The 5 laws of entrepreneurs

October 21st, 2009 by Ryan Huff No comments »

The term ‘entre­pre­neur’ is entic­ing and to many peo­ple implies, ‘doer of any­thing that makes money’ and in a large sense is a cor­rect impli­ca­tion. How­ever, what is often miss­ing from the gen­eral under­stand­ing of the term ‘entre­pre­neur’ is that each endeavor of an ‘entre­pre­neur’ requires con­tin­ual focus, noth­ing is ever truly on ‘auto-pilot’. I have seen too many entre­pre­neurs fail because they tried to be every­thing to every­one; they tried blog­ging, then on to mar­ket­ing, then on to affil­i­ate sales .… all within a few months!

To be a suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur, you have to apply laser focus to your ven­ture to get it off the ground, then you have to con­tin­u­ally apply over­sight to keep it in the air. As you progress and advance inen­tre­pre­neuri­al­ism you can explore out­sourc­ing and Vir­tual Assis­tant options to help you man­age but in the early-stages of a ven­ture, it is all about you and your per­sonal drive.

We could spend hours upon hours of our time and pages upon pages of text that all talk about the do’s & dont’s of entre­pre­neurs and mar­ket­ing. While all of that would be valu­able infor­ma­tion I think that being ‘straight and to the point’ is always an effec­tive mean of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In my own career I have come to find that if I adhere to the 5 laws of entre­pre­neurs I can assure my ven­ture the best pos­si­ble chance of success.

5 Laws of Entrepreneurs:

  • Law of Focus: In the early-stage devel­op­ment of your ven­ture, prod­uct or ser­vice you must remain focused and resist temp­ta­tions to become distracted.
    • Out­line spe­cific times dur­ing your day that you will ded­i­cate to work­ing on the ven­ture and noth­ing else.
    • Dur­ing the times you are work­ing with your ven­ture, turn off your phones, email, Twit­ter … etc. This is qual­ity time for you and your idea only.
  • Law of Goals: It is imper­a­tive that you doc­u­ment the goals and objec­tives of your ven­ture. You have to have some­thing to hold your­self account­able to.
    • If you do not have highly spe­cific goals and objec­tives you can eas­ily become dis­tracted and lose focus (a vio­la­tion of the first law!).
    • Hav­ing spe­cific goals allows you to mea­sure the pro­gres­sion of your ven­ture; with­out achiev­ing goals you have no way to deter­mine if your ven­ture is progressing.
  • Law of Moti­va­tion: In the early-stage of your ven­ture it is easy to stay moti­vated because of excite­ment and nov­elty. You must keep that enthu­si­asm because you can’t expect cus­tomers to be excited about your ven­ture if your not.
  • Law of Integrity: You must vow to never mis­rep­re­sent or over­state your venture’s value or ben­e­fit. Noth­ing will sink a ven­ture quicker than an over­state­ment or misrepresentation.
    • Do not ‘make’ your ven­ture fit into a mar­ket, find the mar­ket that fits your ven­ture by con­duct­ing focus groups and prod­uct research.
  • Law of Per­se­ver­ance: If suc­cess were easy then there wouldn’t be such a thing as fail­ure. Suc­cess is the 100th attempt of 99 failures.
    • You must com­mit to never giv­ing up on your ven­ture until you achieve your goals that you have out­lined. YOU CAN NEVER GIVE UP!

Being an entre­pre­neur is not easy, noth­ing worth hav­ing ever is. The dif­fer­ence between your venture’s suc­cess and being the next idea tossed to the way-side is you! You are the only respon­si­ble for your own suc­cess, so go make it hap­pen! Go be a success!

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Secur­ing Word­Press is not mis­sion impossible

October 19th, 2009 by Ryan Huff No comments »

I hate to be the one to burst your bub­ble but the, ‘how to make Word­Press hack proof’ ebook that you just bought was a com­plete waste of money. Why do you ask — because you can’t make Word­Press (or any other web appli­ca­tion for that mat­ter) lit­er­ally ‘hack-proof’.

First, lets define the terms Hack and Hacker before we get started:

  • ‘Hacker’ — while the more appro­pri­ate term in this con­text would be cracker, we’ll use hacker instead because it’s inferred mean­ing is more socially under­stood (albeit a mis­un­der­stand­ing). Regard­ing Word­Press, a hacker would in sim­plest form, be some­one who causes your blog to do some­thing that it isn’t sup­posed to. Hack­ers may find a way to ‘spam’ your blog or cause your blog to make unin­tended posts/comments, they may find a way to over­write impor­tant sys­tem files in your blog soft­ware that ren­ders the blog unus­able and many other nasty activ­i­ties which can all be exam­ples of hacks (actu­ally the bet­ter term here would be cracks).
    • Out­side of a per­sonal vendetta, one com­mon rea­son for a hacker to attack your blog would be to spam it with the hack­ers own mes­sage (i.e. affil­i­ate links … etc).  By the time you real­ize the hack occurred, the hacker has already enjoyed some free click-thru traf­fic cour­tesy of you.

The World Wide Web is dri­ven by web servers, every blog that we use phys­i­cally resides some­where in the world on a real server that is acces­si­ble to the Inter­net. If you have a blog, that blog sits on a server some­where in the world and is prob­a­bly shared by many other peo­ple, blogs and var­i­ous Inter­net appli­ca­tions. The sad but true fact about web servers that you must embrace is, “the only 100% secure web server is the web server who’s power is turned off”. Unfor­tu­nately that isn’t very prac­ti­cal given that with­out power, your blogs couldn’t be found on the Internet.

So if we can’t secure the web server 100%, that means we can­not  secure the con­tents of the web server 100%. The only option left is to real­ize that the web server and the con­tents will be a tar­get of attack on the Inter­net and the best most prac­ti­cal way to secu­rity is to mit­i­gate threats and make the exposed areas (to the Inter­net) of the server as invalu­able as pos­si­ble. In most cases, there will be lit­tle that you can do for server-level secu­rity because in most cases you are not going to be the admin­is­tra­tor of the server (third party host­ing sit­u­a­tions). In third-party host­ing sit­u­a­tions, the best you can usu­ally do is exer­cise cau­tion when select­ing a server provider for your blog. At any rate you can always con­tact your server provider and ask them about their secu­rity pro­ce­dures and what secu­rity mea­sures are in place on the web server.

You can how­ever take sub­stan­tial secu­rity mea­sures on the blog soft­ware level that can dra­mat­i­cally improve secu­rity on your blog. In par­tic­u­lar I am talk­ing about self-hosted blogs;‘free blog ser­vices’ like blogger.com or wordpress.com won’t leave many options for secu­rity to the blog­ger indi­vid­u­ally and you will have to rely on the organization’s admin­is­tra­tion for security.

If you host your own blog you can employ plu­g­ins that may help secure your blog.  Bel­low, I have listed some of my favorite plugin’s for var­i­ous blog software:

b2Evolution | Plu­gin Site: http://plugins.b2evolution.net/

TextPat­tern | Plu­gin Site: http://textpattern.org/plugins

Mov­able Type | Plu­gin Site: http://plugins.movabletype.org/

Word­press | Plu­gin Site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

No mat­ter what soft­ware you choose as your blog­ging plat­form, no amount of plu­g­ins can match the effec­tive­ness of com­mon sense and prac­ti­cal­ity. This is a list of ‘good rules of thumb’ that extend beyond the use of plu­g­ins and when used in con­junc­tion with plu­g­ins can prove to be very effective.

  1. Less code = more secu­rity. The less code lying about on your blog the less poten­tial there is for code to be exploited. If your not using a plugin/theme/widget on your blog, deac­ti­vate it and then remove it. Do not leave it lying about wait­ing to be exploited. As plu­gin ver­sions change and updates are pub­lished you may for­get to update the ones your not using.
  2. Keep the core blog soft­ware updated.  I am not a fan of the ‘bleeding-edge’ so I wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily rec­om­mend being on the lat­est ver­sion as soon as it is released. New releases can always have unfore­seen flaws. I rec­om­mend stay­ing 1 full ver­sion behind the lat­est sta­ble ver­sion.  Upgrade only when secu­rity patches are released or when a new sta­ble ver­sion is released and it makes your blog 2 full ver­sions behind the lat­est sta­ble version.
  3. Take advan­tage of the built-in mod­er­a­tion con­trols of the soft­ware. Don’t allow pub­lic com­ment­ing with­out some type of con­trol (i.e all com­ments are held for approval, only com­menters that have been approved can com­ment … etc)
  4. Log into your blog at least once per day just to give every­thing a glance, quickly scan new com­ments, look at the file-size of the blog on your server and note any changes, look at your post count and note any changes … etc

Happy Blog­ging!

Ryan Huff, C.E.O & Founder

RTH Con­sul­tants

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The life of a programmer

October 14th, 2009 by Ryan Huff No comments »

A pro­gram­mer was cross­ing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, “If you kiss me, I’ll turn into a beau­ti­ful princess.” He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, “If you kiss me and turn me back into a beau­ti­ful princess, I will stay with you for one week.”

The pro­gram­mer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, “If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I’ll stay with you and do any­thing you want.” Again the pro­gram­mer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket.

Finally, the frog asked, “What is the mat­ter? I’ve told you I’m a beau­ti­ful princess that I’ll stay with you for a week and do any­thing you want. Why won’t you kiss me?” The pro­gram­mer said, “Look, I’m a pro­gram­mer. I don’t have time for a girl­friend — but a talk­ing frog, now that’s cool.”

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Busi­ness Sur­vival — 101 Fea­tur­ing Kris­ten Eckstein

October 7th, 2009 by Ryan Huff No comments »

The Code­Tree has always been com­mit­ted to being an invalu­able resource for new and sea­soned online entre­pre­neurs. We con­stantly strive to pro­vide com­pelling, rel­e­vant con­tent as well as practical,‘how-to’ information.

In that spirit we decided to pro­duce a seg­ment that deals with the issues you face every­day as entre­pre­neurs and busi­ness own­ers. In this seg­ment you’ll hear from suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neurs explain­ing how they achieve suc­cess and what they do to, ‘keep the boat afloat’ in the cur­rent econ­omy.

How Kris­ten Eck­stein Does It …


kristen eckstein

Kris­ten Eckstein

Kris­ten Eck­stein, Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer of Imag­ine! Stu­dios (an arts and media pro­duc­tion com­pany) is a self-made suc­cess in the offline and online world. Kristen’s story started in 2004 when she had the fore­sight and where­withal to rec­og­nize an oppor­tu­nity to suc­ceed and the poten­tial to cap­i­tal­ize that oppor­tu­nity. Like many entre­pre­neurs, Kris­ten found a need in an indus­try that she is well versed in and then cre­ated prod­ucts and ser­vices to address that need.

When ques­tioned how a small busi­ness owner from North Car­olina achieves suc­cess in a sat­u­rated and cut-throat arts & media indus­try she sim­ply responds, “we cre­ate great art and enter­tain­ment that fires the imag­i­na­tion and makes a sig­nif­i­cant pos­i­tive influ­ence in the lives of peo­ple”.

Kris­ten describes her daily busi­ness activ­i­ties as; “a whirl­wind of activ­ity” between bal­anc­ing jobs, invoic­ing, cus­tomer ser­vice, meet­ings, prod­uct devel­op­ment and many other busi­ness tasks Kris­ten finds her­self wear­ing sev­eral dif­fer­ent hats. Today, Kris­ten remains involved with corporate-style graphic design, book design and book coach­ing as a self-employer with three inde­pen­dent contractors.

Sur­viv­ing eco­nomic challenges …

We wanted to know if and how the cur­rent US/World econ­omy has pre­sented any obsta­cles for Kris­ten and her busi­ness . She responds by stat­ing, “It has done noth­ing but make us more prof­itable. Not only are we in a busi­ness that oth­ers need to com­pete and stay in busi­ness, but we believe that though we live in this world, we have the abil­ity to tap into God’s econ­omy, and it is a lot more secure!”.

Every busi­ness owner is faced with the chal­lenge of cut­ting costs and expense wher­ever pos­si­ble; Kris­ten found that join­ing America’s Best Com­pa­nies proved to be a great cost-saver for legal and pro­fes­sional ser­vices. Addi­tion­ally, Kris­ten remains com­mit­ted that her com­pany only spend money in areas that will help grow the busi­ness or enrich the lives of others.

Objec­tives …

Call them goals, objec­tives, mile­stones … what­ever you call them, every busi­ness and busi­ness owner needs them. As a suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur, you must be com­mit­ted to expand­ing your busi­ness. A busi­ness is designed to grow, if the busi­ness does not grow the busi­ness will wither. Among many ways to grow busi­ness, Kris­ten chooses to grow her busi­ness by con­tin­u­ally adding new prod­ucts and ser­vices that are inline with her indus­try such as her recently released Plat­inum Pub­lish­ing Pro­gram for book authors.

Cus­tomer ser­vice should be a pri­mary objec­tive for every entre­pre­neur; great cus­tomer ser­vice equals a great cus­tomer. Kris­ten is very pas­sion­ate about cus­tomer ser­vice, here is what Kris­ten had to say when asked to weigh in her opin­ion on cus­tomer service :

“My cus­tomer may not always be right (they may ask the impos­si­ble), but we take the time to explain every­thing thor­oughly. We have found that even if the cus­tomer isn’t right, good cus­tomer ser­vice takes time out to give the cus­tomer atten­tion, make them feel val­ued (as they should be), and explain sit­u­a­tions to them. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is key! Espe­cially if we can­not meet a dead­line, I will con­tact the cus­tomer and let them know right away. We have found that if we com­mu­ni­cate clearly, they are a lot more under­stand­ing than we may give them credit for.”

Some sage advice …

In order to be a suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur you must be vig­i­lant, tri­umphant deter­mined and will­ing to do any­thing required in order to achieve your dream, includ­ing per­sonal sacrifice.

Kris­ten Eck­stein leaves us with some of her expert advice:

  • Are busi­ness ethics impor­tant? “Yes, if you have strong val­ues and put your cus­tomers first, they will notice and you will reap the reward of their con­tin­ued patron­age. If you always do things cheaply and do not take respon­si­bil­ity when some­thing goes wrong, your busi­ness will suf­fer immediately”.
  • What is the ‘first step’ that new entre­pre­neurs should take? “Come up with a name! Your busi­ness name will iden­tify you, clar­ify your vision, and give you focus”.
  • What are the ingre­di­ents to a good ‘suc­cess recipe’? “Equal parts Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Respect, and Hon­esty”.

Con­tact­ing Kris­ten Eckstein:

Kris­ten Eck­stein, Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer
Imag­ine! Stu­dios www.artsimagine.com
I am Pub­lished! Pro­gram www.iampublished.com
Twit­ter http://twitter.com/imaginestudios


The Code­Tree is proud to fea­ture expert advice from sea­soned pro­fes­sion­als like Kris­ten Eck­stein. To sub­mit your advice for pos­si­ble inclu­sion on The Code­Tree please down­load the inter­view ques­tion­naire and return it to submissions@mycodetree.com.

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