How’s everything going? It’s May and I hope that you guys are taking care of your mothers this weekend. Happy Mother’s Day!

Let’s jump into the epic piece of the week:

The Two Reasons Why You Aren’t Making Over $100K a Year @ Quick Sprout.

What’s my favorite part of this article?

“You don’t have to be the smartest person out there, but if you want to succeed you need to do whatever it takes to get the job done.”

I highly recommend this post as Neil breaks down why some folks make more money than others and what it takes to get ahead.

The carnivals:

Carnival of MoneyPros – (Step Away from your computer and go outside- Edition).

Carnival of Personal Finance – Happy Days Are Here Again Edition!

Carnival of Financial Planning B- May 10th.

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I’ve made so many mistakes in my personal and professional life, that it’s only fair that I share with you guys what you could learn from my mistakes.

We all make mistakes. That’s normal. What sucks is not knowing when you’re doing something wrong. How are you supposed to know that you’re on the wrong path when everyone tells you that you’re the best? This is why I love to receive harsh criticism. Just because someone is honest with you or doesn’t like every single idea of yours, it doesn’t make them a “hater.” We should be thankful for those that don’t sugar-coat.

Instead of calling critics “haters” we need to open our eyes. We can’t always be told that we are the best at everything.

This article is about the mistakes that I made and about how others helped me realize I was messing up. This isn’t about feeling sorry for yourself. It’s about fixing things.

What are 5 little known factors that could be killing your business?

1. Focusing on the wrong people.

What’s your target market? Who are you marketing to? Who do you want to reach?

The biggest issue is that most of us can’t answer this one question. It seems simple enough, but too often do we try to approach “everyone.” That’s unfortunately not a target market. You can’t please everyone. You don’t work for everyone.

You need to stop focusing on the wrong people. I focused on the wrong people for far too long.

How do you know if you’re focusing on the wrong people?

• There’s no specific target group.
• They have no money.
• They’re unresponsive.
• They don’t care enough.
• They have no access to resources.
• They can’t act on anything.
• The market group doesn’t exist.

It’s time to go after those that matter and want your help.

2. Selling the wrong product.

I’ve done this before. It’s easy to get lost in your own little world.

Are you selling the wrong product? First, how do you know if you’re selling the wrong product?

• No sales. 
• Nobody reacts.
• Nobody cares.

The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference. No reaction is the worst reaction. I embrace being hate. I enjoy being loved. No reaction sucks.

You need to stop selling the wrong product and offering the wrong services.

3. Looking in the wrong places.

Oh I’ve looked in the wrong places many times. Not just with business, but with life.

What are the wrong places exactly? It’s difficult to tell to be totally realistic. Nobody goes out of there way to look in the wrong place. It just sort of happens by accident. The best way to tell is if you keep on trying something and it doesn’t work.

My best tip here is to experiment with different ideas. You can try guest posting, Kijiji, Twitter, other blogs, and so on. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. I’m just suggesting that you don’t dump all of your resources into one place. Try everything out.

For my friend’s tattoo business, Facebook works amazing. For me, Facebook is just an excuse to make inappropriate jokes on everyones’ walls. For my one buddy, Kijiji helps him find clients. For me, well we won’t get into that.

4. Wasting time on things that don’t really matter.

There are just so many things that don’t matter at all. Seriously. I’m the king of wasting time on trivial things. Wasting time will only hurt the growth of your business. That means you get to help less people. You make less money. And you don’t make the impact that you were hoping to make.

What are the biggest time sucks?

1. Arguing with random people online.
2. Responding to pointless emails.
3. Research aka reading articles.
4. Marketing aka reading marketing blogs with the same tired advice.
5. Facebook. Enough said.
6. Social media marketing aka chatting about Dexter.

Please stop wasting time when you can’t afford to!

5. Losing focus.

It’s too easy to lose focus. There are distractions everywhere. The other night I went on YouTube and started watching old UFC fights for no good reason. I lost my focus and fell behind.

Once you lose focus, it might be near impossible to gain it back. Nothing seems to click. You’re in a slump and it feels like you’re going to be stuck forever.

I’m not going to be a hypocrite because I’m the king of losing focus. So um, I say, try your best to keep your eye on the prize!

Have any of these factors been holding you back? They’ve certainly held me back at one point or another.

“For the marketer, the freelancer, and the entrepreneur, the challenge is to reset your comfort level, to be okay with the undone, with the cycle of never ending.” — Seth Godin

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Last week, I highlighted most of what we had done during our annual meeting. One other thing I didn’t mention was our company shares valuation. Each year, we crunch the numbers together and assign a value to our business. For the first time in 5 years, the company value is lower than the previous year. That sucks!!!

How DO YOU VALUE NON PUBLIC COMPANY SHARES?

A classic method to value our business would be to take the net profit, adjust it with amortization and apply a multiplier. For example, our last year’s financial statement show a net profit adjusted with an amortization of roughly $40K. This means that, after taxes and all other expenses, our business generates $40K per year. If we use a multiplier to value our business, it would have to be 3 or 4 times the profits. Therefore, the company would worth between $120K and $160K. People who think that you can apply a big multiplier to value a company are not in the real world. You may think that your company is worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars or even a low 7 figure due to its big potential. Let me tell you; potential income worth only for the owner! A few episodes of Shark Tank or Dragon’s Denwill teach that!

We thought the classic valuation model wasn’t right for a web business. Especially because there is no way to appreciate the true potential of this business since we run it with only 20 hours/week (10 hrs from each partner).

HOW OUR VALUATION MODEL WORKS

If I had to sell my blog empire tomorrow, I would certainly base my asking price with the valuation model I use to buy blogs. According to this model, I could sell my sites for as high as four times the gross revenues. Since we broke the 100K figure for the third year in a row, I would not be afraid to ask for $500K. But I would certainly not sell quickly!

When we put a share value to our company, we decided to create our own business share valuation model. We thought it would be a good idea in order to:

#1 Keep the same model to see the shares value evolution through time

#2 Design a model considering both the real market and the potential of this business

#3 Establish a value for our shares upon our death as our wives would benefit from the life insurance we purchased.

Here’s our quick formula to determine the business value:

PAST 12 MONTHS GROSS REVENUES * 3 YEARS + CASH – SHORT TERM AND LONG TERM DEBTS

So we built a valuation model which considers the classic valuation model for websites (a multiplier of gross revenues) and added the cash and debts composites. We did that as we were sitting on over $60k in cash one year and we thought this was worth something. The situation is currently the opposite right now as we have corporate debts.

According to this model, our shares are worth $126,000 compared to $131,000 last year. It’s a drop of nearly 4% in a year. This is mainly due to a drop in our gross revenues. The drop is not astronomical, but when you look at our model, each time we lose $1 in revenues, it affects our business valuation by $3. Since we have concentrated on paying down our debts in 2012 and not growing our gross income, we affected our valuation model at the same time.

WHY I THINK MY COMPANY IS WORTH MORE TODAY THAN LAST YEAR

For the first time since we created our company in 2008, our revenues didn’t grow. Even worst, it has dropped by a few percent! Still, I’m convinced my company is worth more today than it was worth a year ago.

It’s been a while since we havebeen concentrating on diversifying our business and make it more sustainable. Almost 70% of our business model was based on private advertising only a year ago. This part of the business was continuously growing and I was even expecting revenues as high as $15K/month by the end of 2012. An important Google update happened at the beginning of last year and forced us to change our business model to survive.

Last month, we had our best month in term of gross income for almost a year! The best part is less than 25% of our income is now coming from private advertising! We even cleared some of our websites completely! We can now expect to receive money each month from various other sources:

Adsense

Book sales (Dividend Growth)

Small eBook Sales

Affiliate programs

Niche websites

Ad campaign brokering services

It is true that we made less money in 2012. But the point is that we are making more passive income than ever. We are making money from so many other sources that our business model is not dependent on anything anymore. We even suffered from traffic loss and are still making more money since we are able to attach our readers through our newsletter.

With the addition of videos, podcasts and a membership site by the end of 2013, I’m convinced that we will continue to break the $10K/month and eventually reach $15K/month in 2014. At that point, our business will be worth a lot more! Hahaha!

Readers, do you think my shares value worth more this year? Would you invest in such a company if you had the opportunity?

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I’m leaving both the personal finance and making money online worlds this morning for something that matters a whole lot more…

The Habs are in the playoffs!!!

Huh… right. It’s not where I wanted to go but you know I’m a diehard CH fan and we are better off not talking about yesterday’s game anyway… argh!

More seriously, I wanted to relate a quick story that happened to me last week. I with met some old work colleagues of mine while I was in Montreal. One of them lost someone very close just two months ago. She was telling me that it had changed her perception of things…

Why Do You Have To Work So Hard?

I wake up in the morning at 5am. Chow down a quick breakfast and hop on the treadmill. 1 hour later, I run into the shower before heading out to work. Before starting my day, I’m under the pressure to write one or two articles for my blogs. Then, I run the whole day and try to do as many things as I can and hopefully close a deal so I can increase my bonus. Once back home, we eat, play with kids, do the bath routine, put the kids for sleep and… watch hockey .

When I spoke with that colleague of mine, she was asking herself why the hell she runs all over the place to make sure everything was done properly. Accordingly, aligned with what society expects, losing someone definitely puts things into perspective.

So what’s the point of working so hard? To be free one day. What if the “one day” doesn’t happen fast enough? What happen if you leave everything else behind while you are desperately trying to reach this freedom?

I Learned That Lesson a While Ago

When I did my MBA back in 2008-09, things weren’t always rosy with my wife. We just had our second child and she was working full time while I was barely home long enough just to sleep a few hours. Between my online company, new day job and MBA studies, it was impossible to have time for family. This hurt us big time back then.

I was set to become a VP by the age of 30 and heading to financial freedom before the age of 40. My wife quit her job, I started to work four days a week in a job that I love and started to take care of my kids. We made these changes in our lives to both take care of ourselves. We started to take care of what truly matters.

Today, It’s Different

I’m still working hard and still have a crazy schedule. And this is nothing compared to what is going to happen this summer when I’ll coach my oldest son at soccer twice a week between a golf tournament and a happy hour for work.

But the difference is that each week, I take a moment to stop and not do anything related to work. I take a moment to enjoy life with my wife, play with my kids and relax. I guess this is probably where you can draw the line before going on a burnout!

There are some people putting their career first. They always have a good reason for this:

That’s the way it is in my working field

My boss will have my head if I don’t finish this

I need a good bonus to buy this or that (or pay off this or that)

In a few years, I’ll get a promotion and it will all be worth it

I’m in my prime; it’s the right time to climb the ladder

I’m not a lazy ass, I’m here to work

I love my job

Etc.

If you are part of this kind of people I don’t blame you, I don’t even judge you. After all, I was part of your gang not so long ago. But I can tell you one thing; one day you will wake up and the train you were running after will left the station without you. Don’t let this happen to you.

Today, take a moment. You don’t have to take the day off. Just take a few minutes and make a call to someone you love and tell him/her. Send a quick note from your so beloved smartphone. Plan a cool activity with your kids or with friends over the next weekend. Do something for people that truly matters to you… because they might be not be there when you will become available.

Have you ever felt that you are running for nothing? What have you done to change this in your life?

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Summer has hit Ontario! It’s the beginning of May and I already have a little tan going on. It went from being pretty cold to summer within one week. I’m not complaining. I’m loving it. I just come even more alive when the summer hits. How are things where you live?

Let’s check out some cool links from the past week:

Five Fast FAQs About Intermittent Fasting @ Roman Fitness Systems.

Have you tried this idea? I’ve been fasting for the longest time and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I skip breakfast, start my day, then I hit the gym. Once my workout is over, I finally eat. It’s tough at first, but totally worth it in the long run.

Scared Your Child Will Blow Their Savings? Consider a Custodial Account @ Good Financial Cents.

I’ve seen friends blow their parents’ money. It’s pretty sad. Don’t let this happen around you.

Finding The Motivation To Stay In Shape: A Conversation With Big Wave Surfer Laird Hamilton @ Financial Samurai.

Back to fitness. Are you motivated to stay in shape? I personally love to train and never miss a workout. My weakness is junk food and beers.

Carnival of Personal Finance: Disney World Edition.

If you liked this articles, you might want to sign for my FULL RSS FEEDS. Then, you will get my daily post to your email and can read it at any time. To subscribe CLICK HERE

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