Organizing Your Way to Money

The Norwegian Biochemical Society (NBS) have for 41 years organized a so-called "contact meeting" where invited speakers and NBS members share their research, chat, eat a lot of excellent food, and drink throughout the nights.

This year, the meeting was held in Tromsø -- a city so far north in Norway, they have the midnight sun. Unfortunately, this is only during summer; in winter, there is no sun whatsoever. Until January 21, this is the land of the midday dark.

By a twist of fate, I'm attending this meeting, listening to talks with intriguing titles like Sir Phillip Cohen's lecture: "Protein Kinase Inhibitors; The Major Drug of the 21st Century?" and Rudolf Amann's "Exploring Unknown Microbial Diversity by Environmental Genomics".

Now, the reason why I'm telling you about a meeting organized by the Norwegian Biochemical Society in this blog, which is supposed to be about programmers and money, is because it got me thinking of one very important aspect about how to make, yes, money.

The NBS's 41st Contact Meeting has 427 participants, which includes members, invited speakers, and exhibitors. It lasts from Thursday to Sunday, in a city far away from most of us. So we all need accommodation and food. In fact, there are so many of us that lunch is spread over two hotels and one restaurant -- because none of them have to capacity to cater for all of us. And the point is, all of this is running smoothly, it is, in one word, very well organized.

Now, being able to organize stuff is one excellent way of making money. A very basic example: You are young and at a school trip, and everybody wants to order pizza. So you locate the pizza place, you do the maths on how many pizzas you need, how much that will cost, and how much that is per person. Then you add a little bit per person, collect the money before you buy the pizzas, and, like almost out of thin air, you've created some money for yourself (and probably some free pizza).

Now, you may not be comfortable making money of your friends like that, but what if these people were not your friends? Isn't that was a lot of business is about -- organizing stuff for many people, and then charging them a little bit extra, for the organizing?

Of course, if you do something like this, you create a business. But at the same time, you create a job. A job that ties up your time. And this is not good in the long run. You want to be free, and have more time, not less. A job that stops paying you when you stop working it is no good, if you want your financial freedom. You don't want to end up trapped in a job, even though you created it yourself. That isn't much better than being trapped in a job somebody else created, is it?

So you do this. You work on your business, not in it. Yes, you do the job yourself, many times, but all that time you figure out better ways of doing that stuff you're doing, more efficient ways, less expensive ways. And you create a step-by-step manual, rules, so that anyone following those rules will end up with the same excellent results. And when you've got steps that work so well that this brings you enough income to live well on -- you give the job to someone else.

What? Am I saying that after you've done all that tedious work and created a nice income for yourself, you shouldn't stay exactly where you are, and make all those dollars?

Let's see what happens if you do. You employ someone to follow your step-by-step instructions, and that creates the money, and you give that person a salary -- something he or she can live on, let's say 80% of the income. What happens then? Hey, you've created a passive income stream for yourself. You hardly do anything anymore, and yet, the money is still deposited into your bank account.

You've organized your way into money. And because you have to step-by-step guide, you can, quite easily, duplicate that income stream, let's say in another city or maybe even another country -- or just in another suburb.

If you also realize that what you've created isn't only a step-by-step guide, but a money-making machine, you can sell that guide for a very high price, to many people, effectively franchising your business.

And what, I hear you say, has this to do with us programmers? Maybe I don't like go into the real world and do all that stuff you're talking about. It sounds a bit scary. I'm happy right here by my keyboard, thank you very much.

Well, the answer is: everything! Most programmers I know are great at organizing -- their code, that is. This means that they are are also very good at problem solving and creating systems that solve problems. And that is exactly what I've been talking about -- that step-by-step guide is an algorithm, it is, in effect, a system that solves a problem. And hey, there are a lot of unsolved problems that you can solve by creating code!

So I know you can make systems that solve problems. The question then is, can you sell it? We don't like to sell, do we? But it doesn't have to be difficult, and that will be the topic for an upcoming blog entry.

The northern lights, the Aurora Borealis, is really beautiful up here in Tromsø. It waves quickly across the skies at night, pouring it's magnificent colors across the dark heavens. And that sight is worth more than any money. If you're following this blog, you know what I'm talking about.

Frozen hugs,
Sten, Rica Ishavshotell, Tromsø, Jan. 14th 2005