In which Charlie reveals why people might be dropping you from their Twitter lists like you’re a poisonous puffer fish coated in hot lava and rabid Saint Bernard slobber.

I‘m sure there are an infinite number of reasons why people might choose to drop you from their Twitter lists. I’m sure someone, sometime, with no thought about it, will drop you simply because they had a funky bagel for breakfast. That said, it’s fairly likely that two main overriding rules are the essence of any unfollow. If you’re the impatient type, stick with these bolded statements and call it a day. Then go make me some cookies¹:

Remember why people are listening to you and then give them something they want to hear.

Each little tweet takes up a tiny bit of time and is, in essence, a brief interruption. Use that time wisely.

Those are fairly broad and general ideas, so I’m gonna break them down into a few specifics that will make you go, “Hmm,” “Ahhh,” and stroke your chin wisely.

A commonsense guide to using Twitter

The basics are already covered

Every single person on this planet eats, drinks, sleeps and uses the bathroom. Unless it’s really news, it probably isn’t really news.

If you just ate a real live pterodactyl or passed a fire hydrant through your digestive tract, by all means report it to the masses. If not, consider the newsworthiness of such circadian items before letting us all know.

Nothing disastrous about sharing personal things, but minimize it where you can. Give us the goods!

Who does it right? @sushiday. Awesome Twitter user and blogger. She transforms food into something I really care about, regardless of the medium. And that’s saying a lot for a guy who rarely remembers he needs to eat at all.

Don’t JUST be a reTweeter

If people are following you, it’s because they want to hear what you think. I’m all for supporting my friends and reTweeting when something awesome comes down the interwebs, and I’m not saying it should always be about you. Part of the magic about Twitter is how reTweets can turn something awesome into something awesomely viral in a nano-second.

But it sort of needs to be awesome first. “Bread belongs on sandwiches,” isn’t really worth the reTweet.

So reTweet the awesome stuff or come up with original Tweets of your own.

Give us stuff we can’t get elsewhere

I’ve been seeing a lot of inspirational quotes floating though the Twitterverse. Mark Twain and Martin Luther King and Helen Keller are all alive and well on Twitter. Not a bad thing; some of their quotes are real doozies and they were magical people.

But remember that there are books and websites for this type of thing. Also remember that dead people, by definition, are no longer coming up with unique and inspirational quotes. “Carpe Diem” is old news for most of us now. And also remember that we’re not following MLK or Twain…we’re following you.

Go ahead and quote something old and well known, but don’t forget to be unique as often as you can. Give us a quote of your own, eh?

Who does it right? @jillkoenig. Jill does a splendid job of mixing inspiring old quotes with her own business acumen, personal tips, punchy adages. She’s the epitome of pithy.

Leave the TV out of it

Do you know how much I care about television? While it’s on…just barely slightly above zero. When it’s off…zero. When I’m on Twitter…even less than that. Nobody cares what you’re watching on TV and I’m guessing they don’t care who your favorite American Idol contestant is.

I guess you could make the argument that you’re letting your personality shine through by showing followers what you do and who you are when you’ve got free time. But I’d counter that if your personality is based on television shows…mmm…you got some thinking to do. And then you could further argue, but it would come out like, “Brhuyc, juadhbl, aiyha,” because there’s really no way to argue with me.

Remember why people are following you to begin with

While blog newbies still do it and always will, probloggers have for the most part caught on that going way off topic isn’t a good thing to do with their blogs. Unfortunately, Twitter goes that route a bit, probably because it’s still in its infancy and it is devilishly easy to post to Twitter.

However, just because it’s easy to post doesn’t mean you should. Grow your brand when you can. If you don’t have anything earth-shattering to report, it’s totally fine to not say anything at all. And when you do get around to Tweeting, make it on-topic to yourself. Report on cars if you run a car blog. Report on graphic design if you run a graphic design blog. Report on new products if you’ve got ‘em. Remember why people are listening to you, and then give them something they want to hear.

Who does this right? @John_Dickinson. John runs Motionworks, a great blog about motion graphics. On Twitter, John is completely and totally invisible unless he’s reporting something having to do with, you guessed it, motion graphics. I don’t know of anyone who keeps as on-topic as John does. And now that I think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen John tweet something to the general community that was only meant for one person. Which brings me to the next point…

Twitter ain’t no chatroom

Subjecting all nine-thousand of your followers to a conversation you’re having with ONE friend is a lousy way to go about things. Unless the conversation is really insanely awesome and meaningful. It’s sort of like being on a subway in New York, while some guy is on his cell phone talking to his friend about his latest conquest or his grocery list or something. It’s invasive, in that really boring, “why must we all be subject to this,” sort of way that makes you equally want to be in a coma and hit someone with a large brick.

Also, realize that while YOU may be having a chat with @Joe, a lot of your followers might not be connected to @Joe at all. This means your followers are only seeing your side of the conversation, and that leads to an awesome string of Tweet lameness that looks like this:

You: “Doing good, you?”
You: “Dinner, then a movie.”
You: “Usually just olive oil, maybe a little salt.”
You: “Yeah, I remember that.”

Great. Awesome. Thanks for that really awkward half-conversation.

Remember, Twitter has a direct messaging feature which allows us to talk to @Joe without confusing everyone else. Use it unless what you’re saying is meant for everyone.

Tie in your job to your personality:

If you’re a graphic designer (and therefore have followers interested in the life and times of a graphic designer) Tweeting “my son just crapped his pants,” isn’t the best use of the medium. “My son just crapped on my Wacom tablet,” is more fitting and will strike chord with fellow designers, even those who don’t have kids.

Or better yet, add some real value: “My son just crapped his pants and it inspired me to create some unique Photoshop brushes (link).”

Don’t just be a journalist…be interesting:

Most people have sources for worldly news already, so when passing on current events add some personality to it. Instead of saying, “News on George Bush (link),” say something like, “I always knew that George Bush was a grundle (link),” or something. We can get news anywhere, but there’s only ONE place where I can learn what YOU think about the news.

Respond when people write you:

There’s one particular person I used to follow that I must have written a dozen times. I never once got a single response from him. I said before that Twitter ain’t no chatroom, which it ain’t, but to ignore that many messages without even a peep is super bad manners. One-sided communication starts to make you feel pretty invisible after a while.

How well or poorly you communicate (yes, even on Twitter) is a representation of how you do business. Make sure you’re not scaring people away.

Who does it right? @MenWithPens. James Chartrand of Men with Pens comes on Twitter nearly every day with a “good morning.” And he’s chatty. If you write James, he’ll write you back. He runs a six-figure business but still has time to talk and act like a human on Twitter, various blogs and everywhere else you find him. Hmm…interesting…wonder if there’s a connection there?

Twitter can help your business, make you friends and increase the strength of your empire. So use it, but remember to use it like a human living amongst other humans.

The next post is going to be so insanely incredible, if you don’t read it, it will probably take years off your life. Better subscribe now, eh?

¹: You may be wondering what sort of cookies to bake me. I would say any sort of cookie that goes into my mouth.↑

Welcome to part one of Ignite Living’s “Why You Owe it to Yourself to be an Entrepreneur” series. In this series we’re going to explore…guess what? That’s right. Why you owe it to yourself to be an entrepreneur.

We’re gonna start this series off with a subject that’s very close to our hearts, stomachs and landlords: money.

If I were to give my top two reasons for becoming an entrepreneur, the first would be freedom and the second would be money.

Now, how much money you make as an entrepreneur will mostly be in ratio to your industriousness, marketing ability and many other factors, so it wouldn’t be fully truthful for me to say all entrepreneurs make more money.

However, the potential for you to make sick amounts of cash is much higher as an entrepreneur. And I can illustrate this by telling you a real-life story that is entirely not even a lie. About me. In my old corporate job. At a HUGE company that I guarantee you’ve heard of, from which you’ve bought stuff and which should have known better.

Corporate suckiness

Back when I was in the corporate world, I out-produced my quota by double. I’m not patting my own back. It’s just the job was easy and I was antisocial and never once left my desk ever, hence production. After the third year of doing this, I asked for what I thought would be a fitting raise and was given the awesome response of “no.”

I wanted to know the reason for that so I asked, “What’s the reason for that?”

My pay, I came to learn, was actually part of a complicated mix of factors, most important of which was how long I’d been at the company. Having been there for X amount of years, I’d make X amount of money. Then later, when I’d been at the company for Y years, I’d be making Y.

Yay. Worst. System. Ever. Gotta love the Old People Win and Young People Get Screwed System of Rewards and Penalties.

So when I was told I hadn’t been at the company long enough to get a raise, I kindly mentioned that I’d doubled my quota for the year. And I figured, by looking at store sales and such, that I’d grossed the company an insane amount of extra income that year and that they could therefore afford to give me a raise despite having people who don’t use logic in the Payroll Department.

“It’s more complicated than that,” I was told.

“No. Not really,” I said. “How about I just get a little bonus. Say $2,000? Drop in the bucket really. And it’s a tax write-off for all that extra cash I made you.”

“People in hourly positions like you don’t get bonuses,” I was told.

“So,” I began, putting on my Perry Mason courtroom disguise. “I doubled my quota, increased the income of the company by maybe six-figures, out produced the majority of my peers, even those that have been here for many years longer. And I can’t get a raise? Or a bonus?”

“No.”

“Thank you for the explanation. How ’bout this then? One extra week of vacation?”

“Your vacation time won’t change until you’ve been here for five years.”

“Okay, well, here’s another idea. Since I doubled my quota, I’ve essentially done all the work I needed to do for the next year. Can I take a year off with full pay please?”

“Sure. Have fun.”

Just kidding. The official answer was something between, “No” and, “Eat shit, thank you for playing.”

“So, basically,” I said, knowing for a fact that the human in front of me had in fact been replaced by a bowl of jello, “no matter how hard I work or how much I help the company I will never get a single solitary benefit from doing so?”

(shrug went the jello)

That was it. Well, not really, because my big mouth also earned an increased production quota for the next year. Yay again. Welcome to Socialism. Er, excuse me. Corporate America I mean.

If you ONLY get paid for the bare minimum, you’ll only DO the bare minimum

The funny part of this arrangement is that it puts each employee into a situation where they are completely and totally unable to change their condition. Nor will they care to try after a while. With that sort of pay/reward system there is ZERO benefit to putting in extra work, trying harder, being productive, staying overtime, streamlining the system, thinking, having ideas and making things faster. There is no benefit whatsoever. No matter how hard I worked, I would never see an extra dime, extra day of vacation, bonus, pay raise…nothing. This is all the exact opposite of entrepreneurialism (is that a word?).

Nine-to-fivers, for the most part, are subject to just this sort of illogical derangement. They’re locked in at an hourly rate, a set salary, a set bonus structure, etc. While some of those pay structures can be very very good, it doesn’t change this fact, and mark this well if you have even a single person (including yourself) on your payroll:

If the pay system is NOT based on production, it will eventually break all to shit.

Germany proved this in the mid 1900′s by doing the exact opposite and imploding the whole country’s face in.

When your hard work is rewarded financially, production goes up, statistics soar and workers get happier. And oddly enough they start to like the company and product more as well. Interesting, that.

We’ve all known this since we were kids. We mowed the lawn and earned $5. So why not mow two lawns and make $10? That’s how it should be and, honestly, that really is the simplicity of it.

And luckily that’s how it is for entrepreneurs. Well, mostly. And I added that “mostly” in there because someone in the comments is going to say, “But, Charlie, it’s more complex than that. You’re forgetting about import excise numbers multiplied by the parallel of the hypotenuse on the gross amount paid before taxes on your 401k structure. Oh and then there are accounting fees and the dragons too. Plus…that whole ozone layer thing.”

Yeah, probably, whatever.

But no, not really. At all.

When production is rewarded, you get higher production.

That is it. Game, Set and Match. Oh…and a touchdown. I win, and so do you if you’re an entrepreneur or are lucky enough to work at a company where people get it. Which is unlikely. Sorry.

What the hell was all that anyway?

Yeah, I know. This is a sort of a roundabout story and weird way to make a point. So it goes…sometimes I’d rather teach people about a cube by showing them a sphere, telling them what a corner is and letting them sort the rest out for themselves.

So, if your bulb isn’t burning as brightly as it should at the moment, the moral of the story is this:

Entrepreneurs (usually) get paid in ratio to their effort and not by some Socialist, complex system of illogics. The harder you work (hopefully) the more you’ll make, and you can give yourself fat bonuses any time you wish.

You want more money? Put in more hours, figure out a way to work faster and smarter. Market to a new group of people. Try a new ad or test some new headlines on old ads. Create a new product that can replace or enhance the service you provide…or vice versa.

The possibilities are infinite, but the fact remains that when you’re in charge of your own financial destiny, every little thing can help. And sometimes in a big big way. And the extra money you make doesn’t get filtered around to the exec strata (or worse yet, the non-producers) but to yourself. It’s all right and proper.

So be an entrepreneur. Work your ass off; you’re gonna need to. But you’ll get the rewards that you’d likely never see as a nine-to-fiver.

Stay tuned for the next part in the series, in which we’ll explore a subject I haven’t thought of yet, but I’m sure will be just as erotic as this one was.

You won’t want to miss it. I don’t think. So subscribe now.

Question: If you were about to flush $19,000 down the drain, would you know it?

The question up there is a serious one. If there were a division of your company that brought in roughly $19,000 a month, would you keep it going? Shut it down? Would you even know it was pulling in that amount of money?

I would hope so, but on a recent consult I found the same old huge glaring omission that I find with pretty much any individual or business person I talk to. I tell you, I’m about to hire a guy to carve these into stone tablets for me. Or one of those chainsaw artists. He can carve up my couch to read:

1. Some people have no clue how their business is really doing.
2. Some people have no clue how to keep and use stats.
3. Usually these are the same people.

Stats? We don’t need no stinking stats!

I can tell you from first-hand experience exactly what happens pretty much any time you ask an individual or business person for his stats.

“Show me your stats, please,” you say.

“….,” says the guy.

“You know,” you say again, after a long pause, “statistics.”

“Statistics?” says the guy.

“Yeah, stats you know. Up. Down. Sideways. Graph paper sort of thing.”

“Oh, yeah. We don’t really have time for that here,” he says, all puffed up with pride.

“Totally,” you say, “I understand. Must be pretty time consuming walking around with that paper bag over your head.”

The application of stats to real-life

The last person I spoke to about stats is in the food business. She runs a restaurant overlooking a golf course. It’s all very gorgeous and the food is unreal.

Now, once a month she holds huge banquets in her restaurant. They close the restaurant to walk-in customers and convert the dining hall into a banquet room. Extra help is hired on for the occasions, and of course it’s all just a lot of work so she only does it “every once in a while.”

This “once in a while” almost became “never” though. And why? Stats, or lack thereof.

Here, let me back up a bit. The way this lady ran her business consisted of making large amounts of money and keeping it in a pile. She didn’t know which portions of the cash, though, came from catering, these large in-house banquets or regular restaurant income.

She knew she was profitable and wanted to become more profitable. That was the overall plan, and the way she was going to do this was twofold.

One, she was going to quit the banquets entirely. They were large productions, took a lot of time and effort and, “closing the restaurant to walk-in visitors for a whole evening is costing us a lot of money.”

Two, no longer having the banquets, she’d be able to fire her head chef (who was in charge of the banquets and was pulling the largest pay check) and replace him with someone or a couple someones who’d cost less.

She figured that by firing the head chef, and canceling the banquets she’d “make more money by having less expenses.”

This of course is all the province of statistics, and when I asked for hers, she promptly went into a coma.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I mean I need to see your statistics. Mainly income and outgo. We’ll get to the rest later.”

“I don’t really keep stats,” she says. Thus the door to solving this problem opened, and she got some wicked homework.

“Well, over the next month,” I say, “I want you to track every dime that comes in and every dime that goes out. Don’t fire anyone, don’t hire anyone new, don’t change anything else. Just. Keep. Stats. See you in a month.”

One month later

When we met a month later I was happily surprised to see her stats were immaculate.

Inspecting her income graph for the month, I noticed an obvious spike. A large one. If you haven’t already figured it out from my painfully obvious foreshadowing, the income spike was the result of the monthly banquet. In fact, the banquet was worth about $19,000 in income.

And remember how she thought the banquets were too costly? Well, inspecting her expense graph, there was barely a dent for the night. They’d needed a little more food, a little more alcohol and a few extra hands to help with service.

What she thought was a losing night and a terrible idea was actually her largest income producer. What she discovered is sort of old news in the restaurant business. Large banquets of this sort keep tables full, where otherwise they may be empty. Banquets also consume more appetizers, drink more alcohol and order more desserts.

Plus, as she found out, there’s often a double-gratuity thing that happens. Ordinarily, 15-20% is added on automatically to the bill for a tip. But what often happens is that when signing the bills, people often write in another tip. Probably because they’re hammered out of their skulls, but whatever. It’s income.

Moral of the story

Keep stats. You might be losing money with one area of your business and making money with another. You might be losing money overall. But how will know? Without stats, you probably won’t.

Put it down on paper and be accountable for it. Yes, it takes a few extra minutes a day. But believe me, you can afford it.

Sub-moral of the story that I secretly snuck in. Cutting expenses is great and I highly recommend you trim the fat from your expense sheet. But, as our restauranteur found out, cutting expenses to make more income isn’t very sensible.

Sub-sub-moral that I also snuck in: If you run a restaurant, your product is good food. So don’t fucking fire your head chef. Sheesh.