The first way of getting rich is to ‘extract value’ or in the farming vernacular “harvest” crops and extract every possible element of value from the end product. The tools of the trade include a calculating mind, timing, guts and risk taking, and an indifference to other people’s opinions. The Extraction method also invariably ends up leading to an “end justifies the means” ethics and values paradigm since the primary function is to find something that can be harvested at a maximal profit and return a predictable and exponential Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) compared to other opportunities. You will see this methodology abundantly in the world of stock trading, investment banking, private equity, government leaders and law makers in this bucket. It serves a much needed purpose in the economic system because crops that go unharvested never realize their inherent or market driven value and ultimately would be worthless if it were not for the “extraction” model. However, if an economic system becomes to heavily guided by or grown by an Extraction Methodology it will meet its fiscal end with terminal velocity since it is destructive and unsustainable by design.

The second methodology of getting rich is to add or create value. The tools of this trade are vision, patience, commitment, a holistic mind, and a willingness to take risk and a values set inclusive of a healthy ROIC, but not solely based upon it. You will find Entrepreneurs, Activists, Venture Capitalists, Angels, Farmers and Research Scientists in this bucket. The value adders are the reason any of us have anything to wear, drive, eat, drink, etc. and moving forward it will this group that re-centers our Global economy on a path to sustainable enterprise, sustainable living, and sustainable financial models or we will all meet an unpleasant planet, world, and fiscal reality.

It is my personal commitment to strive to Inspire, Enable and Shape this group and next generation of leaders through every effort of my own consulting, startup portfolio, and mentoring efforts. I believe that unfortunately we are beyond the stage of “leading” into this market need, and that we are on the verge of being “dragged” into it, by sheer necessity due to our individual and collective inertia the past 30 years in the direction of an Extraction-based economic value system. I have great hope for the future as more and more capitalist types become Conscious and aware of how you can truly drive a bottom line that is accretive to a sustainable society vs dilutive, but we have to start now and get vertical in our commitment to reset our values, ethics, and key performance metrics. You will see more and more posts and insights from me in the coming months and years as we push into this direction. Here are my closing thoughts on the necessary ingredients for Sustainable Entrepreneurship.
SOIL: Nothing can grow to its full potential in unfertile soil. In the world of the marketer, entrepreneur, leader, etc. Fertile Soil is the environment where they are protected, nurtured, fueled, and developed in the pre-life and early life stages.

SEEDS: The entrepreneur with all of their passion, motivation, ideas, innovation, and willingness to risk it all to transform from a seed into a life-giving and value adding manifestation. The seed is the blueprint and dna for something big, but if it is not planted in fertile soil above it will face retarded growth or extinction before it ever gets a chance to blossum.

WATER: This is the investment and mentor community that keeps the soil fertile and well nourished and hydrated. Without water and sun (capital and guidance) the most talented seeds will never reach their destination fast enough to be impactful. A shoot that grows out of the ground but doesn’t receive enough water or sun will never bear fruit, and ultimately perish.

BLOOD: There is a great saying that says you need Hard Work and Commitment to be successful in anything. Well if hard work is measured in SWEAT than commitment is measured in BLOOD. The most successful and sustainable entrepreneurs of the future will be like Farmers not Investment Bankers and in order for them to be successful all of the supporting ecosystem must be COMMITTED with their own blood to see this through.

We have a big road ahead because we have been living a life of “having our cake and eating it too” in America, but the clock is running out and we have taught generations of people that this way of living is something that it is not….
Action Items:
-Join companies or buy from companies with a social mission that is real and quantifiable (not just marketing hype).
-Start or invest in companies that serve a triple (Shareholders Value, Consumers Health, Planet Stability, Humanity At Large).
-Support Non-Profits that have implemented a sustainable giving model vs an unsustainable donor-only contribution model. Capitalism is only evil if we neglect to put back into the soil what we extracted out of it. It is a new age, and I am excited for the future, and committed to help those who are helping making our future more sustainable.
~CJS
Great Links to check out
www.slowmoney.org
www.mannarelief.org
www.givingchangeseverything.com
www.actionpotentials.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainopreneurship

We live in the age of exponential disruption…

We live in a time of tremendously turbulent market and business cycles…

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s work in Outliers it can take north of 10,000 hours to master a skill and make it part of your rote conditioning.  Assuming that you and I are practicing the “perfect” actions for 10,000 hours we can be wildly successful if we have put the time into mastering and making our actions and default reactions to the world around us unconsciously competent. However since the majority of our working population has spent over 14,000 hours between Kindergarden and 12th grade practicing “imperfect” actions related to how to generate and select a career, prepare for the ‘real world’ of constant external forces that impact our security, cash flow, profits, wages, borrowing capacity, and asset prices it would be my presumably fair, (but my personal bias) that most people through nothing more than a lack of awareness and insight, are doomed to live a life of perpetual vulnerability from a professional standpoint. This subsequently exposes the majority of people you know to high levels of unmitigated risk as it relates to maintaining the quality of life they have become accustomed to, or aspire to achieve and maintain some day in the future.

This is an agnostic and even handed threat to all actively working generations from the Boomer to Gen Y with Gen X in between.  The root of the problem is not in a lack of information or lack of opportunity, but rather in the ignorance of how to properly curate that abundance of information into the small percentage of key ideas that when put together into a personal action plan and communication/thinking style.

This has become a personal mission and passion of mine of late as a problem that needs to be solved and that a handful of my partners, colleagues and self are uniquely aligned and positioned to take massive action on.  Stay tuned over the coming weeks as we roll out information on the ways you can become more professionally and personally effective and sustainable.

Markets will shift and businesses will go up and out of business in record times in the coming years, but sustainable people and personal brands will always find the next organization that needs people who can make it happen and deal with uncertainty in agile ways.  My promise to anyone reading this blog is to continue to discuss and offer up solutions that will make young and old professionals more AGILE, SUSTAINABLE, and PROFITABLE in the years to come.

~CJS

Well not to worry my friends. Here is a cheat sheet that I am using to not only solve your “what do I get so-and-so this year?” conundrum, but that will inspire you and them to lead a more sustainable, non-toxic, and engaging and earth friendly 2013! You (and your Giftee) don’t have to be the founder of Greenpeace or President of the Sierra Club to find the relevance of these few recommendations below, and the packaging and utility of them will last the whole year, so in the words of Uncle Eddie from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation I believe they are the “Gifts that keep on Giving the whole year long”!

1) For those on your list with children (or grandchildren) ages 2-8, I highly recommend a 30-90-or 12 month Gift Subscription to Green Kid Crafts! In a Nutshell: “Green Kid Crafts delivers earth-friendly, monthly craft projects right to your door. Kids will enjoy monthly projects that spark creativity and cultivate respect and love for the environment. Plans start as low as $19.50 per month or annual gift subscriptions are only $214.50 for 36 Awesome parent-child interactive experiments that will make Mom and Dad look like Martha Stewart and Nate Berkus gone green! Information on the variety of offerings is accessible by visiting Green Kid Crafts! Check out the recent MACT award below for a great review!…Over 1.6 million followers on www.Pinterest.com/greenkidcrafts are on to something if that doesn’t convince you!

2) For those on your list that are janitorially-challenged (i.e. slobs), or who have struggled with chronic issues from perpetual colds or even asthma, it could be the year to swap out highly-toxic, chemical cleaners with the most friendly and non-toxic products on the market. Products that will clean your house to spit shine finish, and that are good enough to be one of Oprah’s favorite things and even clean the White House and Vice Presidents home in Washington D.C.! Check out Shaklee Get Clean Product bundles that start as low as $39.50 for a three month supply to $119 for everything from laundry, to dishes, and household cleaners. Watch the Oprah video below to see how beautiful and healthy they are and you will no doubt like me think of a few people in the family who will be excited to receive this type of original and thoughtful gift of health!

Oprah Loves Shaklee ORDER YOUR GIFT KITS HERE

BUY YOUR GET CLEAN HERE and GET FREE SHIPPING TIL 12/14/12
Regardless of what you give and receive this holiday season I encourage you to spend a few minutes (as I will) reflecting on the many blessings you have received this year and the blessing you have been to others. It is very easy for us to get caught up in the adulthood stress of meeting all the demands this holiday brings, but the reason for the season is to celebrate the birth of what is about to be new and the blessings the last and future year will certainly bring if we are willing to focus on and receive them. From my family to yours Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!
~CJS

I am grateful to be alive! I am grateful for the lessons “36″ brought with it. I am grateful for the insight, love, and new levels of joy and peace our son Beckett brought into this past year that no words or prior experience can compare with.  I am grateful for my true partner in success “Brianne” and for the amazing effort, energy, patience, and love she poured into this past year of ups and downs and holding patterns.

I am enthusiastic to (as cliched as it is) make this year the best one yet, and to take the newly honed and wildly enhanced pattern recognition and self-awareness that 36 brought to me, and do some major positive damage in the world around me these next 12 months.  I am raising the glass to 37-BRING IT ON BABY!- I am ready and will meet you and unfold into you ONE DAY AT A TIME!

~CJS

Taxing the largest corporations to a zero profit line and all the Billionaires isn’t enough to get through the first Quarter so theoretically if we trust the government to know what programs we all need and should value paying for then we must collectively agree that everyone who is in the middle-class, upper middle-class, and wealthy class needs to go a year without net income. If you are like me you might realize that the political spin around left and right is merely to fill airtime and gain power in the electorate through the uneducated minds of the masses, and none of it gets to the root realities of how we sustain or gain true prosperity. This isn’t a question so much of whether to cut spending or raise taxes or both, as much as it is an opportunity to rethink how we approach the concept of prosperity in general, who pays the price in the long run, and if there is a more sustainable and equitable (meritocratic) path to achieve it. Food for thought. I don’t have the answer, but I am in the question by choice because Wealth Matters to us all. What I do know is that no government can create sustainable jobs by itself that decrease the issue anymore than spending money on a credit card without paying it off can ever make an individual wealthy or free.

I have lived and built companies (almost exclusively without venture funding) from this town for the last 13 years and it has always been seen as the place you either build a “lifestyle” business or move to after you have sold your company, and the word entrepreneur meant you were in real estate, mortgages, or insurance.  It was a stigma that the real entrepreneurs would need to ultimately go up north to the Bay Area to actually be taken seriously, scale, or raise “real” money.  Sure there is an established incumbency of Venture funds locally in San Diego and Orange County and prior to the dot-bomb era the Angels and Tech alliances seemed productive and active, but in my experience up til now it has been mostly a bunch of expensive breakfast meetings and business plan competitions that have made a step in the right direction, but have failed to complete the transition to a full-blown eco-system of sustainable innovation and massive momentum, seen by the world as a respectable option and environment to seek to build and establish a venture-backed company.

I believe that these fore-fathers of the world of venture-backed San Diego are owed a debt of gratitude for starting the ball rolling and that the last decade was akin to 1974 in Silicon Valley when Arthur Rock and Kleiner Perkins et al were not yet seen as anything but some hippy capitalists (watch “Something Ventured”  for some cool history).  We are in a real shift in San Diego however as we close 2012, mobility becomes the ubiquitous platform for development and innovation, and cost of living spikes in the Bay Area and NYC make room for an attractive yet “turnkey” market for new venture incubation, acceleration, and harvest. It is time for those of us with pattern recognition, capital, and experience to continue to stand up on the shoulders of San Diego’s trailblazers in the venture community, create legitimate exits using hybrid models until we can ultimately prove that large funds can base and succeed here in the coming years, and seize the opportunity to become a major hub for new venture creation moving forward.

I conclude this prediction by saying that I have often considered whether I needed to move my family from San Diego to not be harmed by the opportunity cost of playing in a smaller market where capital leaves more often than it stays, but I am convinced in the last 12 months as I look forward that some sincere momentum exists and that the next decade proves to be the decade where The Silicon Beach becomes a seriously viable player as the demand for innovation and entrepreneurial activity increases.

~CJS

This visual example and trend is merely the phenomena long referred to as “The Race for Outlets.”

Let’s take a step back and think about this trend a different way. If you were to go back to a point in time where Coca-Cola (Coke) had just launched their vending products line, and you were one of the first people to be introduced to the opportunity to own a Coke vending machine you could approach your business one of two ways.

The First Way:
You could focus on picking the premier available location in the most high foot-traffic area in your town and you could plug your machine into the nearest outlet (it needs power to work), and then you could go about the task of figuring out which products (Coke, Diet Coke, Water, etc.)  and in what quantity to stock each of the shelves, and then what the optimal price point would be to insure that you maximized both margin and volume. Then you could focus all of your attention on making sure that your single location vending machine was optimized for position, kept clean, well-stocked, and functioning properly (people hate it when it eats their quarters). The only thing left for you to do would be to clean out the quarters each day and head to your bank to deposit your passively-earned income!

The Second Way: (Different Business Philosophy)
Look at your new awareness to Coke’s plans and your unique timing to be in “the know” and realize quickly that people will always be thirsty when they are out and about, and that “what” they choose to drink (Sprite, Diet Coke, Coke Classic, etc) is less important than the fact that “when” they choose to drink something that they are buying it from one of your ‘vending’ machines. In order to maximize these odds you would quickly realize that there are a limited number of OUTLETS, in prime locations across your city, across the country, and across the world, and that as soon as someone else puts their Coke (or even worse-Pepsi) machine in that outlet, you will not be able to….”OMG” you think,(INSERT LIGHTBULB GOING OFF HERE) that means “I am not in the Coke or Pepsi selling business, I am in the Outlet-Acquisition business!”

Summary Conclusion:

What you and I are witnessing with the rise of posts related to network marketing opportunities on Facebook in particular, is merely what has been going on in Denny’s Restaurants, Hotels, and three-way phone calls for the previous 50 years. It is the age-old Race for Outlets in one’s social circle and extended circle. If there are a limited number of quality outlets in the Coke machine example, then people also realize that there are a limited number of highly valuable distribution centers in their friendship and professional circles as well, and the fear of losing those human outlets of distribution to another vendor in their social circle or beyond (repping the same or different end product) is driving the market into massive activity right now and this trend will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

So what do you do if you are an “Outlet” whose inbox is filled with offers and opportunities from people you know?
1) Be gracious and respectful and realize that somebody thinks you are “prime real estate”
2) Ask yourself if you are looking for an opportunity to put some extra cash in your pocket (if “No” then you can stop reading).
3) If the answer to #2 is Yes, then don’t jump at the first thing you see. Be a business person and look around and comparison shop.
4) Download and Read the white-paper/thesis for Free below  to get an unbiased research-based 12-step tool for laypeople to help you understand the things you need to check off to assess if the company will be likely to last and avoid falling into the ‘gray’ area of the law at any point.
5) Buy some products (support your friends with a purchase/test drive DON’T BE CHEAP) from your top choices and see if you like them and get excited about how they work for you.
6) If all this goes well for you and you decide to enter the game, re-read this post and remind yourself you are not in the “product” business but in the “distribution/race for outlets business”, and start to SPRINT because paraphrasing what Abe Lincoln once said, “Opportunity doesn’t go to those who deserve it, but rather to those who hustle!”

~CJS
SDSU Master Thesis: Are MLMs and Pyramids the same thing? A Layperson’s Guide to Evaluating This Often Misu…

http://www.qualcommlife.com/2net-app-developer-challenge

The truth is that on any given day or market cycle that order may change by the necessity and needs of your business, so you could also argue that the entire exercise is mute.

Skills that must be developed are not limited to but include: Creativity, Logical Analysis, Reason, Influence, Vision, Salesmanship, Leadership, Negotiating, Thick-Skin, Persistence, Energy management and Utilization, the willingness to Break Rules, Trend Spotting, Resiliency, etc.

However I would like to be bold and say that if you were to list the one skill that all successful and resilient (yes because the successful ones fail too and fail often) entrepreneurs and business leaders have is RESOURCEFULNESS and the ability to be RESOURCE PARSIMONIOUS.

The Entrepreneur by nature of its job description takes calculated risk in the endeavor to make something of value where nothing existing previously, and in order to be effective at making something out of nothing, one must become very proficient and comfortable working with NOTHING in the NOTHINGNESS, and managing to create inside of a world of near term (and typically rather significant) constraints.

When the rubber meets the road the reason I believe that 95% of new ventures fail is due NOT to a lack of resources (that is the even playing field we all play on) but due to a lack of RESOURCEFULNESS and proper deployment of the limited resources around them to build something that can continue to attact more and more resources to grow and become sustainable.

My tips from 12 years on the battlefield for cultivating RESOURCEFULNESS

1) When you look at every decision that has to be made you will be investing Time or Money (and in most cases…BOTH) so do a real-time checkup on your current asset base of each and leverage the stronger one to create more of the other one or offset its deficit.

2) Each investment of Time and Money needs to produce you an ROI in the positive of each. For example spending a few hours learning to code a wordpress site or landing page and content series to attract your target demographic into your database or social reach can save you Money when starting out, but also return to you TIME once it’s up because it can work for you aggregating leads and following up with them in an automated fashion to build more acceleration into your sales cycle (ROI of more money). The next time around it may make more sense to invest MONEY with a quality web developer to save your TIME and produce more value and momentum.

3) Money and Time flow where your Attention is and wants to be, so there will always be something you say you can’t afford to do today, but you will still spend Time and Money on other things, so the reality check comes when you are honest with yourself about where you are investing your resources and whether they are feeding your personal desires or what the business needs most in that situation.

4) Learn to manage credit and debt masterfully and learn to create it in non-traditional ways because you will always need to find ways to pay for services or inventory as you grow and won’t likely have a VC or Bank to help you.  If you do then this is a great practice to get in anyway so that you can keep your CASH balances high for when there truly is no other way to pay for your growth.

5) Network and learn to become a valued person of interest within your business and social circle and help others when nothing directly benefits you in that interaction at that time.  I can’t tell you how many times people have showed up and saved me in one situation or another from relationships I cultivated of reciprocity 5-7 years earlier when the only thing we had in common was our love of this game and creating new ideas.

6) Stay humble and learn to thrive under pressure and never forget the lean and tough times and how you were able to get a lot done when you had nothing.  This will keep you disciplined when liquidity is pouring in and prevent you from blowing the hard earned upside.

7) The last thing to remember is the most important: EVERYTHING you have done in your life as a hobby, career, educational pursuit, etc. and EVERY relationship you have had personally, professionally, etc. and EVERY SUCCESS AND FAILURE has created an abundant and personal war-chest of valuable insights, and unique solution sets that you can call on to create resources and answers in tough times and in pressure packed situations to WIN. Don’t be afraid to use every last ounce of your past to shape your future by making the next right decision in the present.

~CJS

An Excerpt from the end of the post is below following commentary around the Fed’s most recent analytic report on the Net Worth of American Families. Both Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997) predicted with near accuracy the data and trajectory of the present times, and this post revisits many of the key analysis alongside yesterday’s data release.  The closing paragraph is excerpted below to create the context and inspire you to read the entire post.

“Just-released Fed data confirms what we have always known about likely economic trajectory of today’s generations: Through the Third Turning and into the initial stages of the Fourth, the Silent will prosper, Boomers will cope with declining expectations, and Gen-Xers will get hammered.

Thoughout history, we have argued, inequality both by class and by age reaches its apogee entering the Crisis era.  Indeed, part of the historical purpose of the Crisis is tear down dysfunctional institutions, vacate positions of entitlement and privilege, rectify the inequality, and create a tabula rasa on which the rising generation can build something new.”

Happy Learning~Chris