Next steps on the journey

 

For some time I have been deliberating about the next course of action. The last post relating to this was written on April 5th entitled ‘Exposing a larger surface area to increase opportunities‘.

 

I have managed to secure a basic I.T. contract working in the client’s office that allows me to pay the bills. This contract is a junior position and hence does not require me to be responsible other than to do the work at hand. The hours are 8am until 4pm which allows me to get back to me office before the working day ends. The money suits the position and wont get me rich but it does provide me a ’status quo’ on the cash flow situation enabled me not to slide into debt.

 

Now that outgoings are covered. I am focusing on winning business and building the company by following up on prospects that did not come to fruition due to the recession. I have noticed that since April the number of inquiries and opportunities have risen and I expect my company will have enough business for me to work full time on it very soon.

 

I am working on a proposal for a very large company at the moment and if that works out, we will be back in business.

 

I have been trading using a demo or practice account (see previous post). My trades are winning and losing and I have been bouncing around my start capitol so far. So no where near making a living from trading.

 

I am learning a lot about economics at the moment in particular about supply and demand and the maths behind the market. I can already see this shaping the way I think about the business world and changing the way I make decisions. I’ll write about this in a separate  post.

 

So all in all, I have covered the downside, working on the upside and making sure I am exploring opportunities and learning.

 

Life is good.

 

A cunning plan

 

 

I have had a couple of weeks to have a think about the next step to becoming obscenely rich.

 

Weighing up my love and fascination for trading and the freedom that this would allow, and coupled with my 12 years experience in coding software and my ability to learn new things very quickly, I have decided to find a job that will teach me how to build trading systems properly.

 

I have been talking to some of the recruitment agents in this area and have found that the way to get into the serious banking / trading environment is to have experience in that environment. This is of course a chicken and egg situation. So, how to crack it.

 

It is possible or easier to get a position with a banking subsidiary company that would offer this experience, or take a full time job in a bank earning less and go in as a more junior position that I would be used to.

There is also a course I have been recommended that teaches about Quantative Finance. This course is expensive (Around £10K) and takes six months to complete in the evenings, but comes highly recommended and teaches the complexities of this type of trading and the certificate might open doors into a bank’s trading floor.

 

You can find out more about this course here.

 

So, I have dusted off the old CV, and sent it to some of the agents and see will see what happens.

 

In the mean time, I have decided to find any I.T. contract that pays well to get me out of my financial difficulties.

 

There seems to be a fair amount of maths involved in building the trading systems, and luckily I have some experience of this as I did a physics degree. I have forgotten most of it, but I am going to start re-learning some of the calculus etc ready for the next step of building my own system.

 

I ignored this before and used the methods in ShareScript to generate the numbers I wanted. Once I understand more about what is going on underneath, this should help me achieve a greater understanding of patterns and randomness in trading.

 

I am also reading and learning more about FOREX trading in general and am reading the book ‘FOREX, Patterns and Probabilities’ by Ed Ponsi. It seems like a good book and I’ll write a review of it once I’ve finished.

 

 

 

What’s next?

What’s next? 

For anyone who has watched ‘The West Wing’, you know what I am talking about.

What’s next?

 

The business is 99% over. I have a few things to clear up in terms of contracts etc and also there are still some prospects out there that may come off at some point, but nothing immediate.

 

This leaves me with the greatest asset of all. Time.

I now have all the time in the world, the rest of my life ahead and I can do whatever I want.

So what to do now.

 

Well, I have learnt a hell of a lot since starting this journey a year ago, perhaps a good place to start would be to see what I have learnt and use this to form a new business plan.

 

1. I have learnt a lot about the markets, trading (both share dealing and spread betting)

 

This is mostly to do with technical analysis, the mechanism for trading, the importance of having a trading system and risk management.

 

2. I have learnt a lot about running a proper business, getting sales and productising ideas to sell to potential customers.

 

This is mostly about keeping costs down, being creative, taking that idea and making it commercially viable and then selling that idea to someone who then pays for you to build it.

This is great in a growing market, and extremely difficult in a shrinking market (as I have found).

 

3. Property would be great to buy now, but I don’t have any cash. Have not explored this avenue yet.

 

4. I love the flexibility of running my own business and the fact that this allows me to spend time with my family when I want to.

 

5. I like being the boss.

 

6. Not many of my friends understand this way of life and in fact some don’t even like to talk about it. (I had one friend who took one look at the very first paragraph of this blog and switched it off quickly as if the thought of discussing making money through assets was somehow unclean!)

 

7. I don’t mind using the telephone to call people up

 

8. I like working on my own as well as with others

 

9. Spending money is a good way of losing money not making money.

 

10. The most important aspect of anything is to have fun!

 

Into the pot, I could also throw that I need some cash in the reasonably short term to carry on paying my expenses.

 

There are some options in order of what I am thinking I might do next:

 

1. Get some contract work which I can do quite easily which is high paid and short term to build cash reserves. The downside of this, is it is back to working on someone else’s asset, the advantage is low responsibility, short term and high cash.

 

2. Go back to working on freelance work form home. The advantage of this is that I can manage my time as I like so I can keep open for opportunities, work from home to see my family more, but the disadvantage is I am not building assets and the cash is a lot less than contracting work.

 

3. Carry on with the business as a background task to keep up with the prospects we have made, pursue any low cost / low time prospects as they might arise.

 

4. Come up with a whole new business idea

 

5. Learn more about trading in its various forms and make a living through that

 

6. Carry on learning and come up with another method of making some money

 

I am going to think about this over the next few days. I have been testing the water with contract work and there still seems to some of it about although not as much as a few years ago.

 

I’ll let you know how it goes.

 

The end of an era?

 

I have been banging on doors now for nearly six months trying to get some sales for the business and have finally given up the ghost of this incarnation of the business. My cash is all but depleted and I have closed the office and I am back working from home.

I have closed my Barclays share dealing account and haven’t opened my spread betting account in months.

I have no real assets to talk of and it is nearly a year since I started this blog.

 

So, am I depressed?, am I carrying on?, am I still waking up each morning flinging the curtains wide and rejoicing at another day.

 

You bet! Life can seem hard at times, especially for a new business in the heart of a depression, with a government that increases tax on dividends by 1% every year.

However, the spring is here, the trees around my house are starting to bud and I am already thinking about the next plan to build assets and generate an income.

 

No one said it would be easy and many entrepreneurs have said they have had many failing businesses before they made it big. So I guess this is just another step along the journey.

 

I looked back over the posts i made here last year and I still believe in the same philosophy of  being free, building assets, focusing on the things that matter in life and working towards financial freedom through asset based revenue.

 

This is the end of one era and very much the beginning of the next one.

 

Back after a long break of writing

I have decided to carry on writing this blog.

Mainly due to the overwhelming number of emails from readers whose very kind words have encouraged me to continue. I will write some more tomorrow to update you on my situation, where I am at and how things have been going.

So, thank you to all those people who have written to me.

 

A Father and philanthropy

I am now a father! My son Thomas Powers, was born on the 31st August 2008 at 11.15pm. He weighed 9lbs 10.5oz (4380g) and was asleep when he was born. We had a lovely home birth with a birthing pool. He is very well and so is him mum.

He is very cute and is feeding well.

It is a life changing experience like people say, and it does change ones perspective slightly. However, with me it has just focused me more and made me even more determined to achieve my financial goals to provide an excellent life for my wife and son.

What is surprising is the lack of support for fathers in this country (UK). In all of the books I have read during the pregnancy and after, fathers get a token mention if at all. All the references are about how they should support there partners and nothing about what emotional things might be going on with them.

All the baby groups are mum and baby, there is never a father and baby class. The support is just not there.

I also found that there is not much support for home births and to guarantee you have a midwife and a birthing pool you really need to birth at home with an independent midwife. There are not many independent midwifes left as new rules have been passed which make it impossible for independent midwifes working outside the NHS to get insurance.

This is a shocking blow to families that want to have natural non-intervention births at home. Our midwifes work without insurance and take the risk of being sued upon themselves as they believe so passionately about what they are doing. We could not have had the birth we wanted without them.

This has led to the ‘natural birthing movement’ where families birth at home without any support whatsoever. This is a terrible shame as if something does go wrong, they would have no one professional there.  So bad has the trust situation got between parents and midwives, that people are willing to risk this rather than subject themselves to the pressure of the NHS to have a hospital birth.

The standard procedure in hospitals is that a birth should take 12 hours. This apparently came from some doctor who worked out you can induce if dilation is not at a rate of 1cm per hour. This is just to get women out the door. Being induced means the baby comes quicker but the body is not ready for the baby. This invariably leads to an increase in the number of caesarean sections that happen, even when the family did not want this to start with.

The natural percentage of births that would need a c-section regardless due to natural complications is around 8%. However, in NHS hospitals today this is between 28 and 45% because of this policy.

When I am richer, I am going to make this problem my first philanthropic endeavour. I want to fund some sort of solution to allow more women to have the birth of their choice at home with professional support. I am not sure what form this will take as a solution, but I will work on it and when I have some spare money, I would put the plan into action.

I’ll let you know how it goes

 

Changing my name

Finding your edge and letting go

Quite some time ago, I decided to change my surname. I have always felt that my surname was not somehow right and did not match my character. It is a strange thing to feel as I have always believed a name is only a label, but never the less, it has always slightly bugged me. I think it might come from a comment from a girl who I fancied at school when I was about 8 or 9, who didn’t like my name.

My surname was Clark, but I have now changed it to Powers. This fits much more with my personality and to me conjures up a successful powerful person.

My parents were not too happy about the idea and it has been very difficult to discuss it with them. I had wanted to change my name after our wedding, but unfortunately discussing the name change upset my parents so much they felt strange at our wedding and wanted us to talk about it to them straight after so my wife and I went up to their house the weekend after the wedding.
They felt that it would somehow change the relationship we had and reduce the bond between us. I agreed to postpone the name change for six months, if we could pretend that I had changed it and see if it psychologically changed anything. If it adversely affected our relationship we would not change our names.

It is now over one year later and of course there has been no detriment to the relationship, so we changed our name by deed poll. It is a very simple process and you can do it all online.

It is important to stand up for the things that matter to you and to take other people’s feelings into consideration. In the end it is my decision and my life and journey. Sometimes the balance between these two things can be difficult to find. However I have found that if I always make decisions from the most positive and truthful perspective that I can and try to make the best possible ‘guess’ at what would be the greatest overall energy gain for all the people involved, then generally I tend to make the right decisions and can look back and know I did the best thing at the time with the information I had.

This attitude of always following this formula is exactly the same as a trader’s edge. Not every time can you expect it to work, but overall I have found it is the best policy.

After realising that our name change would upset my parents, I did some research to try to learn more about names in general to make sure I was not being selfish and to put changing my name into a bigger picture.

I also wanted to see whether there was something more than blind tradition in the father passing the name on the son idea. Most people have this idea so locked into their heads as being important, they can attach more value in the name than the actual relationship between the people.

I researched the idea and concept of a family name and found it was in the 14th century that people in England adopted surnames at all. In Wales and Scotland it is was as late as the 17th century. This was mainly due to population increase and the subsequent need to identify individuals with the same first name.  Aristocrats had also had surnames for some time (about 100 years before the general population) and so the general population had something to aspire to and wanted “sir” names themselves.

Quite often names were not by family but by trade. So a potter would become Simon the potter, or a smithy with become John the smith. The ‘the’ part was later dropped and hence you get a lot of surnames that are like trades. As most trades were passed down from father to son, so the name was also passed down.  In fact, according to Wikipedia surnames generally followed seven category types. None of which were a copy of your father’s name.

In other cultures different rules apply, some cultures have the surname part first instead of last like in England. In some parts of Spain, a person takes both their Mother and Father’s name, and the names are not swapped between partners. This in effect means every member of the immediate family group has a different surname.

In the US it is becoming more popular for couples to create an entirely new name at marriage as we have done. In Canada, some aboriginal groups take the woman’s family name and not the mans.

All of this research has showed me names are very culturally specific and are arbitrary in terms of any intrinsic value other than what individuals put on its importance and about what circumstances may have affected their ancestors many centuries ago. Names now give a common bond amongst family members and promote a feeling of belonging to the family group. They also give a person their identity and help define who a person is.

Many professional people, actors and show biz people change their names and in some cases this is all it took for them to transition to success. This was probably a mind set that helped them to identify with themselves by changing the label to be more in line with what they felt there identity was or what they wanted it to be.

As we have seen from other posts and some of the books that have been reviewed, one of the most important ingredients for success is state of mind. I think that changing my name has helped me to create the state of mind much more conducive creating the right internal environment for success.

This has been a key part on my journey to financial freedom and philanthropy.

 

A little journey back in time

Having moved house recently, I have been sorting out the last boxes and came across a box of ‘memories’. This is a battered old cardboard box, held together by many layers of gaffer tape that contains bits and bobs from my life.

I am not a hoarder of things, but I do indulge myself this one box of items that bring back memories. Every few years I come across this box and spend several hours looking through its contents. It contains everything from school books, to certificates, poems, tickets, love letters and small gifts and post cards from the people of my past.

The reason I mention this here, is because I found two things of interest and relevance to this blog.

The first was an old piece of paper, with a hand written contract on it. It details that I and my business partner will divide up the profits equally from our car wash business, it details what happens if one of us doesn’t turn up for work and a few other points and what should happen. This was my first contract I created, I was 10 years old. My business partner was my best friend Andrew Bentley.

The second was a portfolio of a cafe I started up after University. I took over a rundown old greasy spoon cafe and turned it into a multicoloured chill out cafe. My friends and I turned it into a co-operative business. We did not make very much profit, but we did get into the paper and also expanded the cafe to include an art shop next door and got an allotment to grow food.

These two items reminded me that I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I just thought I would share that here.

 

 

My Career and experience

I thought I would write a bit about me so you can see where I have started from and what experience I had had so far. This may put some of the blog posts into more focus.

I left University in the second year whilst studying physics. I felt the physical laws too constricting for my free spirit!

I started my own cafe business and ran this for about 9 months. It was the first ‘chill-out’ cafe with a fixed location in the UK. The cafe was based in Norwich.

I studied and passed my exams in reflexology and started giving treatments for money, and this went OK although I could not make enough to live on.

I moved to London and tried my hand a dispatch riding on a motorcycle delivering parcels to businesses. After several near death experiences and realising that I wanted to be the one sending and receiving these important parcels in nice chrome and glass offices rather than merely delivering them on my tatty old bike, I left and, reluctantly due to having no money, got a temporary office job at GlaxoWellcome.
The internet was becoming more popular, so I was sent on a two day course on how to build basic web pages using MS Front Page.
Given the tools it was a miracle I found a fascination for the web, but I did a left GW and went to work as a project manager at an ‘up and coming’ new media agency called the hub.
This was a big learning curve, with all the madness of the .net boom, I started managing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of projects with no training or support.

I quickly realised I preferred development over project management, and left to be a developer for the car rental company Hertz.
After making some money, training and learning more, I bought a laptop and moved to Quito in Ecuador.
I spent 3 months travelling the country and learning to program web sites on my laptop.
After South America, I came back to London and did various full time jobs working my way up to a senior developer and ran many big projects creating the websites for Sony, One2One, Tetley, Mars, Fiat and many other big corporate web sites.

As part of all my developer roles, I had maintained a level of project management and client facing skills. It was always important for me to see the business I was working in as a whole and not just as a developer nerd in a backroom.

I realised I could do this much better than any of the many agencies I had worked for, so I set up my own company. I decided with my partner, Heather to move to Cambridge where the entrepreneurial energy was at its peak.
We both built up the company as self employed people and moved back to London once we had out grown the small business of Cambridge.
We then took on bigger clients and started hiring other contract developers to help complete the coding work as the projects are now too big to complete on our own.

During the last year, I married my long time girlfriend Heather. She is now my wife and pregnant with our first child who is called Thomas.

This is when I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad and started this blog.

 

Philosophy

Firstly I will cover my philosophy on life (briefly) which will provide you with a framework of which I will be working to achieve my goal of being obscenely rich.

The cornerstones of my philosophy are these:

1.    That the highest goal in life is to be happy and that this is one’s only true responsibility

2.    You create your own reality every second with your thoughts, emotions and actions.

3.    There is no right and wrong. There is only action and consequence.

4.    Belief in oneself is the most important asset you can ever attain.

5.    Honesty is the most important character trait. (Both internal and external)

6.    You get back many times in life what you give, giving and receiving are both equal in importance.

7.    The universe is abundant. There is enough to go around.

8.    Love is the energy which creates all life and things and underneath all of the layers that we create since birth, every human has at the core, LOVE. Never under estimate the power of love.

9.    Live is the opposite of entropy. Life creates order; entropy is the tendency to disorder.

10.  Paradox, Change, Humour

And a quick definition: Work is the measure of how much you dont want to do something.

I am sure that I will add many more things to this as I write this, but this will do for starters.

It will be interesting to see if these change over the course of this journey.