GoHuman Blog

But when the poop hit the fan, they treated me worse than a number.  As rates came down I spent years trying to refinance my properties through them.  They could not (or would not) help.  They had me resubmit reams of information they already had, charged me a $500 application fee, then denied the loan, multiple times.

Finally, as interest rates plummeted last year, I spent ten months working with an independent mortgage broker to refinance four properties.  Imagine my shock when two weeks after closing the last one, WFB acquired two of them.

PMA customer or not, WFB would not loan me money, despite a 19 year relationship with them, but had no problem acquiring my loans from a third party.  Individuals are a tiny, insignificant annoyance to the business of big banking.  WFB works for someone, but not for me, and likely not for you.

I stuck with WFB because they were not even close to being the worst of the lot.  But the problem is systemic, and I founded GoHuman to initiate radical change, so GoHuman.com is in the process of switching merchant services from WFB to Summit Credit Union.

My apologies to our community for taking so long to take this step in breaking my personal co-dependence on a “too-big-to-fail” institution.  This move is long overdue, but it’s now easier to say WFB PMA?  KMA!

Over the next few months we’ll get more serious about establishing who and what we are, and how, exactly, we are going to change the way our world works!  We also look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Remember the insane difficulty of dropping checkbooks for credit cards and online banking? Still not fully there yet? Have you ever tried selling on eBay?

Introducing new technologies to your beloved business is just plain hard work. There are some big hills to climb, and from the bottom they often appear bigger than Denali (Look it up — it’s taller than Everest).

In tackling these challenges, big, resource-rich companies have all the advantages — right?  Not really. Introducing new technology is difficult for all businesses, regardless of size. But it is far easier for a small business.  You don’t have thousands of staff to retrain, millions of dollars tied up in antiquated machinery, or terabytes of data stored in dusty databases designed decades ago.

But how should you do it?  The answer is surprisingly simple.

Introduce the smallest, simplest change that will produce greater benefit to your business more than it costs.  Positive ROI.

Just keep the changes small, with definable goals and benefits; and never stop moving forward. That simple approach means that your business is constantly strengthened with a more stable platform created for your next advance.

Here at GoHuman our aim is to leverage internet technologies to assist the small business owner. You may not be ready to launch your own website and manage the hardware, software and security issues, nor undertake the investment and potentially harmful distractions that go with it. That’s why we have designed our services so you can take it forward in small steps – and of course, we’ve made the first step free.

You can post your services with GoHuman with up to five separate initial postings, at no cost. Each posting can promote a different distinctive service – or be aimed at a different zipcode area. Perhaps concentrate most of your postings around your home location, and experiment with a mail-order service aimed at a zipcode in another state. Maybe test with different graphics, text and colours to see which attract the most attention. Best of all, have your customers recommend your personal local service – giving you a real edge over big nation-wide companies where the customers are just a number. If you are already marketing elsewhere, then add GoHuman as another string to your bow. Marketing your business with GoHuman is a small step, with easily definable goals and benefits.

We have big plans to introduce new features and functions to GoHuman, and by taking the first simple steps now, the next steps will be simple too.

Invest a few minutes and give us a try. Could we possibly make it easier?  If so, please let us know!

“It’s habit probably. People like to stick to the places they know,” I said, not wanting to put pressure on him.

“It’s a shame really,” he continued. “We all go to that overpriced deli down the road, instead of trying nice wee places like this – and then the wee places just disappear!”

Ah – some insight into what new business owners are up against, I thought. I launched The Flavour Co almost exactly two years ago, and it’s only in the last few months that groups of kids in from the local secondary school have started coming in for their lunch – the younger ones, who have just come up from the primary school nearby.

It’s a reflection of adult behaviour – we’ve had regular customers since day one, yet I feel we’re only just beginning to become an established fixture in the area. And I’m still not sure if the shop will survive!

Although my shop is regularly full of customers, it’s hard to make the books balance. We need a more consistent flow of customers. Passing trade often just passes us by because the shop is so small.

In addition, people are spending less due to the recession – we’ve had to delist some of our more premium lines. Our margins are good, but you need to make a lot each day to cover the overheads.

I often wonder whether things would be easier if I’d managed to lease a bigger shop. But that can bring its problems too. This is obvious from the number of larger cafes that are closing down. One day they’re full of customers; the next day their windows are pasted up.

Here’s an example that might explain why so many apparently successful retail businesses are having difficulties.

I recently read an interview with the owner of a coffee bar that had been launched around the same time I launched The Flavour Co, but in a different town. It’s much bigger than mine and according to the owner it has an annual sales turnover of £320,000 a year, which seems like a dream to me.

It’s situated quite close to the city centre, unlike my café/juice bar which is in the west end of Glasgow, close to the university but not right in the centre of town.

The owner of this café has 12 staff working various shifts, and they will be needed as the café serves food as well as several hundred coffees each day.

500 coffees over 10 hours would mean you have to make coffees at a rate of roughly one a minute.

According to the owner, the money doesn’t go far enough to pay his key staff what he thinks they are worth, or to give him a decent salary. I found this surprising, so I decided to do a rough breakdown of estimated costs.

Coffee sold in coffee bars is known to have a very high margin, but this particular coffee bar specialises in high quality coffee and also offers food. There will be some wastage. I would estimate the cost of the stock at 25%, or £80,000 for the year.

That would leave £240,000.

VAT (value-added tax) is chargeable on restaurant and takeaway hot food at a current rate of 20%. This would take £48,000 away from the turnover, leaving £192,000.

Given the central location and size of the café, and the advertised rent of a retail unit on the same street, I would be very surprised if the rent and rates combined came to less than £50,000 a year.

That would bring the annual takings down to £142,000.

The minimum wage in Britain is currently £6.08 per hour for an adult over the age of 21.

The establishment in question has 12 staff. Assuming that some of them are part-time, while there will probably be a couple of full-time managers, let’s estimate that on average they are all on minimum wage and working four days a week, eight hours a day, and that they get holiday pay.

That’s £6.08 x 8 hours x 4 days x 52 weeks, which gives them an average salary of £10,117 each – not including National Insurance, holiday cover and other benefits such as maternity or paternity cover.

£10,117 x 12 = £121,405. Subtract that from the total and you’re left with just £20,595 per year to pay the fuel bills, water bills, licensing, maintenance, bank interest charges – and the owner’s salary.

These figures are based on my own estimates based on the owner’s claimed turnover, but my guess is that his actual costs will be higher than I’ve estimated, not lower.

The owner has never run a café before; he is clearly full of passion and enthusiasm, and he may well make a success of it in the end. But it shows what café owners are up against these days. Coffee bar prices really need to rise if these businesses are to be sustained – but that’s not going to happen in a recession.

The alternative solution when people are reining in their spending, is to attract a huge number of customers. It’s easy to think you’ll be able to do this, but actually making it happen is more difficult. And if you’re planning to open a new café, it’s very difficult to establish how many customers you’re likely to get. Few café owners want to share this kind of information.

Before I launched The Flavour Co I searched for market research on this but could find nothing. Instead I sat in various cafes and counted the number of customers coming in at various times. This gave a very inaccurate picture, because there are so many different factors involved.

A much better idea for anyone thinking of starting a café is to look at websites like Company Check in the UK, which gives data on limited (incorporated) companies. Also websites advertising businesses for sale sometimes include details of turnover.

Bear in mind that the figures in adverts might be slightly exaggerated.

Rents can be found by looking at commercial property websites, and remember that they can vary sharply in streets that might be close together, depending on foot traffic.

Business rates in Scotland are shown on the Scottish Assessors website.

Also remember that unless you’re very lucky or conditions are exceptional, it takes time, years in fact, to really establish a good customer base.

I was always taught to square the hips to the side of the room. I practiced this way for years and wondered why my hips wouldn’t open, and why I would sometimes have SI joint pain or knee pain. There seem to be two radically different schools of thought here: one is to shove the body into the ‘final’ version of the pose, despite whether your hips are open or not, and the other is to approach the pose according to where the body is at the present moment. Looks vs. integrity.

Regardless of where one stands in this argument, I believe the greater question is, “What serves each student best?” Since yoga literally means ‘to yoke’ or ‘to unite,’ I constantly ask myself, as a teacher, “How can my student feel the most connected to their body?”

I just recently saw the movie Moneyball and loved it. I dare say I shall be putting it and this year’s The Help up in my list of all time favorite movies.  I am impassioned about cheering for the underdog, stepping out of the status quo, slaying the impossible. (Hence my involvement in GoHuman.)

Moneyball is the true story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s attempt to put together a successful and winning baseball team on a low budget. He and the rest of his management team had been taking the same approach for years – looking at the players’ strengths, their looks and their habits off the field. This conventional wisdom isn’t serving them, though, because the team is doing poorly. So Beane goes out on a limb and hires a recent college graduate, Peter Brand (a composite character based largely on Paul DePodesta), for his ability to think differently. Brand convinces him to stop looking at things like a player’s unsightly throwing style or ugly girlfriend — things that baseball managers had been using for years in making their player decisions. Instead, he only looks at one thing – who gets on base. Getting on base equals runs, and runs equal wins. Though ridiculed by their management team and the press, the A’s go on to win twenty consecutive games – an all-time record in baseball.

What does this have to do with yoga? I have seen a very similar thing happen in the yoga community—teachers fixated on a principle before looking at an individual student’s needs. It seems as though the longer one spends immersed in the yoga scene, the more emphatic and rigid their ideas become, especially about alignment. After a while, it seems like some teachers prioritize their ideas and philosophies over actually looking at their students and reading what’s going on in the moment.

I love how simply Brand looks at winning baseball: GET ON BASE. To draw an analogy with yoga, the ultimate “win” for a yoga student is to experience that undeniable feeling of connection in their body, mind and spirit.  Their ‘bases’ might be things such as: acquiring more flexibility, balancing in handstand, floating in arm balances, or building core strength. We might have to modify a pose or two to ultimately get our students on base, but if it gets them closer to their “win,” does it matter how they got there?  If teachers stay rigid about formulaic alignment, students might never get on base. Worse, they will get discouraged and give up.

In Moneyball, Peter Brand gets ridiculed for using a methodology that is different and new. And a good yoga teacher runs the same risk by refusing to buy in to the old belief that perfect alignment is the only important thing and should be achievable right off the bat. Certain popular teacher training courses use language like ‘the most difficult certification process’ in order to convince both students and teachers that their style is the best and safest. But these kind of grandiose statements have the unfortunate side effect of producing some strong-minded, ego-based teachers who put the copyrighted style before the student. It’s this sort of mindless rigidity that leads to injuries.

I think it’s wonderful (and imperative!) for yoga teachers to study human anatomy and physiology.  In my humble opinion, I feel we can never learn enough about the human body. But for a lot of us teachers, this means taking the initiative to seek education outside of our yoga training, or even outside of the world of yoga altogether. Since so many teacher trainings put the emphasis on alignment and tradition over individual bodies, it’s up to us to do the legwork to become better teachers.

As teachers, we are in the position of being of service to the student, and ever expanding our knowledge and awareness is one of the best ways of being in utmost service to our students. We have to think like Brand: for ourselves.

This unexpected expense hurts, but my wife and I are both employed and tax returns and a bonus are on their way, so this is really just a minor inconvenience.  For millions of Americans who have lost jobs or have otherwise been negatively impacted, however, unexpected expenses can have much more serious consequences.  GoHuman’s partnership with Belief for Relief allows us, and you, to help such people… like Dawn Lane, for example.

Dawn is a hard-working mother in Rocky Point, NY who is the sole provider in her household, holding two jobs in order to support her family. Dawn budgets carefully to meet monthly expenses, like many families in America who have no choice but to live paycheck to paycheck.  With monthly expenses rising and household income decreasing, her car broke down. Dawn can’t afford to fix it, so it simply sits in her driveway while she struggles to get to work in the middle of winter.  Belief For Relief Inc. has approved her request for $1,500 for car repairs, but Dawn is on a waiting list until more funds become available.

Dawn’s car is GoHuman.com’s third MicroCause.  You can contribute directly, or assist her by getting friends to sign up at GoHuman.com.  We’ll donate $1 to Dawn’s car repair for each new registrant who mentions Dawn or Belief for Relief. So what are you waiting for?! Let’s make a difference together.

Thanks for the pic Chris (click to read the story).

In this blog I want to share a potential mutual solution for both frustrated home seekers and fed-up landlords.  It’s called Rent-to-Own, and it’s a real estate investment model that has worked well for me and several of my friends over the years.

The benefits of Rent-to-Own for renters:

• They can become homeowners if they have income, but poor or no credit.
• If something changes and they need to move out, there are no penalties, and no effect on their credit rating.
• They can lock in a purchase price to protect themselves against rising housing prices.
• They can renegotiate the purchase price when the market goes down.
• It is great for small business owners as renting vs. paying down a mortgage is good for their debt-to-income ratio.

The benefits to investors:

• They will get renters with an owner mentality vs. a renter mentality.
• They can typically ask for full-market or slightly above market price, as there is not much competition for homes that can be rented with the option to purchase.
• When providing the rent-to-own option, homes typically move much faster than ordinary sales. My own experience (and that of some of my friends) is that homes that may normally stay on the market for 6 months can move in 1 to 2 months.
• The renter takes care of maintenance and repairs, minimizing the time and energy required to manage a property. (No phone calls Saturday night at 11 o’clock complaining about a clogged toilet).
• In some states like Tennessee, the income is considered passive and therefore not subject to corporate income tax, if you have an LLC that is owned by your family. (See your lawyer/accountant for details or your state’s appropriate tax form: TN Tax form FAE 183.)

If you like the sound of these benefits, stay tuned, as we’ll explore how this all works in more detail in future blogs. In the meantime, check out the Real Estate section on GoHuman.com (update to your zip code)!

We’ll start with a couple more relevant definitions. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process whereby a website or web page is made more visible via the organic (free) listing. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of promoting and marketing a website through paid listings (advertisements) on search engines. SEM can include elements of SEO, but not vice versa.

In the realm of search engine marketing (SEM/paid listings), a wealth of options exist and if you’re not careful, you can throw your hard-earned money away on a “little of this” and a “little of that” and not get a great return on your investment (ROI).

Ads on most search engines operate on a PPC (pay-per-click) model, meaning that you pay only when a user clicks your ad, and not for the ad impression (the instance in which the ad appears on the page in response to a query). Another common and useful pricing model in online advertising is cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), in which you pay per impression, not for any clicks on your ad. How and when to use CPM will be covered in more detail in a future blog.

Let’s explore the top search engine options currently available to you. The three most notable paid advertising search engines are Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft/Bing. Google continues to dominate the scene with nearly 65% of the market share, while Yahoo and Microsoft/Bing are battling it out for second place, at 15.1% and 15% of the market share, respectively.

All three search engines utilize the “bidding” option, whereby you determine a monthly spend (this is your budget) and then figure out how much you are willing to pay for each click. You set your maximum bid (i.e. $0.45/click) and depending on a variety of factors such as the keyword competition, geography, and relevant content, your ad will appear.

Now let’s throw another tool into the mix: social media advertising. There’s been a lot of talk about social media and quite frankly, who isn’t familiar with Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube? But Facebook is more than just a way to reconnect with high school friends or to share pictures. Facebook, like LinkedIn and YouTube, now offers paid advertising. The difference between search engine marketing and social media marketing is that the former is primarily based on keyword queries and the latter on relevant content.

Getting the most out of SEM requires selecting the option that’s right for you. If you’re trying to appeal to a bigger audience and you want people who are searching for your product (whether it’s coffee or cameras), Google is probably your best choice. If you can afford it, also advertise on Yahoo and Microsoft/Bing. Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube are better suited for those trying to brand their product and not necessarily complete an action (ie. sale or sign-up). Social media marketing does not allow you to do a search for a product; rather, display ads will appear based on relevant content.

Rather than take a “one size fits all” approach to advertising, consider the following points in choosing the “right fit” for your small business:

• Compare the ad pricing of all three search engine options – can you afford to advertise on all three or should you choose the one that will give you the most bang for your buck?
• Consider your market – are you trying to achieve a measureable result (sale, sign up, newsletter, etc.) or are you trying to create a brand?
• Constantly re-evaluate your return on investment (ROI) goals
• Is social media relevant to your business or are you succumbing to the hype?

Don’t be pressured into parting with your hard earned money. Knowledge is your best tool when utilizing search engines or social media to market your business. And, of course, don’t forget another powerful advertising tool at your disposal, and a free one at that: posting your business on GoHuman!

I truly do love raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens and all the other wonderful, simple things that enrich our lives. As a new contributor here on the GoHuman Blog, I want to share simple things – tips, tools, techniques, resources – that can enrich you personally and professionally.

Let’s start with a simple thing you can do to create greater awareness for your business. If you haven’t listed your services on GoHuman, it’s easy to get started.

Then invite friends, neighbors, clients, and other local businesses to join. Spreading the word about GoHuman gives you a wonderful opportunity to talk about what you do and who you serve, which is the heart of marketing.

May this special time of year be filled with all the simple things that bring you peace, happiness and joy!

U.S. founding fathers were familiar with a 4,000 year old economic system, which enabled capitalism while limiting capitalists’ ability to exploit the system and oppress its losers.  All families owned land, debts were forgiven every seven years, and land was leased, not sold, for a maximum 49 years.  It reverted to the tribal / family owners in a year of Jubilee.

But Solomon, a king of Israel and “the wisest man who ever lived”  wrote “The rich rules over the poor, And the borrower is servant to the lender.“  Why would the king of Israel, in which every family was supposed to own land and debts were forgiven, state such a thing?

Because the people abdicated ownership, on multiple levels. Within a very short period of time, freed slaves were again enslaved, first by their fears and desires, then by their kings, then by outside forces.  Human nature hasn’t changed much in 4,000 years.

American-style capitalism has addicted the planet to a mass-market consumer culture, fed by an insatiable desire for corporate funded entertainment.  We have allowed ourselves, and worse, our children, to become programmed consumers, with a black hole in our soul, into which we cram the things advertisers tell us we need.

I know I’m oversimplifying, but it’s still true.  If we want lasting change it must start with us. I salute the Occupy movement for focusing attention on Corporate oppressors. But realize that we create and empower these Frankenstein monsters.  As long as we’re willing to sell our future for temporary gratification, a cycle of debt and oppression will continue.

Only owners have a legal right to occupy. To claim a moral right we need to own the moral ground we stand on.  Every individual and family should strive for ownership, at all levels, to advance the occupation. GoHuman seeks to build ownership, at the local level.  We wish to empower small, local businesses and their customers to occupy and regain ownership of their own communities.  One backyard at a time!