What articles do not tell you about starting your own business

There are many articles online as well as books about starting a business. In particular with articles, I have found that they often assume you have plenty of money available to pay salaries, advertising, premises, stock and other related items. None of them really cover what you should do when you are starting right from the bottom with super limited amounts of money to try and make a little bit of extra income to get through the month.

What these articles conveniently do not mention either is how expensive advertising is, especially print media and how difficult to see if the advertising actually might have limited use or just be a waste of that super rare cash. The articles often throw around words like "startups" and small businesses, but they really imply having millions in funds and multiple employees, but no mention of when you have to start from home and are starting up small.

The articles also assume having access to a huge market that just happens to want your services from day one. There is also no mention how long it can take to get a customer, how to have competitive pricing that does not leave you poor, etc.

A very casual gamer view of what is wrong with Guild Wars 2

English: Picture of Guild Wars 2 Français : Image de Guild Wars 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Recently I got hold of Guild Wars 2. Notably I have very little time for playing games and never seriously got into solo farming in the first Guild Wars game due to slow connection and the whole grind for not getting much. I have played Guild Wars for roughly four years, but it got rather stale for me. These days I have far less time and patience.

Yesterday, I finally got my first character to level 8. In the new personal story system (I like the idea), I so far had two cases of encountering a character in the instances that I cannot possibly beat even when I try repeatedly. I do not have the patience to try this kind of thing ten times with the same outcome. For me that seriously starts putting me off a game and even getting close to uninstall if the situation cannot be solved. The previous game also had some rather annoying and partially stupid quests which were easy for the hardcore gamers that live these games.

What does not help in the instances is that the character gets adjusted to the difficulty of the area which is normally fine when you are a high level character in a starter area. In this case it makes the situation impossible to overcome. End result: My interest for Guild Wars 2 already had two knocks and I have not even bothered trying to create other characters because I know that I will encounter more quests like that.

What is wrong with South African corporates?

A friend of mine recently had an anxiety attack due to extreme stress levels. Someone else that we both know who is working at the same company is super stressed. My friend's predecessor died from a heart attack at work due to stress.

A lot of this comes from managers having huge expectations and pushing people to do even more urgent work and then still complaining when there are delays. What does not help is other people and departments delegating work just because they do not want to or learn. My friend was angry because of the sales people not supporting their customers when they have questions about the products that they sold and pushing that onto support. Notably support should be dealing with things like errors and not general questions.

To make matters worse, there are a lot of queries coming in that get delegated to support that should never get there. Also people not reading properly does not help. What is even worse is that the company website does not get fixed up properly to streamline this process and to reduce the huge workload and stress on the people at the bottom. None of the managers wants to take responsibility to do this since that means less support queries answered and they have to admit that there is a problem which stops their promotion and bonuses. Obviously getting more support staff is not an option because that means paying more salaries, wasting time in training people and less bonuses.

My friend is now seriously concerned about his health due to this anxiety attack. Several people from other companies that I was talking to were talking about similar issues. The common pattern is that management is disruptive and just makes matters worse and does not really manage the situation since managers do not really want to know about problems or the details. If something then goes wrong, the people below the managers involved get blamed and written warnings and most likely even more work, but the cause of the problem never gets addressed.

In the end there is high staff turnover and wasted time on training and no real progress made to solving the cause of the high staff turnover and related losses with that. People seem to love blaming others and not wanting to take responsibility themselves, but they want "responsible" positions like being a manager for the status and salary. This is notably not applicable to all companies here, but it seems to be a rather common trend from what I have heard and seen.

Security upgrade due to repeat burglary

On Friday, I had yet again a burglary where someone was after my cash box. Just like the last one, it was after I had lots of clients and I was at my main work during the day when it happened. This time there is proof that the point of entry was the kitchen window. Someone took along equipment which will be returned, but my new camera is badly scratched. If it still works or not is another matter. My thanks in this matter goes out to ADT and the police in Goodwood (Cape Town area) for being so quick on the matter, as well as someone at a liquor shop who noticed something odd about a poor customer who lives in the bush with rather expensive equipment on him that does not belong in a bottle store.

Due to this happening not the first time, I will now install burglar bars and a safe plus possibly a camera for movement detection with uploading before the camera can be disabled.