Some of the business plans I reviewed really stood out, others stumbled in a big way. I wrote up a short blog post about my top 5 tips for anyone considering a business plan competition. The post is published on the University of Washington Foster School of Business blog: http://depts.washington.edu/foster/5-tips-succeeding-business-plan-competition/ 

This will force you to spend less on haircuts and more on concerts (if you love concerts), less on groceries and more on Disneyland with your kids, less on lattes and more on gifts for those you like to share lattes with, less on gasoline and more on ski lessons. 

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(No, I’m not actually a nominee.)

I attempted to suspend my subscription via their website and was unable to do so because I kept getting an error. I tried multiple times with 3 different browsers and couldn’t do this on my own, so I made the request via their customer service.

Their customer service department is clearly in need of some help. Read the full text of our exchange below.

__________________________________________________________

—————Original Message Follows: ————————
Hi,
There seems to be a problem with your website.

It is not allowing me to suspend my subscription. I keep getting a page that says “Error: 500″ .

Can you please suspend my subscription from 8/21 to 8/28?

Subscription info:
Chris Rodde
4017 Meridian Ave N
Seattle, WA 98103

Thank you,
Chris Rodde

—————Original Message Follows: ————————

From: onlinejournal2 <onlinejournal2@dowjones.com>
Received: 8/23/10 10:56:16 PM SGT
To: Chris Rodde <omitted>
CC:”WSJ.Service@dowjones.com” <wsj.service@dowjones.com>
Subject: Re: Subscriber having a problem with your website (KMM24125379I72L0KM)

Dear Chris Rodde,

Thank you for contacting The Wall Street Journal Online. We have forwarded your request for suspension of your print subscription to our print customer service for further assistance.

Please contact customer service at the e-mail address below, if additional assistance is required.

Best Regards,
Wall Street Journal Online Customer Support

—————Original Message Follows: ————————

Dear onlinejournal2,

Thank you for your message requesting we suspend delivery of your Wall Street Journal subscription.

Please give us the date to when you want to suspend delivery.

In the future, you may visit us at https://services.wsj.com where you can check your subscription status, renew, suspend delivery or change your address. Other special Web features include a 30 day Article Archive and top headlines.

Thank you for your interest in our publication.

Best regards,

Customer Service Dow Jones & Company

—————Original Message Follows: ————————

From: onlinejournal2 <onlinejournal2@dowjones.com>
Received: 8/25/10 10:40:56 PM SGT
To: “WSJ.Service@dowjones.com” <wsj.service@dowjones.com>
Subject: Re: Response regarding suspend and restart Email ID: (KMM24138932I72L0KM)

Dear WSJ.Service@dowjones.com,

Thank you for contacting The Wall Street Journal Online.

This was sent to the Wall Street Journal online instead of to the customer. Please send your response to the customer.

Best Regards,
Wall Street Journal Online Customer Support

—————Original Message Follows: ————————

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 12:56 PM, WSJ Service <wsj.service@dowjones.com> wrote:

Dear Chris Rodde,

Thank you for your message requesting we suspend delivery of your Wall Street Journal subscription.

Please give us the date to when you want to suspend delivery.

In the future, you may visit us at https://services.wsj.com where you can check your subscription status, renew, suspend delivery or change your address. Other special Web features include a 30 day Article Archive and top headlines.

Thank you for your interest in our publication.

Best regards,
Customer Service
Dow Jones & Company

—————Original Message Follows: ————————

From: Chris Rodde <omitted>
Received: 8/30/10 1:02:53 AM SGT
To: WSJ Service <wsj.service@dowjones.com>
Subject: Re: Response for Suspension Request Email ID:

Hi,

Please see below. The dates I wanted to suspend our subscription were in the original request (8/21 to 8/28). I’m now back from vacation and see that this was not done

Can you please credit our account for these days?

Thank you,
Chris

—————Original Message Follows: ————————

WSJ Service to me show details 3:08 PM (8 hours ago)

Dear Chris Rodde,

Thank you for contacting The Wall Street Journal.

There is no way to verify on our records that you have requested a vacation hold on the dates provided.

We will check with the carrier if your papers were delivered so we could determine you adjustment.

Best regards,
Customer Service
Dow Jones & Company

I’m not a tax attorney or an accountant, so don’t take any advice from me at all without consulting with a professional (was that a legal disclaimer?)

Here are my 2 suggestions on how to survive an IRS income tax audit:

1. Be aggressive with your taxes, but don’t break the rules. My dad has always said that he tells his tax accountant to be as aggressive as possible short of sending him to jail. There are many gray areas with taxes.  I am usually pretty aggressive where things are ambiguous, but have always stopped short of doing something I knew was outright wrong. During my 2 tax audits, this paid off, as I hadn’t done anything that I was too worried about. In both cases the reason for my audit turned out to be either abnormalities or filing errors, neither of which were cases where I had underpaid.

2. When you file your taxes, purchase a tax audit defense service. After having done my own taxes for 18 years, in 2006 for the first time I purchased a service through Turbotax called “Audit Defense” by a company called Tax Resources. The cost was around $30. I was very lucky to have done this–Tax Resources was a lifesaver. 2006 was the first year I was audited and Tax Resources did everything for me at no cost. They will not pay your fines or extra taxes if you owe extra money, but they take care of all the communications with the IRS and do all the work to defend you. I also suspect that since this is what they do for a living, they likely know the IRS auditors pretty well and my guess is that this helps. I believe if you hire a tax accountant that many will offer the same service, so ask your accountant.

Some other things I learned along the way:

• In our case, the audit really only included an examination of the 2 “fishy” elements of our tax return. I always believed that an audit meant that the IRS would go through everything and you’d have to dig up every receipt, bill or pay stub you’d ever received for the past 7 years. This was not the case at all for us. The IRS only wanted to look at the specific portion of our tax return that triggered the return. In conversations with Tax Resources, this is typical. Now, I did learn that if they find that you have committed some sort of fraud with that one “fishy” element, they may broaden their examination and in some cases may even examine earlier years. So this just reinforces rule #1 above.
• The official communications from the IRS are very stern sounding and you are led to believe that you must follow their deadlines closely. My accountant from Tax Resources, Eric, sort of proved this wrong–he dismissed most of the deadlines and we never had a problem. I’m not saying you should do this, but if you work with Tax Resources and they are nonchalant about the deadlines, you can be at ease.

So why were we audited?

I’m sure there are a thousand different reasons that people get audited, so knowing what happened in my personal case likely won’t help you avoid one, but I’m sure you are curious so I’ll share my story.

In 2006, our tax return included a very large sales tax write off. We had done a major remodel to our home in 2006 and we wrote off the sales tax from the remodel. This triggered a flag in the IRS’s system and they chose to audit us. Writing off the sales tax on our remodel was totally within the tax law, so we incurred no penalty or backtaxes.

In 2007, we had a stock transaction (sale of stock options) that I reported incorrectly. I had paid the correct amount of taxes on the transaction, but didnt report things correctly. So again in this case, no penalty, no backtaxes.

The budgeting system that finally worked for us it one that closely resembles a cash allowance. Here is how it works:

• We have totally stopped using our credit cards.
• We have 2 bank accounts, our “main account” and our “cash account”. 
• The “main account” is where all our deposits go, including our paychecks. We pay our mortgage out of the main account, other loan payments and all other “non-discretionary” spending like utility bills. 
• We decided upon a weekly budget for “discretionary spending”. We spent some time looking at our spending to understand how much we needed for groceries, dining, Starbucks, kid’s shoes, etc. We then agreed on a weekly amount which took into consideration what we had been spending on discretionary expenses and what we thought we could get by on. It’s really important to talk this weekly allowance through as a couple so that everyone is on board. We used a great site called mint.com to track our expenditures and break them into discretionary and non-discretionary items. 
• We then set up a weekly recurring transfer (using Wells Fargo’s amazingly easy website) from our main account to our cash account in the amount of the weekly budget. 
• The cash account has a $1000 cushion so that we don’t bounce checks. So when the balance gets to $1000 we know we’ve spent all we can for the week. 
• We use our debit/credit cards from the cash account for all spending. 
• We get daily alerts as to our balance on the cash account so that each of us always knows where we are for the week. 

The net affect of this budgeting system is that we have a target each week that we’ve agreed upon, we have visibility into how we are progressing against our budget and don’t have to manually track a single expense to do all of this.

The trick is to actually stick with it, which is not easy.

I looked to see if Butch has his own blog, but couldn’t find it, so I decided to post it myself. 

Butch Jimenez, head of PLDT’s media and strategic communications department, delivered this speech at the UP Diliman Class 2003 commencement exercises. He was the youngest commencement speaker in the university’s history.

What’s better than…?

By Butch Jimenez 

“As college students, you’re just about to set sail into the real world. As you prepare for the battleground of life, you’ll hear many speeches, read tons of books and get miles of advice telling you to work hard, dream big, go out and do something for yourself, and have a vision.

Not bad advice, really. In fact, following these nuggets of truth may just bring you to the top. But as I’ve lived my life over the years, I have come to realize that it is great to dream big, have a vision, make a name, and work hard. But guess what: There’s something better than that.

So my message today simply asks the question, What’s better than…?

Better than being negative

Let’s start off with something really simple. What’s better than a long speech? No doubt, a short one. So, you guys are in luck because I do intend to keep this short.

Now, let me take you through a very simple math exam.

I’ll rattle off a couple of equations, and you tell me what you observe about them. Be mindful of the instructions. You are to tell me what you observe about the equations.

Here goes: 3+4=7, 9+2=11, 8+4=13, and 6+6=12. Tell me, what do you observe?

Every time I conduct this test, more than 90 percent of the participants immediately say, 8+4 is NOT 13, It’s 12!

That’s true and they are correct.

But they could have also observed that the three other equations were right. That 3+4 is 7, that 9+2 is 11, and that 6+6 is 12.

What’s my point? Many people immediately focus on the negative instead of the positive.

Most of us focus on what’s wrong with other people more than what’s right about them. Examine those four equations. Three were right and only one was wrong. But what is the knee-jerk observation?

The wrong equation.

If 10 people you didn’t know were to walk through that door, most of you would describe those people by what’s negative about them. He’s fat. He’s balding. Oh, the short one. Oh, the skinny girl.

Get the point? It’s always the negative we focus on and not the positive.

You’ll definitely experience this in the corporate world. You do a hundred good things and one mistake… Guess what?

Chances are, your attention will be called on that one mistake.

So what’s better than focusing on the negative? Believe me, its focusing on the positive.

And if this world could learn to focus on the positive more than the negative, it would be a much nicer place to live in.

Better than working hard.

We have always been told to work hard. Our parents say that, our Teachers say that, and our principal says that. But there’s something better than merely working hard. It’s working SMART.

It’s taking time to understand the situation, and coming out with an effective and efficient solution to get more done with less time and effort. As the Japanese say, “There’s always a better way.”

One of the most memorable case studies I came across as I studied Japanese management at Sophia University in Tokyo was the ‘Case of the empty soap box’, which happened in one of Japan’s biggest cosmetics companies.

The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a box of soap that was empty. It immediately isolated the problem to the assembly line, which transported all the packaged boxes of soap to the delivery department.

For some reason, one soap box went through the assembly line empty. Management tasked its engineers to solve the problem. Post-haste, the engineers worked hard to devise an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soap boxes that passed through the line to make sure they were not empty.

No doubt, they worked hard and they worked fast.

But a rank-and-file employee that was posed the same problem came out with another solution. He bought a strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line. He switched the fan on, and as each soap box passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line.

Clearly, the engineers worked hard, but the rank-and-file employee worked smart.

So what’s better than merely working hard? It’s working smart.

Having said that, it is still important to work hard. If you could combine both working hard and working smart, you would possess a major factor toward success.  

Better than dreaming big

I will bet my next month’s salary that many have encouraged you to dream big. Maybe even to reach for the stars and aim high. I sure heard that about a million times right before I graduated from this university. So I did. I did dream big. I did aim high. I did reach for the stars. No doubt, it works. In fact, the saying is true: “If you aim for nothing, that’s exactly what you’ll hit – nothing.”

But there’s something better than dreaming big. Believe me, I got shocked myself. And I learned it from the biggest dreamer of all time, Walt Disney.

When it comes to dreaming big, Walt is the man. No bigger dreams were fulfilled than his. Every leadership book describes him as the ultimate dreamer. In fact, the principle of dreaming and achieving is the core message of the Disney hit song, “When You Wish Upon a Star”.

“When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are; anything your heart desires will come to you. If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme. When you wish upon a star, as dreamers do,” as Jiminy Cricket sang.

But is that what he preached in the Disney company?

Dream?

Imagineering

Well, not exactly. Kind of, but not quite. The problem with dreaming is if that’s all you do, you’ll really get nowhere. In fact, you may just fall asleep and never wake up.

The secret to Disney’s success is not just dreaming. It’s IMAGINEERING.

You won’t find this word in a dictionary. It’s purely a Disney word. Those who engage in imagineering are called imagineers. The word combines the words “imagination” and “engineering.”

In the book “Imagineers,” Disney’s CEO, Michael Eisner, claims that “imagineers turn impossible dreams into real magic.”

Walt Disney explained there is really no secret to their approach. They just keep moving forward – opening new doors and doing new things, because they are curious. And it is this curiosity that leads them down new paths. They always dream, explore and experiment. In short, imagineering is the blending of creative imagination and technical know-how.

Eisner expounds on this thought by saying that “Not only are imagineers curious, they are courageous, outrageous, and their creativity is contagious.”

The big difference with imagineers is that they dream and then they DO!

So don’t just be a dreamer, be an imagineer. 

More potent than a Vision

You must have all been given a lecture at one time or another about the importance of having a vision. Even leadership expert John Maxwell says that an indispensable quality of a leader is to have a vision. The Bible also makes it very clear that “Without vision, people perish.” So no doubt about it, having a vision is important to success.

But surprise! There’s something more potent than a vision. It’s a CAUSE.

If all you’re doing is trying to reach your vision and you’re pitted against someone fighting for a cause, chances are you’ll lose.

The Vietnam War is a classic example. Literally with sticks and stones, the Viet Cong beat the heavily armed US Army to surrender, primarily because the US had a vision to win the war, but the Vietnamese were fighting for a cause.

In the realm of business, many leaders have visions of making their company No.1, or grabbing market share, or forever increasing profits.

Nothing really wrong with that vision, but take the example of Sony founder Akio Morita. He did not just have a vision to build the biggest electronics company in the world.

In his biography, “Made in Japan,” he reveals that the real reason he set up Sony was to help rebuild his country, which had just been battered by war. He had a cause he was fighting for. His vision to be an electronics giant was secondary.

What’s the difference between a vision and a cause? Here’s what sets them apart…

No one is willing to die for a vision. People will die for a cause. You possess a vision. A cause possesses you. A vision lies in your hands. A cause lies in your heart. A vision involves sacrifice. A cause involves the ultimate sacrifice.

Just a word of caution. You must have the right vision, and you must be fighting for the right cause. In the end, right will always win out.  It may take time, and it may take long. But if you have the right vision and are fighting for the right cause, you will prevail. If not, no matter how sincere you are, if you are not fighting for what is right, you will ultimately fail.

Two final quotes.

Allow me to end with two quotes that I have lived by ever since I stepped out of UP.

The first comes from the Bible, which says, “To whom much is given, much is required.” 

Having been given the opportunity to study in UP Diliman, no doubt, much has been given to you in terms of an excellent education. Don’t forget that in return, much is now required of you to use that education not just for yourself, but for others.

And as you move up and start reaching the pinnacle of success, even more will be required of you to look at the welfare of others, of society and of the country. Though I have often dreamed of addressing any graduating class of UP Diliman, I never really thought it would happen.

This brings me to the second quote I have held close to my heart as I traverse the destiny God has laid out for me.

“There is no destination beyond reach of one who walks with God.” My standing in front of you today, as the youngest commencement speaker of this esteemed university in 92 years, is proof of how true that quote is.

A final review:

* What’s better than focusing on the negative? Focus on the positive.

* What’s better than working hard? It’s working smart.

* What’s better than dreaming? Imagineering.

* What’s better than doing something for yourself? Doing something for your country.

* What’s better than a vision? A cause.

* What’s better than a long speech? Definitely, a short one. 

Thank you and congratulations, UP Diliman graduating class of 2003″