PreneurCast is a marketing podcast. Author and marketer Pete Williams and digital media producer Dom Goucher discuss entrepreneurship, business, internet marketing and productivity.
This week, Dom talks to Pete about the MQT rule – Money, Quality, Time – both in its traditional use, where you pick two to control, then you have to accept the effect on the third; but also, you need to be aware which of these is holding up your projects.
Action Step: Think how your attitude to Money, Quality or Time is holding up a project, and then think how you can affect one or more of the three to move things forward.
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Dom talks to Pete about how MQT affects your projects
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Episode 072:
MQT – Money, Quality, Time
Dom Goucher: Hello everybody, and welcome to another exciting episode of PreneurCast with me, Dom Goucher, and him, Pete Williams.
Pete Williams: Hey, hey! How are you, big fellow?
Dom: Good, good.
Pete: Awesome!
Dom: Hopefully, all is well over there—is there anything to report immediately at the front of the show?
Pete: Just baby bumps, which is all exciting. So that’s all good. Other than that, just same old same old, slowly trying to take over the world.
Dom: You say, “Same old, same old,” but really, it’s not. It’s not that trivial, is it? For example, I notice on Audible this week (one of our favorite little sites) that you have a little announcement.
Pete: Yeah, it’s very cool. One of the few books that are going to be released on their Audible platform over the next few months is being released, and it’s the audiobook version of Media Strategies for Internet Marketers. That audio version is now available to download. It’s the first time the audiobook’s been available, it’s not available anywhere else right now except for Audible.
So if anyone’s interested, you can definitely go over to Audible.com. I think they’re going to be releasing it on Amazon and syndicating that very shortly there. But you can get it at Audible.com. And [Audible] being a sponsor of the show, you obviously have the opportunity to get it for free.
Dom: Yeah, that’s right. As a PreneurCast listener, if you go to AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast, then you get the offer of a free download as part of a trial membership. So if you haven’t already signed up, pop over to AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast, sign up and choose Media Strategies for Internet Marketers as your free download. So that’s quite a good tip—because that book is not just available on Audible is it?
Pete: No, there’s the print version that’s available on Amazon, and there’s the eBook, Kindle version, there’s a NOOK version. It’s available in all good online book retailers in eBook format and print format, but this is the audio version which is kind of cool.
Dom: Look at you, taking over the world, one format at a time.
Pete: Well, it’s one of those things. I guess it’d be really strange of me when I speak about Audible, my love for that service and how I devour so many books from them and so many books in audio format. It’d be very weird for me not to produce my own books (or have them produced, probably a better term) in audio format. So, it kind of had to be done.
Dom: Absolutely. And this is something that we absolutely believe in, which is that we walk the walk. If we talk about something, it’s because we do it rather than that we’ve heard about it and think it might be a cool idea. We have it first and let everybody else know that it’s okay, rather than let everybody else find it out for us.
Pete: Yup. I heard this really cool saying—on that, the other day, and I’m probably going to screw it up (as I often do). But it was something along the lines of: you wouldn’t go to a seafood restaurant and order steak. So why go to a business coach that has never actually run a business?
Dom: Alright, I’m working that one out.
Pete: Well, I think it’s that you wouldn’t go to a seafood restaurant to order steak, because you go to a seafood restaurant. If you want a steak, you go to a steak restaurant, because that’s what they specialize in, that’s what they do. If you go for a business coach, you want to go to it from a business consultant or get advice from a business advisor or guru or whatever the term might be.
From someone who actually runs real-world businesses like you do. Because there are so many people out there talking about marketing and the only business they’ve ever run is a business on teaching people, how to make money by teaching people how to make money.
Dom: Yeah, absolutely. I understand, but I think that might be what my old English teacher would call a bit of a ‘mixed metaphor.’
Pete: Ah, see, it was much more articulate when I heard it the first time. I’ll try and find the original quote and we’ll put it in the show notes.
Dom: Let’s do that. Okay, moving quickly on! This week, believe it or not, I have something that I want to talk about. It’s a little something from my past. You very often bring things in from your past, things that you’ve learned, amazingly in your few years.
I remember this from one of my earliest days working for Xerox, actually, and this is something that came from one of my managers. He used to talk about it. I’m going to talk about it, originally in the context that it came from, and then I’m going to map it to a more kind of current issue that I’ve been seeing.
It’s a concept that we always used to talk about in relation to building software systems. So please everybody, bear with me, and don’t switch off. It was a concept he always used to say to me, “There are three things that apply to any project, and that’s money, quality and time.”
He always used to say, you can pick two, but then the third one is out of your hands. I’m going to modify this a little bit and say you can ‘control’ two, but then you have to accept what happens to the third. So let me give you an example of that just to frame it, give it a little bit more context.
I said this comes from software systems development and using big teams of people, and clients paying money for things and things like that. But it does apply to individuals and entrepreneurs. The example I would give to just start this off is if you want something to be high quality and you want it to be done quickly, then you’re going to have to accept that it’s going to cost you more money.
Pete: Yup, because all those three have to balance out somewhat.
Dom: Yeah, that’s right. The three have to balance out. So if you want to control the quality and you want to control the time, then in a positive constraint, in a positive way, then you’re going to have to accept that the cost, the money side of the equation is going to have to go up to balance those two out.
Pete: Yeah, because you’re obviously having to pay for someone who’s highly skilled, and then generally what comes with high skill is someone who’s very busy or in demand. So, to obviously get at the top of their queue, you have to pay a premium for that.
Dom: That’s right, and also the high-skill brings to bear against those other two factors. If you want high quality and it done quickly; well, the higher the skill that someone has, the higher of quality of job you should get from them, and also the higher the skill they have, the more efficient they are in doing that job, so the more quickly it will get done.
But highly skilled, professional people cost more money, simple as that. So that’s a good real-world example of someone trying to get something done within these three constraints. But let’s move the equation around a bit. If you want high-quality and you don’t want to pay a lot of money, then you’re going to have to accept that it might take a little bit longer.
Pete: Yeah, because you’ll be the person who gets done in the down time.
Dom: So for example, yes, you might go to the same person but without the same sense of urgency. So in order to pay slightly less, you’ll do them a deal and say, “Look, just get it done for me when you can.”
But you might also maybe hire somebody less skilled, so maybe it takes a few more times round the review loop. Maybe they don’t get it right the first time, maybe they’re just not that efficient—all these things because you’re not prepared to pay as much money or you can’t.
Pete: I think it’s that point we’ll probably come back to it a little bit more later in the show today.
Dom: Absolutely. This is quite scary. This is something that’s probably 15 years old in terms of a concept I learned a long time ago.
Pete: I think it’s also a term the Project Management Triangle. In my textbook world, I’ve sort of heard of it described as that. Some people may have heard of it with that sort of title.
Dom: Yeah, it’s absolutely not a new concept. I haven’t done any research on where it came from; I just remember it from a particular guy. I’m actually going to call it out and say the guy’s name was Tim. He was probably my first real full-time manager when I worked at Xerox.
He was a well-read guy like yourself, and I’m sure it’s an age-old project-management principle. It’s not the project-management aspect that brought it to my mind, and I’m going to bring it home in a minute with this. But the third example, because these three examples are all important regardless. If everybody switches off at the end of these three examples, hopefully they’ve still learned something.
We started with, if you want high quality and you want it quickly, you’re going to have to accept that it’s going to cost money. If you want high quality and you want a reduced cost, you’re going to have to accept that it might take longer. And the last one is if you want it quickly at a reduced cost, then quality is going to suffer.
Pete: Of course you’re going to find someone who’s not really highly skilled who has spare time who can do it for you on the cheap, and obviously that’s going to mean poor quality.
Dom: Yep, and all through our real-world examples there and the things you brought to bear, those examples are about how much money you’re willing to pay to buy a particular quality of service. But that’s not necessarily the only application of this principle, and that’s why I want to talk about it.
Pete: Yeah, and I think that’s great. Because most people, when they’ve turned or heard this triangle before, they’ve seen it in the context of design work or project management. But obviously, where you want to take this and where I think the discussion should go is something completely different, so let’s absolutely go there.
Dom: So just to clarify—it does come from that world. It comes from a software-engineer and a project-management world, or even design-work world—all those examples are applicable, and it matters and everyone should pay attention to it from that point of view.
If you’re hiring or spending money on a skill or a resource, then that equation is very important to pay attention to, and you should be prepared to accept one of those three situations—but it doesn’t have to only apply to that.
The one that I want to talk about today—and I’m not going to go on about it, this show might be a little bit shorter than usual because it’s a very clear point—is that it’s not the money aspect, but it’s the time aspect. This is one of the things that I want to bring to the front because time doesn’t have to be the elapsed time to get the job done.
In the original example, it was. It was, “I want this built by then, so I maybe need to spend more money to get a higher-skilled person to keep the quality,” or, “I need to spend more money to get more people to work on it at the same time,” and that will affect the elapsed time from now to when the job’s finished.
But if you look at this more from an entrepreneurial point of view, it might not just be the elapsed time; maybe it’s the time that an individual member of your team spends on the job or even how much time or effort you personally put into that job. And this is a big topic that we’ve talked about a lot, individually, you and I.
Dom: Over the last few months, and it’s contributed quite a lot to a big project that we’re working on right now that we’ll talk about again, I’m sure, soon; but the amount of time that you as an individual put into something is a big issue to an entrepreneur.
Pete: Absolutely.
Dom: A lot of people get into this trap, and this is a secondary issue, but they get into this trap of doing everything themselves or spending a lot of time on something that they don’t necessarily need to spend time on. And that’s something that gets ignored. So I want to bring the attention back to that. And I don’t know—is that where you thought I was going with this?
Pete: Yeah, absolutely. Can you give more of an example, a real-world [example], how this applies that’s kind of tangible?
Dom: Yeah. Classic example, which is something you yourself speak to a lot, is hiring people, hiring out-taskers or even outsourcers that are going to become a member of your team.
Pete: Freelancers.
Dom: Freelancers and that kind of thing.
Pete: Even internal stuff.
Dom: Even internal stuff. And you talk about hiring for attitude and training for skill.
Pete: Yep.
Dom: Now, if we look at that from these equations; let’s just dig into that, an example of training someone for skill versus hiring for the skill. If you were to hire for skill, which is basically going back to those three examples that we talked about at the beginning—and this is just literally in terms of the whole process.
If you hire for skill, then you will find someone quickly because it’s easier to say, “I want somebody who can make Keynote slides. I want someone that can edit video.” The jobs will get done quickly, literally, because they’re more proficient at the job.
Pete: They’re going to come in, ready to roll.
Dom: They’re going to come in ready to roll. So literally, your project will start sooner, each individual job that gets done will finish sooner. You’ll be able to maintain that quality because they’re professionally skilled people, but you will pay more. Now, that’s a little more expanded version of what we were talking about at the beginning; but let’s look at this and flip it on its head.
If you’re willing to spend some more time and some more effort of your own (and our focus is on the individual, we’ll get a little more esoteric with this later); but just your own time, you’re willing to spend a little more time and effort on your own to train someone or to have someone trained, then yes, it will take more time and effort on your part. But on the end, it will, in monetary terms, cost less to get that acceptable level of quality of output.
Pete: You could also, though, at the same time—not to throw a big spanner in the works and go completely off tangent too early in the show today—but you’ve also got the opportunity cost that you want to factor in there; that sometimes training someone up to a particular task and then investing the time of X weeks or months to get a project completed to try and get the budget low, what is the opportunity cost you’ve had to expend while you haven’t had that outcome?
Like if it’s building a website or it’s writing a sales letter or it’s doing a direct marketing campaign, if it takes you an extra six weeks to get that outcome than it would have been if you hired someone at a premium, that six weeks is lost opportunity of sales. How much is that actually costing you as well?
Dom: Absolutely, and that’s great. That’s exactly the kind of thinking that I’m trying to apply to this concept, to get people to look at those, each one of those factors, money, quality and time, not in that flat-out project management sense, but from an entrepreneurial mindset.
I don’t think this is a tangent at all; it’s exactly where I’m trying to go with this. It breaks away from that last example that I gave, but it does pick up another aspect and make people look at it from a different point of view. So yeah, from the money aspect, now, when you say that, you’re saying that if it takes a longer elapsed time, are you willing to let that opportunity go?
You’re basically talking about losing money; not spending money, but losing potential opportunity, losing the opportunity. Similarly, let’s look at moving each one of these around, around that example. We need it to happen quicker before we lose money. We need it to happen quicker.
What are we willing to give up? Because you pick two and leave the third one. So are we willing to spend more money to make it happen quicker to keep a high quality? Or are we willing to deliver what we believe is a lower-quality product—it may not be lower quality, but maybe it’s less of the volume of the product, less of the scale of product, in order to keep the cost down and make the time short.
And that’s what I’m just trying to get across in this episode; what are we willing to do, what are we willing to move around? And I think it’s really helpful for people to look at anything from those points of view. If you move one or you’re willing to change one, what does it give you back?
Because I see this a lot; I see a lot of people who are like, “Oh, I’m not ready.” In fact, right now, literally, just before the show I was sending an email to a client about a website. It’s not really a client, it’s a friend of mine, I’m helping him out; but they spent three weeks picking photographs. Three weeks picking photographs.
We’re now up to the wire, and this weekend the site needs to be finished so that they can link an external site, which is a traffic-generation thing to their website. So they have the opportunity to be listed on an international listing site to drive traffic to their website, and they’ve spent three weeks spending photographs.
Pete: Which is probably going to do very little to conversion.
Dom: Which is probably going to do very, very little to conversion, and if they don’t do it, they will miss this window of opportunity completely; literally, they will not be able to be listed on this site because they don’t have a website. I’ve said two things to them, one of them is this equation, “Look, you need to lower the quality here.”
Pete: Did you swear at them, at least?
Dom: No, I did not swear at them.
Pete: See, you’re nicer than I am.
Dom: I’m English, I’m polite. I am. Yep, I try not to make people cry on the phone, and I try not to swear at them either. But seriously, I just said, “Lower your bar.” And one of the things that goes along with this, by the way, is that as I said to them, “We can put up something that does the job today.
Get that link fixed, get it done. This is the internet; so tomorrow, we can change it. I can change it in half an hour; I can change it in five minutes. We can change it. It doesn’t have to be perfect first time.
Pete: Yeah, I completely agree.
Dom: But it’s this willingness to look at each one of these aspects from a different perspective, and be willing to trade one for the other and to realize, what is the most important thing here? Very often, it’s actually the time that’s the most important.
In terms of making money, it’s very often the actual time to implementation. That’s your example; the little tangent we’re currently on is about time to implementation, it’s the opportunity and the cost of missing that opportunity or being there when the opportunity is ripe and being ready for it.
I was just looking at quality there; but if we’re looking at money, this is another thing that does people’s heads in; for example, they’ll say (this is a personal favorite and a friend of ours, Ed Dale, talked about this a lot) listing a product on the Apple iBooks or Newsstand platform.
When the Newsstand platform came out, the digital magazine delivery platform (which is an amazing platform), a lot of people were running, screaming to the hills, waving their arms over their heads saying, “Apple want to take 30% off me.” And this is the exact phraseology, “They want to take 30% of me.” So people were literally not listing products on Apple.
Pete: Well, same with App Store; Apple takes 30% of every single app sale.
Dom: App store, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And this is another conversation for another time, and I think we should talk about this separately—ignoring the actual secondary opportunities that those kinds of platforms bring to you (which is a huge topic, and we really should dig down into it).
But just focusing on that mindset, “Apple are taking 30% off me.” Um, no, Apple are giving you a massive user base in a relatively small marketplace of competition and they have the credit card details and instant-payment capability for every single one of these people. So anybody that sees your product can click a button and very often, other than clicking a box saying, “Yes, I actually did want to buy that,” that’s it.
That’s all it takes for them to buy your product. Now, as Ed says, “I would happily give 30% all day long and twice on Sundays to anybody who could bring me that kind of business opportunity.” It’s just looking at things from a different point of view, and that money thing holds so many people up.
Pete: Yep, as my fax machines go up in the background, sorry guys.
Dom: Didn’t hear a thing, but thanks for pointing that out.
Pete: To go back a little bit to what you were talking about before, because there’s a lot that I could say about that Apple thing, and we’ll definitely do that in an upcoming episode in the next couple of weeks because there are definitely some bullet points I just wrote down on my pad then that I want to address in that episode.
But to go back to a point you made before, and a great saying that, “money follows speed of implementation;” money is going to follow speed of implementation, and what that means is as you were saying; the quicker you get something done and dusted, the quicker you’re going to have money coming into your business.
And this is really the internet marketer, opportunity-seeker mentality versus entrepreneur and what I speak about quite a bit on stage at internet marketing events; that you have to treat your business as a real-world business. I know a lot of our listeners aren’t even in this internet-marketing space.
They’ve got real-world businesses selling real-stuff to real people in real bricks and mortar stores; and they’re lucky, in a way, because they kind of get this. If you own a telecommunications company and you install phone systems, you realize that you’re not going to be the one who’s going to work out how to do window signage on the front of your retail store.
You realize you’re not going to be the guy who’s going to service your technician’s vans and vehicles—you’re going to leave that to somebody else. But in this internet marketing, online-marketing world, for whatever reason, for whatever sort of sugarcoated crap that have been shoved down people’s throats, you’ve got to learn how to do it all.
You’ve got to learn how to set up your WordPress website, you’ve got to learn how to use the autoresponder, and you’ve got to learn how to do the layout of the sales page. But in a real-world business, you’d never do that. You’d focus on the core elements of what’s important and then you let other people take care of the stuff that’s not your core skill set.
But the analogy is, you’d work at how to manage your hosting account; which is the equivalent in my mind of doing the mechanics of the car fixing when the vans get a flat tire or a flat battery or a broken cog. You’re going to work out how your website lays out; so you’re going to learn how to grab a hammer and nails, and do your shop fitting out and do your store signage.
Of course you’re not! But for some reason, when people want to start this online business world, they think they have to do it all. How that little rant relates to this MQT process is that sometimes, if you are a start-up entrepreneur, you try and do everything, which is fine, because money is tight and you’ve got time but you don’t have money.
But realistically, what really happens is it’s a slight different equation. You’re going to save money, yes; but your time is going to blow out ridiculously long. You’re going to learn something you’re probably not going to have to do twice. And realistically (let’s be honest about it), your quality is going to be crap as well if it’s the first time you’re doing something, because you’ve got to learn how to put up a website.
Until you’ve done something five, six, seven times, you’re not even relatively proficient at it. In this internet marketing or opportunity-seeker, or start-up business world where you’re not being a serious entrepreneur and looking at it seriously, you are affecting this money-time-quality matrix more so than traditionally. It’s worse for those sorts of people.
Dom: Absolutely, and this is kind of the next point that I’ve got. You did go a little bit off on one of your little rants there (that I totally agree with, by the way, I totally agree). But again, we’ve talked about Core versus Mechanics before in a separate show. I think anybody that hasn’t kind of got that, listen to that show, really. It’s vital that people go and listen about Core versus Mechanics.
But you’re right, it creates this almost Bermuda Triangle out of the MQT [money, quality, time], out of the money-quality-time equation, because it really messes with people’s heads, what they need to spend their time on. That’s really what I was leading to with my “you spending your time.” A more concrete example of that, to me, is that element of that training, training people or just communicating with an out-tasker.
Because this is the thing, to speak back to what you just spoke about and just to bring it forward to where I was going, a lot of people think they don’t have enough money to hire an outsourcer or an out-tasker. Now, I don’t want to be the big, ‘insist everybody outsources and out-tasks;’ but your example of, “Would you actually write your own signs and paint your own windows and things?” is a good one.
Let’s just look at that in the context of any kind of job instruction, any kind of providing instruction to people to get things down. We’ve talked already about the more highly-skilled somebody is, the more money it will cost you to hire them; and then we talked about, “Well, what if you hired for attitude and you were willing to train them,” which is great.
But what if you’re in a situation that you don’t know exactly what it is you want to do or you don’t know how to train them? That’s why you’re hiring them, as you would a sign-writer or somebody like that. Well, this is where that time factor comes back in and addresses quality and money as well.
If you are willing to put in the effort—not in doing the job, not in learning how to do the job, but in becoming good at specifying the job, being good at understanding exactly what needs to be done, what’s going to have the most leverage, what’s going to get you that business opportunity, what’s going to give you that speed of implementation, and then defining it clearly.
The more clearly you can define a job, the more clearly you can specify what needs doing; then interestingly, I’ve found this time and time again: the less you end up paying to get the job done.
The holy grail is that I can actually train somebody to do the job I want doing, and I’m in a very lucky position, and this is what, again, skews people’s minds; because they look at people like you and I and they say, “Oh, that’s not fair. You know how to do it, so you can train them.” I’m actually not talking about that, but let’s start at that end of the scale.
I’m lucky I can train people in the main or have historically been able to train people in the main to do the jobs I want to do. But I don’t even have to do that. But I have to do—and this is something that I’ve absolutely, with your help, I’ve been focusing more and more on is: I’ve been focusing on being better at specifying what I want to get done.
That is just as powerful; in fact, possibly more powerful. When you get good at specifying what you want to do, then you’re not leaving it to the experience and knowledge of the person you’re hiring to interpret what you’re saying, to come up with options. All these different things that you get from people that you pay a lot of money to.
If you just want something doing, as long as you can be clear about what you want doing, you can go on Fiverr.com. Classic example: let’s look at money-quality-time versus build a website. You start with, “I want a website.” Well, good luck to you, I hope you’ve got a big checkbook because you’re going to pay a very expensive web design consultant or somebody with a big name, a lot of money to come and ask you a lot of questions.
And in the end, you might get what you want. So there’s your money-quality-time. You’re going to pay a lot of money, and then you’re going to get a high-quality product in a reasonable amount of time. But if you’re willing to spend a bit of your time working out what you want and you eventually (I’m going to shortcut this) realize that you want to control the money and you want to control the time it gets down.
But you’re willing to accept maybe not the dream website that you have in your mind, then you could probably get to a point where, using a very quick implementation system like WordPress (which we basically use for everything that we do at a basic level; every website we build that’s basic, we use WordPress) and WordPress has this concept called themes. It’s like putting clothes on a Barbie doll, the theme is.
Pete: I love it! That is the analogy.
Dom: It literally is, isn’t it? It literally is putting clothes on a Barbie doll or an outfit on a GI Joe. You literally have this basic object and you flick through and you go, “Oh, I like that outfit,” and you take it off the rack and you put it on. That’s how you make a design fit a WordPress site. It literally is just like clothes, an outfit on a Barbie doll.
Pete: It’s funny, when you say outfit on a Barbie doll. The first thing that comes to my mind is that scene out of Clueless where Alicia Silverstone is going through her closet on the computer and then picking the outfit. What does that say about both of us?
Dom: I’m nodding, but I’ve never seen that film, so I’m going to leave you hanging on that one and carry on with my example.
Pete: Dude! Hang on. So you’ve seen The Princess Bride but you haven’t seen Clueless?
Dom: Yes.
Pete: Ah, dude. Can everyone chip in and just send donations to support [at] preneurgroup [dot] com? We’ll all chip in and buy you the DVD together. It’d be all about six bucks.
Dom: Thank you, thank you for that. I appreciate your concern about my cultural breadth. Meanwhile, back to the example.
Pete: I had the biggest crush on her.
Dom: So, money-quality-time. You’re willing to accept that this is not your dream website, but it needs to get done and you haven’t got a lot of money. If you can define that, that you can base what you want off of a WordPress engine and that you can pick basically a theme, which very often, by the way, these themes, these outfits for your website are free.
Then suddenly you can go on Fiverr.com, where people will do pretty much anything for $5. You can look for somebody who installs WordPress websites and say, “I want a WordPress website with this theme.” It will cost you $5.
Dom: Now please, anybody tell me, tell me you have $5. Tell me you can turn around and walk back out of Starbucks this morning. Don’t open the door or don’t do something, anything, and get that.
Pete: And the question is really, if you can’t afford $5, what are you doing trying to start a business? That’s being completely transparent about it.
Dom: Sorry, and I am going to go there with that, by the way, because I went a little off-tangent with my WordPress example. But this is my point—just by being willing to lessen your initial quality, you can meet your speed of implementation. And this is a secondary issue; this is rejoining the 30% of Apple, your perspective of Apple taking 30% off you.
That is this: a business is where you see an opportunity. Now, that opportunity, as far as I’m concerned, had better have a dollar value; otherwise, it’s not a business opportunity, it’s just a hobby. You see a dollar value. Now if you see a dollar value and you have a plan to get that dollar, that means that you should be able to map an amount of money and a reasonable attitude towards quality and time back to this project.
So if your project is not going to pay you $5, then yeah, it’s not a business. If it is going to pay you $5 or $50, or $500, as long as you get going and get moving and use your personal time, not focusing on learning about websites, learning about color schemes, learning about images, Photoshop to upload pictures and all that stuff.
If you spend your time defining the business plan, looking for the opportunity, planning the marketing, and putting that core value into that business; then really, seriously, $5 or $50, or even $500 for a website, as long as it’s the right thing, you’re not spending money; you’re just literally investing that money in that opportunity.
This is really the whole thing; I want people to stand back, I want people to look at each one of these things: money, quality, time—MQT. Look at your attitude to each one of these in the context of a business, in the context of being an entrepreneur, in the context of your time, your product, your business.
Look at which two matter the most and what you can do about that third one. Just to get (as Pete says, and I think) that money follows speed of implementation. Get yourself implemented; stop stopping yourself because of the money, or stop stopping yourself because of the time, or stop stopping yourself because of the quality, yeah?
Pete: Yep. Could not agree more.
Dom: Okay, so that is my action point for the week, is that look at MQT. Look at Money, quality, and time. Look at how one of those things is holding you up. Look at the other two aspects and look at which one you’re willing to move on. Or look at how you could rearrange this equation to your benefit.
Pete: Yep. Love it!
Dom: Alright. Awesome, folks, went on a little bit longer than I expected. I really thought it was going to be a short one. But hopefully, people have found some value. As always, folks, please drop us some feedback, either on iTunes (our personal favorite; we love iTunes comments in the various iTunes Stores around the world); pop over to PreneurMedia.tv where you will find all the shows, all the show notes, and even transcripts of all the shows.
So in whatever format you like to consume things, you can consume this podcast over at PreneurMedia.tv, and you can also leave us a comment on each episode there—or on the e-mail, which is preneurcast [at] preneurgroup [dot] com.
Pete: That’ll work. See you guys next week!
Dom: Yep, see you guys next week.
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Show notes + links:
Books:
Pete’s book, Media Strategies for Internet Marketers is now available on Audible:
http://audibletrial.com/preneurcast – Audible has a huge library of audio books of all types. Visit our link for a free trial and PreneurCast listener coupon for a free audio book.
Online:
http://www.7levers.com – The 7 Levers of Business Home Study Course is now live. Sign up today and get 2 months free access to our Preneur Platinum private members area.
PreneurCast Episodes:
These previous episodes are talked about in today’s show. If you missed them, you can listen again:
PreneurCast Episode 44 – Mechanics vs Core Business
PreneurCast Episode 68 – Getting things done, not doing them yourself
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