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LYA: So you ran businesses with just a fax machine, computer, and a phone? BH: Sure! Those things are very easy to use anywhere in the world. It’s easier to sell ideas and concepts and support for ideas and concepts rather than physical products.When you’re not delivering a physical product, you don’t have to actually show up with a thing to give to someone, or support giving that thing to someone. In my case what I’m doing is sales via web sites, or offering support for people with technical problems. Typically I can either hop on a computer right then and there, or put tools in place where I can control someone else’s computer from wherever I am, and then show them how to do something. It's a business that's easy to do from anywhere. LYA: What are some of the brightest and boldest technologies that allow you to do that? BH: Right now some of the most promising stuff is stuff that comes from the corporate world and trickles down into the you-and-me world. Video conferencing, for example. It used to be a big deal. There were businesses where you would set up a time and place, then go to a building and dial in, and you'd see the other guy while you talked to him. Now that’s part of the package they sell to you when you buy a new Mac, it’s called iChat. They’ll sell you a little camera, the software, and you have your own little personal video conference. It's like VoIP -- that was something that was developed in-house for corporations who didn’t want to pay for huge telephone systems. So they said, "If we can get our telephone system working over the Internet we’ll save a ton of money!" Eventually that trickled out to you and me, and now we can have our phone lines on the same lines as our Internet or cable. You’re only paying one bill. You're basically paying an Internet bill but your phone, cable, and everything else is running through that one line. There’s some fun stuff you can do with that. Your phone can go with you no matter where you are as long as you’re connected to the Internet. That’s an amazing technology. A lot of the E-payment stuff, which again was normally reserved for big businesses and has trickled down to us. too. PayPal being the big killer example. A lot of people think PayPal is just something you use when you buy off eBay, but that’s not the case. If I need to pay a guy in China, it’s just as easy going through PayPal than through currency houses because PayPal will handle the conversion for me. It’s an easy way to get money anywhere in the world without having to experience something like Western Union or other conditional business entities. LYA: Western Union is very costly. BH: PayPal also kind of dings you on the exchange rate, but if you had to get money to some guy in China, you could do it in 10 minutes regardless of whether you’re a PayPal member or not. Whereas with Western Union you’ve got to call it in and jump through hoops and there’s half-hour to hour delay. There are a whole lot of problems you have to deal with. LYA: What about remote access to another computer? BH: This is great for people who need access to a certain computer from somewhere else in the world. A couple of technologies have come along in the past five to eight years that have made that easy to do. There’s a company called pcAnywhere where you can fire up a window on your computer that's actually a window from another computer. Say a big business had a hundred computers and didn’t want to have a hundred monitors. They could use this software to find the computer they needed. They could click on an icon and get computer # 43 and they'd have the desktop right there. There’s also a company called GoToMyPC.com which offers exactly the same service but with a couple different enhancements. The point is that these technologies allow you to access a computer from anywhere. The killer aspect of all the remote-control software I mentioned is that they can be interactive. For example, I have a client in Canada who wants me to walk him through certain tasks. I can set it up so he is standing at his computer while I'm remotely controlling it and he's watching. I can talk to him on the phone and say, “Okay, I’m going to take control of your mouse now, watch what I do. Take notes, I’ll walk you through it." But I am the one who is controlling his computer from afar. That’s fairly easy to do, it’s about 10 or 15 minutes worth of set-up to get it done. It used to be that this was a job you could only do in person. Another example of how great it is: when I go home to Ohio, I'll forget a document, something I absolutely have to have. My computer is in Arizona and always on. So I just dial in from my parent's house in Ohio and it looks like I’m sitting at my desktop in Arizona. I find the document I need and either email it to myself or print it out. Another option are memory sticks. A lot of people have them. A one-gig USB memory stick can carry 98% of your work if you mainly have Word and/or Excel documents. If you’re carrying a lot of data, like pictures, you don’t really need to be sitting in front of your computer, you just carry the data around with you and you plug it into whatever computer you happen to be sitting at. LYA: So what about somebody who is not as technically inclined as you and wants to go global? BH: Your Portable Professional eBook is a great place to start! It’s not that hard to figure out. Basic email skills are 90% of it. That, and getting the right tools in place. LYA: What other technologies and services help you be portable? BH: There are so many things you can do. You just have to think creatively. For example, you can hire someone to pick up your postal mail, sort it, and pop the important things in a scanner and then email them to you. There are some other third-party services that do that. I might add that craigslist.com is an excellent place to find people to do these sorts of things. If you're ever looking for an extra pair of hands in any city, go craigslist.com and look for the jobs list category. There’s all sorts of crazy stuff like, "I’m moving to this town next month could somebody collect last week's newspapers and send me copies?" It’s a great way to find people. I have another business where I rent cell phones to people going on vacation in Mexico, and this does deal with some physical inventory. So I hired someone in Tucson to handle it. I gave her a fleet of phones. She has nothing to do with the billing, tracking, or maintenance. I take care of all that online. All she gets is an email that says, "Hey, on this date, print out this label, drop this phone in the mail and send it to this guy. It will return on this date, let me know when you get it." She’s basically a micro-fulfillment house, but in an abstracted way because she doesn’t have a URL or a business. Rather than dealing with pre-mailing services or "front" P.O. boxes where there is a significant turn-around time, I can email somebody and have it in the mail that night. The point being that whatever challenge you face, there's a solution. LYA: Do you think it's important to have a home base? BH: With the technology like it is today, it’s not that hard to maintain an image and make people think your in one place when you're really in another. When you buy stuff as a customer, what assumptions are you making? Their mailing address is here so they must actually physically be here. That’s not necessarily true. For all intents and purposes my business is a P.O. box in Tucson. It’s a six-inch square little box that's a line on my tax forms. My real business is me sitting at a computer 90% of the time. It doesn’t matter where my computer is or where I am, but for my clients and for the identity I put forward for some of the businesses, I'm "headquartered" in Tucson. LYA: Anything else you'd recommend? BH: Just keep your eye on all the options out there. For example, there are a couple of different types of P.O. boxes you can buy. You can buy the one that literally says P.O. box or you can buy the kind that’s a P.O. address, like 1234 Main Street #567. That looks just as much like a business address as it does a post office address. So in my case that’s all I’m using. All my tax-related stuff, all my shipping, everything. When I leave, I just have somebody I know check it once a month and pay them a very minimal fee. If there's something I absolutely have to have look like it’s coming out of Tucson, billing, etc. I have a way to do that, too. I bought a friend of mine a hundred envelopes, a hundred stamps, I paid for the printer, paper, etc. Periodically I email them something, they print it out, lick a stamp, and walk outside to drop it in the mail. I worked out a very small fee for this, it’s trivial, it’s nothing. You can find students for this, elderly people, friends, it doesn’t matter. As long as they can receive email and print it out, you're good to go. LYA: Well, thanks Bryan, you gave us a lot of useful information. BH: No problem, Mark. To learn more about Mark McMahon and his Adventures, visit www.LiveYourAdventure.com The following are Mark's previous articles for the magazine:
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