• Track hours of virtual employees
• See how those hours are being allocated to projects
• See “twitter like” updates on each of those projects
• Ability to have a manager quickly see what everyone is working on, and follow up with those individuals efficiently
• Have the CEO be able to be quickly involved on any major decisions that are going on with projects
• Get an overall report on what everyone is doing
• Have individuals be able to quickly collaborate on issues virtually
• They do not want to spend the cost remotely of SalesForce.com ($50/month/user)
• Not platform specific
• Had a mobile app

Organizational Psychology would be the place to start with discovering the answer, but I’m going to go a different direction.

Let’s start with back into the number. For optimum balance and building yourself, there is health, education, emotional & spiritual foundation. Parts of this assessment of time is my opinion on how much time should be spent, but I’ve provided some support resources. Let’s see what would go into each category per day:

Health – 10hrs

• 7 hrs uninterrupted sleep according to a study by the Archives of General Psychiatry on mortality and sleep, unless you are doing polyphasic sleep
• 1hr exercise – This time is all inclusive. I’m not saying what needs to go within that time frame, but you need to burn >4200 kcal/week for lowest heart disease risk. It is also recommended to have about 150-300 minutes per week.
• 1hr eating – It surprised me but the average time per day is only 65 minutes total per person
• 1hr hygiene – that includes brushing teeth, getting ready for work, showers, etc.

• 1.5hrs learning – This covers reading, listening, or watching the news, podcasts, books, blogs, etc. (of course if it’s part of your job, it doesn’t count)
• 1hr maintaining life – balancing budget, cleaning house, shopping, groceries, etc.

• 3hrs family time – This covers direct & immediate family & vacations to family, and an assumption you have a child 1
• 1hr Leisure – hanging out with friends 1
• 0.75hr Meditation / Spiritual time - There’s value according to the Cleveland Clinic 2

Screen Sharing – TeamViewer.com

I’m not going to be paying $50 / month for GoToMeeting, so I use TeamViewer. There are many apps on my computer that I might need to run to get specific data from for a presentation, but I just need to see it, not download anything. This is when I need Screen Sharing.

1. Go to TeamViewer.com
2. Install it on your home computer
3. Set it up so you have a password to log on to it remotely
4. Set Preferences to have it turn on when you log on to the computer (So if your computer at home restarts, you can automatically get access.)
5. Go back to TeamViewer.com and Click the Web Login button at the top right of the screen
6. Setup an account
7. Login online
8. Turn on your TeamViewer
9. Click Show TeamViewer
10. Get the ID number from it
11. On the Website, Add a new Partner
12. Click TeamViewer-ID and type in the ID number from your computer
13. Create an Alias
14. Type in the password that you setup initially on step 3
15. Now install TeamViewer on your iPhone or iPad
16. Click PartnerList in your App
17. Login with you details from step 6
18. You should now see your Alias from step 13, If you click it you should now see your desktop
19. Now you can see your desktop from anywhere in the world. That wasn’t so hard!

I was able to sell my first venture at a young age, but it didn’t allow to me to actively invest in every idea I wanted to. So I went and built another 2 firms, which I believe will allow me to build my wealth to that ultimate goal. But let’s look at which makes more sense towards building financial freedom: building a venture or getting a career?

I’ll give you the conclusion first: It could be both, but it mainly depends on you.

The Career Path: Up front you will need a strong collegiate education. The better the school, the better the probability of a better job. You will pile on the debt up front in most cases, and you should probably do your masters so you stand out. Then you’re onto your job hunt. If you’ve got the right education, getting a job isn’t that hard. I only say this because there are tens of thousands of job openings in technical fields. Of course the trick is to get the right education. Let’s say that you do, and you get your entry level job. You start working, and hopefully you start saving and investing immediately. You work your ass of and you keep building your nut, and you are very fiscally conservative and you work for 40 years straight, and let’s assume a steady growth of your investments, which once again in this world is not necessarily impossible, but definitely easy.

Let’s give you the benefit of the doubt that you’ve saved $5MM by the time you retire. It may sound like a lot, but if you’re getting 10% compounding annual growth and adding $500 a month to your pile, in 40 years you’ve got over $5MM. Alright let’s start retiring, and not adding anything to that pile, but reinvesting 50% of the returns, and taking out 50%, so now you’ve got a 5% compounding rate instead of 10%, which means in your first year you’re pulling out around $250k per year, not taking taxes into consideration. Sounds awesome! Right?

Let’s go the venture route. First factor is that you are, or should be doing something you’re 100% passionate about. If not, what’s the point. Of course that’s a first huge bonus over going down a career path in many cases. Now if you do get a job or go to college to purely educate yourself about the industry you want to jump into, this is definitely a road to take as well because you’ll get to meet people in the space, learn about the industry, see how it works, and get paid at the same time. However this could take a lot of years, and if you go to college it could mean piling on the debt to start.

So you jump in, and you quickly find out that unless you’ve got a fast growth venture idea, a small business person will definitely work harder  to make a living, and will not be able to effectively grow the value of their business. Franchises are an exception, because you are building more units of small businesses that are growing the overall value of the company. The fast growth venture idea most likely means that you have to give up equity in your business to key personnel and investors. In the hundreds of ventures we’ve worked with, we try desperately to maintain at least 20% ownership of the company at the end of the day. However this means if you want to get to that same $5MM pile, you need to grow the value of the company to at least $25MM. In a report by SoftwareEquity.com Jan 2010, the median pure play SaaS venture multiple was 26.6 EBITDA, so that means in our scenario you need a company that is generating about $950k EBITDA per annum.

So how long will it take you to get to about $1MM in earnings per year? Well their estimate was 16.3% TTM (Trailing Twelve Month) EBITDA growth as of January 2012. So let’s say in your first year you generate $100k, and then grow at 16.3% EBITDA each year from there, it will take you 14 years to get to over $950k EBITDA. Obviously there are huge assumptions I’m making, but from personal experience, it should be faster than this rate, not less. I’m also being biased towards a very high multiple industry, which personally are the only ones I look at.

So 14 vs 40 years? I’m not saying that it would happen this way perfectly, and I’m not taking into consideration your personal salaries each year and that associated life style. I’m also not factoring in failure rate, but if I was able to try several times and failure and waste even 10 years of my life trying, I’d still be ahead by over a decade.

At the end of the day, you need to focus on the present, mid-term, and long-term future and keep an alignment so you keep true to yourself. If any of those pulls you out of order, then you are not doing the right thing for yourself. It does not matter how much you are getting compensated. Money is only part of the equation. If you are getting compensated for something that is not in alignment with who you are, then you are not being authentic to yourself.

Many may argue against me and say that they need to life at a certain level to maintain their life, and I understand that especially having a family of my own, but even then, it is still more important to stick to your values.

I think the conclusion is obvious. Do what you know is the right thing to do, and don’t compromise your values. It is as simple as that.

Answer: LLC

I recently sat down with a new startup that wanted to get our help to coach them through the growth process of their software company. A friend of theirs mentioned that their lawyers has set them up as an S-Corporation. I asked them why. Not terribly surprisingly they didn’t know exactly other than their lawyers had told them to.

I had obviously wondered myself when starting my first company. For myself, and almost every company that we work with, we needed to raise investment capital and were looking to get acquired in the future. We were not planning on creating a PPM, we were planning on raising capital from private high net worth individuals who had experience in investing and had been in the similar industry, and from VCs.

I’m sure you can do all the research you want about LLCs, C-Corps, and S-Corps and see the comparisons between the two, but there is one main reason that we like LLCs. You can have multiple types of ownership and it is flexible for how profits are distributed.

Although some have stated that an LLC is not as clean as an S-Corp in terms of raising capital, if you’re dealing with seasoned and sophisticated investors, then don’t worry, they’ll understand the value of the structure and why you want to have preferential abilities that you can have with an LLC.

S-Corps only have 1 class of stock. Investors want to have preferred treatment with their shares, and with an LLC you can write it any way that you want.

C-Corps have double taxation, so unless you’re going public, forget it.

If you want to find out more technical details between the two, Wikipedia has a pretty solid article on all of them.

• LLCs
• C-Corporation
• S-Corporation

As a note, we are not lawyers, so use your common sense and get a lawyer to finish the details.

Mike Zhang, founder of AirSoftMegastore.com, dropped out of business school at Berkeley at the age of 21 in 2008. 2 years later, Zhang built AirSoft to over $10MM in revenues. It is easy to say in retrospect that Zhang, Gates, Jobs, and a legion of other successful entrepreneurs dropped out of school to focus on something they were passionate about.

There are several components that factor into that decision, and it may not necessarily be just faith in your idea, but more importantly that you don’t believe that going to school will offer you any benefit. After finishing my education at Georgia Tech, I was on scholarship and decided to go for an additional degree in building construction. What I quickly realized is that there was absolutely no benefit that I would gain by staying in school for even the only 1 more year required to finish another degree. In fact, I felt that there would be a negative impact in my focus. For me it was my passion for artificial intelligence and it’s application in the hedge fund space with a strong team that I believed in that allowed me to take the leap.

But you can’t just quit for the sake of quitting, you need to have something you want to do with your life. In the case of entrepreneurs, we have something built in us that will not allow us to quit. We just drive forward and learn along the path till we make a break through.

Steve Jobs said it best when he said that the difference between entrepreneurs that succeed and fail are those who do not give up. It is as simple as that. Sure your idea may not be perfect day 1, but you need to keep pushing till you capture what it is that you were searching for.

The time for you to drop out of school has to be when it’s not really a question, you just know it’s the right decision without regrets.

By McKinsey Global Institute

Latin America is the most urbanized developing region, with 198 cities together contributing over 60 percentof regional GDP today. Yet Latin America’s largest cities are under considerable strain. If their performance doesn’t improve, they risk dragging down the region’s overall growth trajectory. To sustain growth, urban Latin America needs to emulate best-practice examples at home and around the world.

Read more »

Why the leap? Lawton showed his ability for creativity and enthusiasm and brining that to any concept. Though the market turn of ’08 put a dent in the vision, it sharpened his focus. He ended up leaning up operations and focused on an e-commerce model which he could do while working at Sage.

You can read about the ups and downs in the latest issue of Entrepreneur Magazine or catch it online here: http://ht.ly/7qvb9