UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship

by M.J. DeMarco

Find that city, country, church, coffee shop, or band of new friends that supports and inspires you.

Productocracies go hand in hand with a powerful brand image.

Behind every disciple, a clear brand identity reinforces loyalty. If you want a business that grows and sticks, brand strategy needs to be a primary consideration.

For experts, branding is more: it is the art of personifying a business with human qualities and characteristics so that it reflects or affirms your own customer’s identity.

The point is, brands aren’t created by website words or walled mission statements—a brand is earned. It is a reputation arising from consistent action, much like an individual earns a reputation.

Brand building starts with identifying how you want your company to be perceived. If it was a person, who would be its friend? What does it stand for, and how will it conduct itself to reflect that persona? Don’t confuse a brand with your USP, or unique selling proposition. Being the cheapest or the service with the most features isn’t a brand. A USP is a part of the brand build like ties are to suits, but underneath the image there must be something more. Your customer must feel you are different.

After you identify your brand persona, identify the specific initiatives that would make it happen. Is it a no-time-limit, no-questions-asked, money-back guarantee? Is it the ability to talk to a human being without having to press a gazillion buttons? Is it eco-friendly with a portion of profits going to a nonprofit environmental organization? Consistency of brand action must always be congruent with operations, from you to your employees.

SELL OR BE SOLD Execution is the “act, assess, adjust” trio, but it also has another three-headed pilot: selling, marketing, and communication. If you’re idea-empty while saddled to the couch, here’s what you can do in the meantime: learn how to sell. Selling and all of its cousins (marketing, copywriting, negotiation) are the most important skills, no matter what your business is. These skills can be banked for life.

TELL A STORY If you want to sell more of anything, give your product or company a story. People love stories because it’s how we make sense of our world. Linking a story to your company or product gives the customer a chance to become part of the narrative. When the story resonates with your customer’s identity, it strengthens your brand.

HUMANIZE YOUR CORPORATION A big part of attaching a narrative to your company (or product) is that it humanizes it. Humanization is another double-pronged strategy that helps reinforce your brand AND sweeten buyers to top-of-mind. The fact is people want to do business with relatable people they like, not mammoth corporations hidden behind a bureaucratic wall.

The easy way to humanize your business is to put a face to it.

Another humanization strategy is to engage your audience on social media.

APPEAL TO SELF-INTEREST, MEANING, AND PURPOSE The ultimate consumer doctrine of selfishness is what’s in it for me? The quicker and cleaner your customer learns what’s in it for them, the quicker the sale. Forget features, doodads, and sparkly accoutrements—sell benefits. If you skewed multiple value attributes in the value array, translate those attributes into direct benefits. Tell your potential buyer exactly what you can do for them. Your campaign focus should always drill down into one core benefit. Don’t let your customer draw their own conclusions.

You have seconds to appeal to self-interest, and it all happens with your headline. Make it large, bold, short, but long enough to convey the core benefit.

The best sales secret isn’t about sales at all. It’s peer testimonials and reviews. It’s the good word from your friends,

In a digital “sharing” economy, social proof is the primary method in the buyer’s decision process, not advertising.

So whenever you receive your first positive echoes, jump for joy. And then save them. Use them in advertising, on your website, and in your promotional materials. If the raves come by private emails, ask permission to use them. If they’re on public websites, link to them, cite them, get them front and center so potential buyers read them and become actual buyers. If someone tweets positives about your wares, favorite it. Even more powerful, Twitter allows tweet embedding, where you can immortalize positive comments on your website. Dozens of such tweets are embedded at my website, and they sell for me 24/7.

Instead, I’ve focused on creating great content, and Google has rewarded me with a good search ranking. This SEO relationship oddly parallels money—once I focused on what attracts money and not money itself, the money flowed. Likewise, once you focus on what attracts good search-engine results—valuable content—the good SEO results follow.

The UNSCRIPTED preamble, the final union represented by the upmost triangle, 4(D), in the UNSCRIPTED Entrepreneurial Framework is discipline: the tricky trick of getting to the prestige and staying there. Discipline completes the UNSCRIPTED penta-union, joining with belief, meaning, and an executed CENTS strategy. Once you accomplish a scaling productocracy, the four disciplines finalize the difference between lifelong UNSCRIPTION and fleeting success. They are: Comparative Immunity Purposed Saving Measured Elevation Consequential Thought

the first UNSCRIPTED discipline: comparative immunity. Comparative immunity is being at peace with your present pace while abstaining from the unwinnable game of comparison.

Your three objectives under the purposed saving discipline are: Lifetime passive income Early “retirement” and dream pursuit Tax relief

1. LIFETIME PASSIVE INCOME While a business can spawn semi-passive income, a money system, regular monthly income generated from investments, is numero uno on the passivity scale. Unless you count regular royalties from Seinfeld syndication, the money system has no match insofar as regularity and “hands-off” management. Since you aren’t Costanza, purposed saving, while growing your business, needs to be your go-to plan.

The end game is the money system, which can be funded from two sources: (1) purposed saving from business income; and (2) a business sale, known as a liquidation event.

A total financial reconstruction consists of five retooling phases. They are: Reframe Reform Reduce Reallocate and Remind Reward

STEP 1: REFRAME Reframing is changing your perception about money. First, rename money as value-vouchers.

Second, see one saved dollar as a tiny passive-income machine that produces a nickel in lifetime passive income.

STEP 2: REFORM The second step is reforming expenses and cash outflow. This involves eliminating any expense that is not conducive to an UNSCRIPTED objective.

The pragmatic approach for attacking debt within a purposed saving mindset is that every

dollar spent should fall into one of three categories: 1) Business expenses; net-worth acceleration is anchored by your business. Don’t fear spending money here. If one dollar spent translates into ten dollars tomorrow, the risk and returns are worth it. 2) Living expenses; food, shelter, transportation, insurance—your household should be run like a fine-tuned machine. 3) Debt reduction; if it isn’t needed for basic living expenses or can’t be reinvested in your business, it should go toward repayments. Pay down credit cards or reduce the principal on loans, such as mortgages or student loans.

STEP 4: REALLOCATE (AND REMIND) Financial reconstruction’s fourth step is to reallocate *something* into your money system every month, even if it is only a few dollars. Optimally, allocate any surplus income after covering your business and living expenses. And yes, even if you have to divert a few dollars away from debt repayment, do it.

STEP 5: REWARD Reward is the final phase of financial reconstruction for purposed-saving: giving yourself a gift for milestones achieved. This could be dinner at an expensive restaurant, a vacation, a fun gadget, any desire craved. For example, my first Lamborghini purchase was a reward for a financial milestone.

Measured elevation’s discipline is simple: You only limitlessly consume a fractioned amount of production. If you want something expensive, it’s earned and then some. I mean, let’s be serious: We all like nice things. Flying privately is better than being stuffed in economy next to the lavatory. Producerism produced by a productocracy sells enough of what OTHERS want so you can purchase whatever YOU want. You can live very well and still save disproportionately.

consequential-thought—the foresight into the consequences of our actions and knowing that our choices are unfairly weighted toward the bad ones.

Negative influences or destructive people, no matter what their label (family, fraternity brother, coworker) shouldn't carry exemptions to excommunication.

effective UNSCRIPTED money system is allocated into two pots and an optional third. The size of these pots is dependent on your lifestyle goals as well as your risk tolerance for each item they represent. The “fuck you” pot The home pot The paycheck pot Visually, the UNSCRIPTED money system looks like this:

The optional home pot is your dream home, owned free and clear without a mortgage.

If you remove this expense, money will never be an issue. The other alternative (and why the home pot is optional) is to have your next pot—the paycheck pot—large enough to pay your monthly mortgage nut (or rent) without stress or issue.

For the UNSCRIPTED entrepreneur, the paycheck pot is the end game—a passive-income system of financial instruments that pay your bills, fund your lifestyle, and throw off regular cash you can count on. Such financial instruments can be bonds, ETFs, options, stocks, bank deposits, investment trusts—anything that delivers a published, predictable yield. It could even be a low-cost mutual fund, and yeah, I just recommended mutual funds. My contradiction is absolved in our ends: purposed for income, not for growth. Once a 5 percent return on your paycheck pot is a large enough income to make you comfortably (or luxuriously) happy, you fund the other pots as you wish.

As for the rent you should receive, it should come every month or quarter in any of the aforementioned income streams:

dividends, interest, or partnership income.

#2: the snap rule. The snap rule requires that paycheck-pot investments must remain highly liquid, or recallable back to cash at the snap of a finger.

The snap rule says that if a cash recall takes longer than a finger snap to initiate, liquidity could be an issue. Liquidity issues put your principal at risk in shifting markets. The rule saves you from asset price declines that significantly outweigh the income received from the asset. $10K in interest from a bond ETF that has declined $100K in value is not an effective investment, as it takes ten payment periods to recapture the lost asset value.

The three-three rule says that if any of your investments, whether they be stocks or bonds, appreciates unrealized gains greater than or equal to three years in dividends in any three-month period, SELL and take the profits. Consider this appreciation a compressed dividend advance where, instead of waiting three years to receive the money, you can take the cash now by selling. Money today is better than money tomorrow.

when dealing with managed distributions from managed funds, avoid any fund with a management fee greater than 1 percent, excluding interest charges.

The ostrich rule states that you should avoid investments where the business no longer jives with either the cultural or economic climate.

For market awareness, here are some questions which cornerstone the ostrich rule: Is the company’s industry dying? (RadioShack, Kodak) Is the company’s industry being disrupted? (Barnes & Noble, Blackberry) Is the company’s industry going through a cyclical shift that could endanger the underlying asset? (Linn Energy, Chesapeake Energy)