only one checking account for your business and your personal bills and expenses. I did a little research and found 2 good links that helped me out, hopefully it will do the same for you. Here it is! (the 8th one down)! And here is a link to explain how to set up an owners draw.

I love the product, not the customer service. I love having my finances being organized in such a friendly way, I hate that I rely so much on my computer system. I will do my best with what I have and share what I learn along the way!

Have an awesome day and a great night, and don’t let the Intuit bugs bite. (wow, that was an awesome ryme!)
~ Chais Meyer

Multi-Level Marketing, Pyramid Structures, or Pyramid Schemes have a very interesting business dynamic.  Looking at this system of business as a business structure, I believe it is one of the best structures around. If we can apply the MLM principals in our daily lives, we can grow to be extremely successful (personally and professionally).  If you don’t know what this type of business structure is click here to find out.

Why do I believe that MLM is such a great system?

1. If you truly care about providing someone with a worthwhile product or service and helping them (the people that you helped get into your organization) do a better than yourself, you will be rewarded from their successes.
2. You can have an organization / business that doesn’t need to do external advertising to make sales. Is there a better type of marketing in the world than getting a single, excitable, sneezing person pumped up about your product or services? My answer, NO!
3. On the same advertising note, your product or service can reach the unreachable customer. Why? Because they are getting told about your product by their friends, not by your thousands of ad dollars that get sent to the advertising gods, hoping that someone will see your ads and act. [Unreachable Customers: listen to iPods instead of the radio, surf the web for news instead of reading a newspaper, DVR their TV shows and skip the commercials rather than sitting through 5 minutes of ads for their show to get back on]
4. This business system doesn’t require any extra hours on your part, it actually requires less. If I can get 5 people ready to sell my product or service in one month and they can get 5 more people each in another month, we now have 31 people (including myself) in two months that are ready to sell my product or service. Did I have to train all 30 new people? No, I trained 5 people, made sure they knew their stuff and they did the rest of the work. Why did they care about telling more people about this product or service? The answer to that question can be summed up with #1.
5. Anyone can get involved! You don’t need a college education (I hate college! That’s a different story) to get trained on a specific product or service. You don’t need a college education to get others excited about what you are selling or providing for them.
6. People are only as successful as they choose to be. They put in the work and they get rewarded for it (and so do the people that trained them)! This beats paying someone as an hourly employee for them to sit on their butt and do nothing all day.

After hearing the reasons why I like MLM, can you think of the ways we can apply it to our personal and professional lives? Think about it…if we can use this same structure to work for us in our daily lives, we might be able to get a lot more accomplished.

Have an Awesome Day!

~Chais Meyer

I am working with an investment property manager named Matt Meister. He sends a weekly report and email to everyone he is working with. Here is his last email, I liked it so much I thought I should share it.

"Hello Everyone,

Matt Meister"

Thanks for Reading and Have a Great Day!

~Chais

Anjunabeats, for all of you that love this amazing trance, Above and Beyond now has a iTunes podcast to listen to their music.

Go figure, a week after I give detailed instructions on how to get their music from their website, they come out with an easy way to download it.

Oh well, it’s easier for both of us now. Just go to iTunes Store and search for “Above and Beyond: Trance around the world”, and subscribe away. Whenever there is a new show, it will automatically download to your computer.

We’ll talk soon and happy working!

~Chais

I am realizing a few things about my life: I have bad credit because of my irresponsible past, I no longer work for an employer and I depend upon my wife’s and my work habits for how we live, and I have very few professional relationships for help and advice.

I came to terms with it.

Now I’m doing something about it.

I met with a banker today that allowed me to ask every question under the sun that had to do with my wife’s and my future. So I did, and the nice man from Wells Fargo Business Banking Department Answered my questions.

[C] = Chais Meyer, [W] = Wells Fargo Man - [Below is a paraphrased version of our conversation]

[C] What are some steps I can do to help fix my credit score (besides paying bills on time)? I want it to be easier to get a mortgage for future real estate investment properties?

[W] A Main tip for your credit score to be top notch is called the 50% rule, do not have more than 50% of your total
available credit card liability used. Stay under that amount and that will do two things, You will be using credit in a positive way (building credit), and You will not be abusing it (maxing your cards out) and the credit card companies will see those as a huge positives. Another thing to consider is your limit on credit cards. If you have $20,000 available credit on 4 different cards, to creditors that is saying that any given moment you could (only if you wanted to) spend $80,000 dollars on whatever you want (bad news).

[C] While I am working on my credit, to get it up where it needs to be, what can I be doing in the meantime to build a relationship with the local banks (getting ready to borrow money for investments)?

[W] One thing that will really help is a CD Guaranteed note , purchase a CD (for a value of $250-$1000, a small amount) and use it as collateral on a personal loan from your bank. [side note: if you were to save up $1000 and purchase 2 CDs @ $500 a piece, from 2 different banks, and then use those CDs to get a $500 note (loan) from each bank, you would then be able to use the loan money from the banks to pay off your loans monthly. This Process is guaranteed to build your credit (as long as you pay on time) and build professional business relationships.] A very easy way to help yourself out for the future.

[C] So, after I have built some professional relationships and have been working on my credit, what are some rules that I need to know before I come to a bank for a mortgage?

[W] The main question we ask ourselves is, is there enough cash flow to be able to afford this extra payment? Debt Service Coverage ratio : What is the ratio of income compared to your total monthly debts (not including household utilities, etc.) ? We look at the loan payment for the Mortgage, Property taxes, etc. Your bare minimum debt service coverage ratio should be 1.25. [click on the link above for a more detailed description.]

[C] O.k., the last thing, What kind of down payment will I need to have to purchase an investment property?

[W] It all depends on who is purchasing it (Personally or through a business entity ), and if the owner will be living in it or not.

1) If a business entity is purchasing a property and it is owner occupied, you can expect to pay at least 20% down.

2) If a business entity is purchasing a property and it is not owner occupied, you can expect to pay at least 25-30% down.

3) If a person is purchasing a property and it is owner occupied, you can expect to pay at least 10-20% down.

4) If a person is purchasing a property and it is not owner occupied, you can expect to pay at least 40% down.

This was a great meeting and very informative, Thanks to the Wells Fargo Man for giving us a little insight in the banking world. I hope this time spent will help others that have an interest in real estate investments and getting your life in order.

~Chais Meyer