The killer investment with A 100%+ ROI
Thinking about the stock market or real estate as an investment? Assuming that the fundamentals are excellent, I still have a better investment opportunity for you.
My favorite place to invest money — people!
Yes, hiring an employee is speculative and downright risky. If you do not already know what you are doing, you can lose every last dollar and more.
I could sit here working non stop for the next 10 years making money. My “to do” list is endless. That means I always have something for an employee to do. If you think you’ll have to work to find something for an employee to do, that just means you aren’t quite ready to invest in one.
Poor writing skills? Hire a writer. Can’t program? hire a programmer. Spending half your day doing repetitive tasks? hire a general helper.
I have always been a big believer in focusing on what you do best and paying others to do the rest. Spending a little time learning about the task is ok, but it should not be done at a cost that hinders the most profitable things you do.
When I look at the investment choices before me — buying websites, domain names, software, real estate, stocks, bonds, none of them looks anywhere near as good as hiring an employee. And as tempting as a fast new car is, I’d still rather hire another employee.
Great advice. In the past I’ve employed programmers full time and it’s really paid off, for instance I was paying over $1300 in server costs a month, I hired a programmer full time for 2 months at $3300 a month, he managed to change the back end from the crude MySQL and PHP coded by myself (and I’m the first to admit I don’t know PHP or MySQL!) to an advance system making the site static and having an admin panel that uses AJAX and can send the files to a whole host of good cheap hosting accounts with lots of bandwidth that has reduced my server costs to less than $450 a month, meaning I’ve save $850 a month - which soon adds up to his wage over those two months. Furthermore the site is now faster, and also more user friendly, which should also increase income.
Marx said it’s the workers who create the value of society, and the capitalists take surplus value off them. We wouldn’t class as either, we work off our own backs mostly but are subject to market forces which might mean we earn more, but also mean we are at the mercy of what happens in the international monetary market - if there is a recession we could lose our ability to work for ourselves. Extracting the surplus value of others when the goings good could mean we’re able to survive a recession by being a larger business which when it is forced to cost cut, doesn’t mean us having to quit being full timers.
Comment by Sean Spurr — May 8, 2007 @ 2:06 pm
Great post Andrew. I agree 100% and it’s something I’ve personally been exploring more recently.
I’d love to hear how you go about finding good people to hire full-time, or even freelance. But I guess that is the million dollar question.
Comment by Nick — May 8, 2007 @ 3:29 pm
Nice post and I would like to refine it further.
Most peopler hire a single programmer to do designs and programming. Not that there are exceptions but I am yet to find a single person who is good at designs and good at programming. Those two are separate specialities and needs to be treated so.
Comment by Software developer — May 9, 2007 @ 3:03 am
Ya, finding a reliable worker is the problem. Most programmers I’ve hired vanish shortly after starting work.
Comment by Chris Beasley — May 9, 2007 @ 8:54 am
I completely agree. This is a similar concept to delegation - concentrate on what you do best, and what you can achieve within the constraints you are working with.
Everything else should be done by someone else who can do a better job.
- Martin Reed
Comment by Community Building Blog — May 9, 2007 @ 9:41 am
Chris, try iwebmasters.com. I’ve had a programmer with them since January and I’ve had zero problems with him or the company. The process of hiring was a little rough, it took over a month while I was expecting a week tops.
Comment by Andrew — May 9, 2007 @ 2:12 pm
What a great post!
I’ve preached this offline for many years to people wanting to start their own small business. Some are so hard headed they’ll go bankrupt before hiring someone who is an expert at one aspect of a project.
Like spending the money on Quick Books, taking tutorials or offline classes and running the risk of making errors when they could have a CPA do it quicker and cheaper (not to mention with less errors) than the time it would take them.
Work smart, not hard!
Don
Comment by Don — May 9, 2007 @ 4:38 pm
Don, I say work smart and hard! But, working smart not hard will beat working dumb and hard any day.
Comment by Andrew — May 9, 2007 @ 7:47 pm