Well, this year has been WILD. After getting laid-off in January from Texas Instruments I have been staying afloat by being self-employed as a DJ and IT Entrepreneur. My businesses: eddierenz.com and soundandshow.com didn’t generate a ton of revenue, but hey, I haven’t missed any meals and I’ve learned so much about having my own business. Here are some of the most important.

1. Never count on your clients to pay on time.
2. Operating cash is a necessity so scale back on all unnecessary spending so you have more to invest in your business.
3. Social Networking is good for business, but perhaps not as impactful as you are often led to believe.
4. Competition is a mean bitch.
5. There is never a time that you can coast and there is no such thing as a holiday or a day off when you are self-employed.
6. Word-of-Mouth referrals are still the best way to get new business.
7. Never underestimate the power of a good website, but don’t overestimate it either. Just because you have a brilliant website doesn’t mean customers are going to start flocking to you.
8. In all areas of business you will have to work with people you don’t like.
9. You must always be looking for ways to improve and to gain market share on your competition, but remember, they are doing the same. So improving your services and finding your niche early on is important.
10. There is nothing more rewarding than making it as your own boss, but there is nothing more frightening than having bills due and having no idea where the money is going to come from the next month.

I’ve got lots of great ideas for 2010. I sure hope to see them come to fruition.

Happy New Year!

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That’s the way I like it…

Five times a week there is a group of us in Allen, TX that play Wallyball at Lifetime Fitness. It is one of the most fun games I have ever played and one of the most educational.

When it comes to sports, many people play at their peak performance and they are so focused on their own skills that they neglect to pay attention to the skills of their opponents. This is what separates the Average Joes from the Pros. I think instinctively you need to be aware of what your opponent is going to do before they do it. You have to constantly be understanding their strengths and weaknesses and instead of constantly trying to improve your core set of skills – exploit their weaknesses!

This same strategy can be applied in the business world. When you understand your opponent you can better align yourself for success.

Another important part of success is surrounding yourself with people who are skilled and to fully understand their strengths as well. If you have a strong fat guy on your team he would be used for power moves where a more agile person would be used for speed moves. Both are often necessary, but when used inappropriately both can be worthless.

For me, working alone I don’t have a set of team members to help me bump and set – which are crucial when playing  a skilled team in Wallyball or Volleyball. Spiking it is great, but hard to do without a perfect set. So I often find myself just spiking it and sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t – but for now I’m still in the self-employment game and I’m hanging in there.

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I was all ready to sell my casa when a realization hit me – Moving Sucks. Moving, uprooting, packing up your life and starting brand new someplace else requires a lot of energy and resources – and to what end?

I want to move to be closer to family and friends, but will that really help me change my life? Shouldn’t I be able to make new friends and start my own family here in Plano?

So I decided that what I need to do is go back to work full-time or at least find a part time job that is flexible and brings in some stable income that will help me to feel a little more secure. I don’t think running from my problems is the answer, however, I have to find balance between being responsible and being delusional.

So I’m stepping out in faith. I’m going to try to stay here until I’ve got a solid reason to leave. Yes, family and friends are a solid reason, but I have friends who are like family here in Plano too.

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I’ve been contemplating selling my house lately. Why? I’m afraid I’m turning into my real dad.  Working in my living room all day surrounded by nothing but the sound of the TV and the click-clack of my keyboard.

I’ve successfully isolated myself into a world that is filled with only the exact people I want in my life, but most of those people live in Denton and if I don’t move I will continue to drift alone out here in this big brick box that is as empty and hollow as my love life.

Selling a house is such a big decision, especially after just two years of owning it. But, I only bought it because I thought I would be working at Texas Instruments for the rest of my life. Now that thought seems depressing. Working for someone else for the rest of my life? No thanks. But… what if I can work for myself for the rest of my life and start now by investing in me? Cut my overhead, simplify the excess, and just take care of myself and a handful of responsibilities instead of two hands full.

Say a prayer for me. This is a big decision and I have no idea where I will live in Denton.

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“Can you play some Scorpions or Def Leppard?”  The man asked without thinking of anyone other than himself. “Here, I’ve written down a list of 10 awesome songs for you to play!” Says the goof who doesn’t know anything about good music.

This is what people do at DJ events. They request songs that they want to hear not realizing that their requests reflect on me. No one realizes that I am playing a song to make someone happy, instead, they think “Why is this DJ playing the Chicken Dance?” – because your mom requested it.

I’m not complaining about my work at all. I FREAKING LOVE IT. But… I spend hours downloading music and putting together playlists. I have to make follow-up calls and meetings in person with wedding clients to go over details and reception flow. I have to constantly stay up on the hottest trends of music: Frat Rap, Emo, Alternative, Country, Rock, Reggae, Oldies, Motown, New Age, the list goes on and on.

But on the upside, I get to learn about new music, I get to spend hours listening to new tunes, mixing together great songs, looking at beat counts and knowing what song will flow well to the next and how to transition a party smoothly from a rocking bump and grind fest to a slow romantic waltz.

I think this is where the art of DJing comes in – knowing how to mix a set of music that keeps the party ever-escalating while still keeping the dance floor packed.

What you do is play songs for each group in the room. The single dancers, the kids, the rockers, the old lovers who want to cuddle and the hip-hoppers.

As someone who LOVES to dance, every now and then even I need a break. If you play hit after hit after hit then I want to dance to all of them and I just get tired. Instead, I like to have a few hits and then a few slow so I can take a break between my hip thrusting and gyrations.

So this is my life and I love it. Even the part where I tell people “No, I can’t play that song”.

DJing is harder than you think, but it is better than any other job I’ve done in my life.

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Emotions… they have been a topic on Posted Note so many times that I should just change the name of this site to “Emotional Posted Note” or something else touchy-feely.

This morning I received a certified letter from a client that wanted documented proof of hours spent working for them. Granted, the invoice that I sent them was dated August 3rd and so I haven’t received payment for that work and now they want to hassle me about my hours.

My first impulse is to rain fire and brimstone down on their heads and make threats of how I am going to do everything I can to ruin their business because they are ruining mine – literally.

When you are self-employed you obviously rely on your paychecks to pay your bills, but even more than that, you need money to make money. When you work for a company you just show up and use their resources, not your own, and so you just get a paycheck and call it day. For me, I have to buy software for the computer work I do. Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop – these are the tools of my trade for my day job. But then there is my DJ business as well that requires me to purchase music, lights, tablecloths, speakers, microphones – the expenses just keep adding up.

So when I don’t get paid not only can I not pay my bills, but I can’t make more money – or as much money as I could have made.

Also, when you can’t pay your bills on time you get incessant phone calls by automated systems that call your phone twice a day. Citifinancial Auto likes to call you twice a day, every day, from two different numbers asking you constantly, “When are you gonna pay? WHEN? WHEN!!!” and I keep telling them, “Just as soon as my 6,000 arrives from my clients”.

This type of stress makes me very emotional and I have to do everything in my power to control it, to stuff it down and to make it go away. I have to be professional and courteous and instead of getting upset, I can be the one to make phone calls and send emails and write letters to customers who don’t pay me. If it works for Citifiinancial, then it should work for me right?

In the end, I have to wonder what other people do in these situations. If you are self-employed, what steps do you take to get your money from non-paying clients?

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I’m still adjusting to working for myself.

When I was laid off in January 2009 I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with my life. Since I was 12 years old I have been working at some sort of job – for someone else. I always had dreams of owning my own business one day, but taking the giant plunge was just too scary.

In the Renz household you worked for a living – sometimes two or three jobs. Our motto was “If you want something, work for it.” That meant 2 a.m. paper routes, cleaning churches and schools, working for a horse ranch, being a bank teller, driving a special ed school bus, running the register at a gas station, cleaning houses, cleaning the post office, working for Boeing, Custom Food Group, Texas Instruments, Ericsson. Yep. Those are all the jobs that I have had and they weren’t short term, many of them I had for years and some of them I worked while working another job and going to school full-time.

So when I was suddenly out on the street looking for a job I decided that after doing all of those jobs and none of them being really what I wanted to do that I wasn’t going to take another job unless I really enjoyed doing it. So I’ve now been unemployed/self-employed for 7 months and I’ve been doing just fine on my own.

Now I still work 2-3 jobs to make ends meet, but they are things that I like to do and they have amazing flexibility that allows me to live a non-traditional life. I don’t work 9-5 days or 80 hour weeks. I don’t sit in traffic or rush through my lunch, but there are trade-offs as there are to everything in life.

I don’t have any co-workers and there isn’t much opportunity for advancement unless I bust my butt and make it happen myself. Clients don’t always pay on time or pay at all. I’m home alone a great deal of the time and that can get old.

But that upside is that being your own boss is the best thing in the world and worth every sacrifice. There is also the joy that comes from making it on your own. There is also that little twinge of fear that keeps you motivated to keep working hard and busting it so that you can still pay your bills.

If you are looking to start your own business then I say do it. Start small, start networking, get a website, do some small jobs to get your feet wet and start building your network of friends while you still have full time work. This is probably a good idea even if you don’t plan to start your own business.

And lastly, I never could have gotten to where I am today without the support of great friends and family. And if you are looking to keep up with more of my work life, then check out my business sites: http://www.soundandshow.com and http://www.eddierenz.com

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“I’m busier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers.” That’s busy, but not as busy as I am. I already stacked multiple projects together and would have had to pull a feat of near inhuman capability to pull them all off successfully, but then a server crashed in Waco only adding to the problem.

This server isn’t just any server – nope. It is the mother of all of our servers and therefore will require a lot of work to restore and that is what I am doing at this very moment while I type this.

I only wish I were a cat today on a hot tin roof or in a room full of rockers or a whole lot of rockers on a hot tin roof – whatever, that would be a walk in the park compared to this week.

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I’ve had two interviews now with Fellowship Church and I am quite excited and a little apprehensive. This would be a big change for me, something new and totally different and the guys that have interviewed me have expressed repeatedly that this place will reshape you. Which is exactly what I want. I’m so bored all the time. Even with all of my jobs I feel like it is too easy or has too many limitations for me to really grow and shine. Like I’m some potted plant and in order to really grow I need to be moved to a large pot or planted outside of my comfy house where I can really flourish.

Here are the concepts I came up with for interview #2. In the first interview they asked a lot of great questions and then sent me home with homework. I came back with this:

FC Singles Event Coordinator
Creative Project by Eddie Renz

1.    Creation VS. Evolution
a.    Fight Night – The Fight of the Millennium
i.    Cage Fight with real people
ii.    Interviews with fighters placed on YouTube
1.  Example Questions:
a.    Evolution, despite your many weaknesses, you always seem to stay in the fight, what is the secret to your success?
b.    Creation – There have been some new theories concerning your strategy to win this fight, what will make this fight different from all the rest?
iii.    Web Page created with the ability to leave comments
iv.    After Fight Party
v.    Live Streaming Video of the fight
vi.    Commentators will actually give the talk while overhead projector screens are used to capture key lines of information that we want to communicate such as statistical data, theories, back story, thinking questions, etc.
vii.    Facebook and Twitter Pages and possibly local news coverage and an ad in the Dallas Morning News
viii.    Class Description: The Epic War of Creation VS. Evolution has been raging for centuries and that fight continues LIVE June 30 at FC Fight Night. Watch as Evolution and Creation go head to head in a literal Fight for Life.

2.   GLBT – Alternative Lifestyles
a.    Desperate – A Love Story
i.    Front Room filled with true storyboards on the walls.
ii.    Either Video footage of real people or actual real people/actors on stage
iii.    Create a journey through the lives of 4-8 people who struggle with identity/sexual issues.
iv.    After the talk have groups of people go to the back room to discuss and talk about sharing the gospel with people who live alternate lifestyles.
v.    Class Description: In a world where everyone is desperate to fit in where do you turn when you don’t?  Take a look into the lives of eight individuals who found themselves searching for their identity, seeking happiness, and desperate to be loved.
vi.    Example Script – Dear Diary, today I just want to be normal. I’m so tired of living a lie. Shame and Fear are my constant companions.

3.   Giving instead of Taking
a.    Loaded –  A Night of Money, Guns and Glamour or Money, Cribs and Cars.
i.    Gimme More Britney Fashion Show
ii.    Create an event that is sleek and flashy filled with fast cars, money, clothes and material things that are our cultures idea of success.
iii.    Use video clips from MTV Cribs and other shows that highlight wealth
iv.    Borrow some nice cars to place inside the building or outside
v.    Bring Paparazzi with cameras – red carpet
vi.    Find people to Model the clothes
vii.    Generation Now – Black-Eyed Peas could be a song that is played instead of Gimme More as the main theme is “I can’t wait, I want it now”
viii.    Class Description: Give it to me, or I might just take it… yep, you heard me. I’ve got to have it, I want it all and I want it right now – Nita Moore

b.    The G-Now Success Conference and Expo – Have Nothing. Possess Everything.
i.    Video at the beginning of the show focuses on something inspirational like Lance Armstrong winning his race, Olympics, Marathons, then have it transition to Race for the Cure, Providing post hurricane aid, etc.
ii.    At the end of the video we will use the tag line: What is your measure of success?
iii.    The entire night will be a juxtaposition of various types of success.
iv.    Live speakers will take the stage and discuss what it feels like to give back and how it is truly better to give than to receive
v.    Wrap up the session with Paul’s verse from 2 Corinthians 6 – known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything
vi.    Outside in the smaller room setup booths for people to sign up for Habitat for Humanity, Missions, Red Cross, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Charitable Organizations, etc.
vii.    Class Description: The G-Now Success Expo will feature interactive workshops that will help you reach your ultimate life goals. Explore new and creative strategies for being successful in all areas of your life.
1.    Small Group breakout sessions
2.    Question and Answer panel
3.    Swag Bags filled with opportunities to give.

4.   Sharing Your Faith

a.    Jesus Rambo Explosion – It’s a battle, come equipped.
i.    Army tanks and hand grenades
ii.    The entire theme is based around setting the captives free, equipping the soldiers, etc.
iii.    Use the back room as a “base camp” of sorts for planning.
iv.    I’m envisioning uniforms and guards at the doors
v.    I think a stomp routine might be fun to interject at some point. Military style complete with a drumline from a local high school band if possible.
vi.    Class Description:  Why do people lose their battles? Because they are ill equipped. In every situation the proper tools are necessary to get the job done. Your mission is to use the tools and training we give to set the captives free.
vii.    Flyers will include an outline:
1.    Training
2.    Equipment
3.    Deployment
4.    Post Op
5.    Recruitment

So these concepts included some pictures and ideas to go along with them all neatly bundled and bound at Kinkos.

Keep me in your prayers as this will be a big change for me and I only hope to do the Lord’s will.

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I had an interview yesterday with http://www.fellowshipchurch.com and it was awesome. Not only did we talk for 2 hours, but I learned a great deal in those 2 hours – about Fellowship Church and about myself.

In my interview yesterday I was given homework which is due next Wednesday. We were given 4 topics to plan a night around and I have 4 really great ideas – but I can’t share them with you here. They are my babies and I have to protect and nurture them. However, I was wondering what your thoughts are concerning Alternative LIfestyles which happens to be one of the topics of discussion. It’s a hot-button issue in our culture today that is gradually becoming warmer and warmer and eventually it may not be an issue at all – or will it?

I’d like to know if you are for or agains homosexuality and why? Do you believe people were born with a same sex attraction? Was it nature vs. nurture?  What about transgendered individuals, bisexuals?

I’ve really appreciated some of the great feedback I’ve gotten on here. Keep it coming please!

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In an effort to improve the effectiveness of our Monthly SOS Newsletter I have updated it with more content.I’m trying to figure out how to create dividers to make it look more compartmentalized, but so far all of my attempts have only made it feel more cluttered. I’m also thinking about redoing the header image in something more fantastic…

It is now chock full of useful information and a free digital download of Romans Vol. II session 1 by Tommy Nelson.

You can checkout the Newsletter here.

Also, if you want to subscribe to the Newsletter then go to http://www.songofsolomon.com

(The Subscription option is on the left hand side of the screen.)

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I’m looking for a personal assistant. I’d prefer someone leggy who wears smooth tight fitting business skirts – think Ali Larter in “Obsessed”.

I don’t have a lot of money right now so I would have to pay you about 100 dollars  a week for about 50-80 hours worth of work. That means answering my phone at all times, 24×7, updating my calendar and bringing me latte’s whenever I scream out, “WHERE THE HELL IS MY LATTE!”

Experience Required:

• Must be able to type 80 words per minutes
• Must understand and be able to use Twitter.

Considered a plus:

• Ability to give deep tissue massages
• Enjoys wearing Stilettos at all times

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