2. Only fools need the excuse “because it is Valentine’s day” to do something nice to show their appreciation of their partner.

3. Whatever you do, it will be judged against what others are doing with their partners today. If you are wise you will choose a day with less competition to make your move.  

4. Red roses have never been as expensive as they are today. Supply and demand!

5. Stores sell you last season’s lingerie at a Valentine’s day price point.

6. “Crowded in here, eh?” If you manage to secure a table at a fancy restaurant it is going to be kissy kissy cozy cozy at all the tables around you.

 7. To boycott this day is a nice opportunity for you to see how your partner respond to stress. Can she handle rejection well? Will she make a big scene the next time you forget her birthday?

8. She will refuse to wear the the expensive lingerie you bought. It does not fit (too small) and is too kinky for her taste.

- No mom!

Do you want to be a rockstar?

Practice, write songs, tour, have your mother and grandma offer you class A drugs. Oh yes, this game really lets you explore the reality of life in the pop business. Rockstar was created by Wizard Games of Scotland and released in 1989. It gives you the opportunity to try to make it in the rock and roll business.

More screenshots from the game

It is not a game you choose for its graphics.

If you use too much hard drugs you risk an overdose. Luckily, you can always go to rehab. But, do you have time for a 5 week rehab when your new record is out and your management require you to go on a tour?

Oops!

A few hints and tips for the game

* The game provides sound through the PC speaker. It can become very distracting after a while. Use F9 to turn sound off.

* As an aspiring artist your main source of income is to do gigs and tours.

* Do not tour at bigger venues than you can fill. You can actually lose money by touring when nobody shows up.

* It is not necessary to accept the first recording contract offer. It can pay off to wait for a better offer.

* Creativity and happiness are vital to produce that hit record. Creativity is correlated with drug use.. just do not overdo it! 

The business games series

In this post I continued what I started. Writing about great business games I have played the last 10-15 years.

Download

Download Rockstar demo version

I will take a vacation now. Will be back posting in mid-September.

Carnival of Vanity points to “Waiting for things to get better”, a post about how a struggling small business owner can pull his head out of his ass and change the situation. 

Atheist Frank hosted Carnival of Personal Finance this week and bloggers submitted their gold to him. The best post for me was surprising six figure jobs, truck driver is one of them.. go and read.

More good links: 

SEObook has 101 no bullshit tips on how to build link popularity.

Problogger has a submit your list and let me display it contest.   Some very interesting submissions:

5 reasons why every entrepreneur should work out

8 different blogging business models

20 ways to generate real traffic

Top 10 ways to win an argument (not really, it is only soft hearted irony)

I’ve browsed through some of the chapters and this is really good stuff. 126 years old and it is basically the same advice as Donald Trump gave me in his “How to get rich.”

A few good chapters are:

WHATEVER YOU DO, DO IT WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT

LEARN SOMETHING USEFUL

READ THE NEWSPAPERS

BE POLITE AND KIND TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

DON’T BLAB

PRESERVE YOUR INTEGRITY

Have a look at it and enjoy the basic, common sense advice that clearly stood the test of time and inspired countless of later “how to get rich” books.

Slip into the suit of Gordon Gekko and play this addictive business simulation game. Operating in the US economy you are an investor with $100-1000 millions in starting capital. Capital growth is your goal. The tools used to reach it can range from the honest to the dirty.

Spreadsheet warning

The game is complicated. I first played it several years ago before my business degree and did not understand much to be honest.

The appeal

If you have more than just casual interest for either the stock market or entrepreneurship the game is very addictive and interesting. You can do everything from research and investing in individual stocks, create holding companies to reduce tax and risk, and start-up your own companies in industries you find promising. Let me show you some screenshots from my  start-up of a company in the beverage industry.

The name of the company is Get Drunk and Be Somebody, inspired by Toby Keith’s hit song. It aims for a rapid growth. This is very capital intensive so expect to make losses the first years until you grow bigger and can start to reap the rewards of reduced fixed costs.

Research reports are available for all companies.

My thirst for growth made me acquire an underperforming competitor priced at 70% of net assets.

After you have acquired a competitor your options are increased. Merger, LBO, Liquidate?

I merged the two companies, but performace was poor. Be aware, quick fixes comes at a hefty price.

Conclusion

The game is shareware, and the shareware version is very playable. The game is not the easiest to get into, if you find the game promising, the full version includes a strategy guide that links general financial theory with the options available in the game. The wisdom provided by this actually helped me on some of the finance and entrepreneurship courses I completed during my degree.

Download the very playable shareware version of the game (direct link)

More information about the game at Ronin Software’s pages

More business/economy games

Previous entries in this series include

Rise from mailroom clerk to CEO in Executive Suite

Sort out what Bush refers to as ”shit” in the Middle East by being the Israeli Prime Minister

Ahh.. gas prices.. “Can I help you?”  “33 cents a gallon? No, you can’t!”

Is your job boring? Never return from your vacation on a Monday.

Budget conscious bloggers answer the question: “If you had to give up one thing because you could not afford it, what would it be?”

How to be respected and make money on the internet 

Regarding YouTube, we are all content producers now, or? And can they make money by facilitating it?

I need to learn to write better headlines, expect me to produce some future posts influenced by these 10 magnetic headline tips by CopyBlogger

If you are a consultant that tries to drum up business from your blog and then add advertising.. I think you may need to consider lowering your hourly rate as a natural result. It adds kind of a “cheap” feel, not to the blog, but to the main service offered.

The 28 rules of macho men. Metrosexuals not allowed entry.

 ”This person is 24 years old and is under medical treatment for bipolar disorder and ADD. He is a high school graduate, but has not pursued any vocational training beyond that (this is not a possibility now, either, due to financial constraints and a need to gain employment ASAP to support himself). Previous jobs have included kitchen work in a restaurant, food prep and counter work in a deli/bagel shop, roofing, and warehouse jobs. He has left these jobs due to either conflict with management/coworkers, or a lack of steady hours.

Now, understandably, he’s having tremendous difficulty lining up any kind of work.”

The ask.metafilter community have lots of interesting answers.

Ranging from the unethical, but extremely practical: “The other option is to put “no” to the felony question on employment applications. IANAL but I am almost certain that this is NOT illegal but is simply a civil matter, providing he’s not applying for something like daycare or some sort of licensed trade. The worst that can happen is they do a background check and tell him to get lost. This won’t work for getting a job at IBM of course, but a lot of businesses don’t run checks, particularly small businesses and quite a few entry-level positions. If he starts small, it may not come up later — and even if it does, he has still scored a nice period of employment.”

To more conventional suggestions about going to college or back to kitchen work. It sure is no easy way to solve this, but the man is 24 years old and is ready to make changes to his life. Read the full post here.

1. Keep your voice down

Ask for some change, but do not be loud! Be soft spoken, almost silent. By keeping your voice down you force the unlucky by-passer to stop to hear what you have to say. Once they stop, your chance for success increases!

2. Be “honest”

They know you are not going to use their change to buy a bus-ticket. Try to give them a likable reason to give you money.

This works: ”Yo, I’ve been doing drugs for 2 days and really need to eat something, can you spare some change so I can buy me some bread?”

This fails: “Yo, can you spare some change, I need to take the bus”

In the first example you are undressing your soul in front of them, who can resist giving you money? In the latter example you are just lying and they walk away.

3. Be clean and nicely dressed

All great salesmen try to imitate the prospective buyer. By dressing similar to the ones you beg from you are bridging the gap between you and them. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it is easier to give to your own type! If they meet someone very different from themselves it is easier to just walk away.

4. Remember a sucker

If someone gives you money you better remember their face. Then you need to acknowledge them every day you see them by greeting them with “Good Morning Sir!”, “Lovely day, eh?” This will remind them about the day they gave you money, and they know you hope that they will give you more. It is painful to walk away from you after you have been nice to them by remembering their face. Two things happen, either they walk another way to work, or they will give you money to ease the tension they feel inside!

5. Learn to love rejection

95% will not give you money. Love it! You get the opportunity to show how good and clever you are. Shout after them “Have a nice day!”, “Thank you, bye”, “No problem, thank you very much Miss”, “Enjoy the rest of your day Sir!”

The result is that they will think: “Oh.. he was pretty nice.. maybe next time..”

Got more tricks used by beggars? Please feel free to share them.

Strenghts of the blog:

Really good stories from a real waiter.

We all have a good idea of the restaurant business. We all think we know it. It is a topic that it’s easy for people to relate to.

Weaknesses and threats

The stories he writes are really looooong… it is well written, but it’s a bit tiring to read in front of the screen. People generally like quick stuff.

The blog is really popular and the dedicated server costs $170 a month. He now had to ask for donations to avoid losing money on his blog.

The opportunity

I thought of this when I was thinking of what books to bring for my beach holiday this year. Last year I read “Hotel Babylon” about the life on a luxury hotel in London. This year I wished I had a book of some of the Waiter’s best stories.

Why not look into self-publishing your own book? It seems like an ideal candidate. Successful blog, thousand of readers. Publish a “best of collection”, the initial spark of interest generated from your blog makes the title fly up the chart at Amazon and then the wheels start turning.. By searching in Google for “how to publish your own book” and “publish my own book” I found several companies specializing in it. You can print a paperback version from a few $ if you buy in bulk.

With such a talent for writing it would be very nice to see him cash in on it. What do you think about this idea? Does it have potential? Or is it better to focus on the PayPal tip jar?

Hmm.. this publishing thing? Here are some blogosphere links about publishing books:

An literary agent in stilettos throw in some advice for “Publish On Demand” people.

Bookseller chick explains how a book ends up in her book store

Big important person complains about peole who can not accept their novel being rejected

This is the stats over unique visitors to this blog the last month. The big spikes are due to the post about the “from mailroom clerk to CEO game from 1982.” This post was submitted by myself to fark, reddit, digg, shoutwire, joystiq and other PR & buzz sites and received some attention. If you think you have a post that will be of interest to such sites I see no problem in submitting them.

Not all hot tips from you to other sites are successfull though. My idea about selling 100 signed copies of a celebrity author’s book on eBay did not catch on. I sent some e-mails around promoting it, but no success. It was criticized for it’s unethical flavour and blatant use of child labour.  It was so bad that it did not even generate a single spark of controversy.

“Recently I have come a cross four very important words: Easy, Relax, Healthy, Positive. I encounter these words in Steve Pavlina is Million Dollar Experiment. I have participate in this experiment and I’m currently holding the following intention:

In an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way, in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all, I intend $1,000,000 to come into my life and into the lives of everyone who holds this intention.”

I wish him all the success, but to be frank, to me, this sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo. But that is just me. I would rather read Golden Rules for Making Money (P. T. Barnum 1880) one more time. It contains genuine no bullshit advice for any aspiring entrepreneur.

“Your public profile will be enhanced as will your personal brand, being exposed to the nearly 1000 daily readers who come to SmallBusinessBranding.com through the web and RSS readers. If our relationship proves successful SmallBusinessBranding.com will be re-branded to include your photographs, biographical and contact details.”

This is an opportunity to lay down some work now and milk the profits later. Do you have a brain? Do you want to raise your profile and know what to do with your increased reputation afterwards? Then go ahead and do it. The other way around is to make a few dollars short term and kill your own brand on the way by working for Pay Per Post.

Blogosphere links:

Pay Per Post = Stupid

First impressions of Pay Per Post

Personal finance blogger considers making the suicide

My blog is now available through bloglines and all these other RSS things. Sign up via Feedburner and become the 2nd person to subscribe.

1. You have failed to acknowledge your place in the system

Your job is to help the customer. Not to go around and think about how superior you are to them or that “if I just worked a little harder, I would not be there.” The customer is the boss, and he loves it when you are happy to understand and serve him.

2. The customer IS right

Customers would not bother to wait 50 minutes in a telephone to speak to you if they doubted they had a valid request or complaint.

 3. If you can not fullfil a request, do not be a jerk, explain!

Most customers are in fact quite sophisticated and intelligent. They know you have a boss, they know you are part of a big big greedy company. I would much rather have you say:

“Unfortunelately, because of the new regulations from the top management, I am not allowed to decide if you can get your money back for the stupid bike with three wheels. I am only paid $6 an hour and even though I am a sensible and intelligent person, they would not delegate such responsibility to me. Please let me refer you to my supervisor. Can you hold on please?” 

Than:

“Sorry, can’t do it. Just can’t do it. Gotta talk to my boss to do that.”

In the first example, anger and frustrations are transferred from you to the stupid company. You team up with your customer. In the second example you are just being a jerk.

Interesting blog posts about “The customer is always right”

Some common sense from Seth Godin

How hard is it to cancel AOL - The now famous customer service experience.

Excellent customer service experience delivered by American Apparel North America (but not the UK division, they do not even answer e-mails. Will blog about that another time.)

Funny look on life as a customer representative: “The customer is usually wrong”

1 How to Be a Millionaire ABC

2 Money (That’s What I Want) Flying Lizards

3 Funky Dollar Bill Funkadelic

4 Money Money Horace Andy

5 Bills, Bills, Bills Destiny’s Child

6 Rent Pet Shop Boys

7 You Never Give Me Your Money The Beatles

8 Free Money Patti Smith

9 Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Bing Crosby

10 Be Thankful For What You Got William DeVaughn

Here is a challenge for the blogosphere: Can you give me a tips of a song about money where the lyrics are actually talking about the good sides of capitalism? Sadly, most popular songs about money are from those “make love, not money” type of artists.