I’ve recently been attempting to read a biography of every United States President.  While like any country, we’ve had both good and bad leaders, it can’t be denied that each of these men have reached the pinnacle of their profession.  While being raised with “blue blood” and a lot of money helps (as does marrying well), there are still some lessons commoners such as myself can take from these CEO’s of politics.

Rising Early

Want to emulate the success of U.S. Presidents?  You can start by waking up while it’s still dark outside.

It seems like almost every biography I read about a President mentions how they: “Always rose early and often had more work done by lunch than most people would accomplish all day.”

Although Mark Twain once famously refuted this belief when he said:  ”Therefore, how is a man to grow healthier, and wealthier, and wiser by going to bed early and getting up early, when he fails to accomplish these things even when he does not go to bed at all?”  It appears that the majority of great achievers get an early start each morning.

Like Twain, this is not good news for me.  I am a natural night-owl, and remember even as a kid preferring to stay up late.

President Truman was known to be up by 5:30 a.m., each morning.  George Washington was also known to be an early bird.  This is not surprising due to each men’s background in farming.  Benjamin Franklin–although not a former president–was perhaps one of the biggest proponents of early rising, however, and he was a printer/writer.  You would think that if there is anyone who likely would prefer a late schedule it’s a writer/printer.

It appears that waking up early is a key to success in business/life.  I wish this wasn’t the case but it appears to be true.  It must allow you to focus more time during the morning/afternoon when work is being done and less time wasted at night when personal pursuits are more commonly pursued.  (such as watching television).

Dress the Part

Another, perhaps less surprising trait of great achievers is their placing a high importance on how they dress/appear.  As I am currently learning from the George Washington biography I am currently reading, Washington sometimes perhaps cared more about appearance than even the skill or ability of his men.  Besides being almost obsessed with his own appearance, he had a height requirement of “between 5-8 and 5-10? for his secret guard.  In other words, he sought guards who were very tall for the time–but not quite as tall as he.

President Truman, who prior to his presidency owned a haberdashery  boutique, was also often described as a “sharp dresser.”  One wonders if he would have achieved half of the political success that he did if he didn’t strive to “look the part.”

Take Risks

Most of the best presidents were daring.  Teddy Roosevelt moved by himself to North Dakota to try and start a ranch.  The ranch ended up being a failure but later pursuits proved more fruitful.  Most of the presidents have moved between private and public sector work.

Conclusion

Wake up early, take risks, and try to dress well—fair or not, those seem to be three reoccurring themes, and I suppose it makes sense: one has to wake up early enough to find time to “dress for success.”   Although these are pretty standard pieces of advice, I did find it interesting how they played such a large role in most of the president’s lives and personal success.

What are some other reoccurring traits of success?

Popularity: 1% [?]

I recently received a very interesting email from a retired member of the military asking some help with a golf scoring issue. Needless to say that on so many levels I was more than happy to help out. While this blog is about “Experiments in Finance, it’s fair to say that many finance lovers like to play golf as well. It’s not the easiest problem to explain but hopefully with his comment and a preview of his spreadsheet you will get the idea. Here we go:

“I need help with writing an “IF” formula in excell. Background: I run a local golf league with 40 to 70 golfers playing each week. Instead of using strokes and keeping up with the handicaps, I use a point system. Each week I have to manually calculate each man’s score, plus or minus, from his required points.

Example: For myself I currently am required to make 45 points. If I make within plus or minus 2 of the 45 points there is no change to my next weeks requirement. However, if I make minus 3 or more points, my score will drop 1 point(to 44). If on the other hand, I score 3 or 4 points above 45, my new point requirement increases by 1 point, if I score 5 or 6 points above, my requirement increases by 2 points, if I score 7 or more points, my requirement increases to 3 points. I currently use an excel spreadsheet, listing the players . I enter their that days point total and then manually do the math and enter their new point requirement. I can continue to do the math…but in this day and age I would like to work “smarter not harder”"

Here is an example of his spreadsheet:

First off, the points that he discussed are not exactly the same as the ones in the spreadsheet but that is not a problem, we are looking for a flexible solution anyway.

I used the following method:

-There are 4 possible answers:
-”a”
-a given range (in this case, between -1 and 5)
-lower than that range
-higher than that range

Basically, I will first use “if conditions” to check if any of the first 3 occur, and then refer to a range of results if it’s not the case.
The following formula looks more complicated than it really is:

=IF(C3=”",”",IF(C3=$V$4,B3+$W$4,IF(C3-B3>$V$5,B3+$W$5,IF(C3-B3<$V$6,B3+$W$6,B3+VLOOKUP(C3-B3,$V:$W,2,FALSE)))))

basically, it checks if the previous score made is filled, if it the result is either "a", higher than the range, lower than the range and applies the adjustment depending on those.

If none of those conditions are met, it simply checks the range.

You can modify the range or values at any time by changing columns "U" and "V"

You can also simply copy the blue cells to a new column "req". try copying from P3:P22 to R3:R22.

Here is what the new spreadsheet looks like:

I also invite you to download the spreadsheet to see for yourself! As is always the case, please feel free to send me your own excel related issues, I’d love to help

Popularity: 1% [?]

The other day, I got a question about using dates in excel spreadsheets. It’s very tricky to use both dates and numbers in Excel and certainly not as easy as it should be. Before getting started, I would love to invite you to ask us any questions that you might have. You can simply go to our contact page.

Back to our spreadsheet, many users email me every month with questions regarding dates in excel. The difficult part about writing posts is that almost every problem is a bit different compared to vlookup or sumif issues which are almost all similar. Today’s issue is a rather common one. First let’s take a look at the spreadsheet:

The objective is to fill out the last 2 columns. First off, we determine if the task is overdue. It’s quite simple to find out if it is, as we have today’s date. If the due date is further than today’s date, the number should be over 0. However, we cannot have “negative days”. Therefore, I will be using this function:

=MAX($D$3-E6,0)

Then, the status should be either “Outstanding” or “Closed”. In this case, Outstanding means:

-There has not been a “response date”
-Overdue days are over 0

I will use the “Nested Excel And function” that I presented some time ago. Here is the formula that I will use:

=IF(AND(G6>0,F6=”"),”Outstanding”,”Closed”)

I also added conditional formatting to make it look even more obvious when issues were “Outstanding”. This is what it looks like:

I also invite you to download the spreadsheet for additional information here:)

Popularity: 1% [?]

I’m now almost four months in to my new business.  As my last post indicated, sometimes business is slow.  But so far, the profits have increased steadily each month.  I am currently the only employee of my professional services business.  I don’t have enough work where I could afford someone full-time, but I might be able to hire a secretary 10-20 hours per week.  What worries me is that I don’t have a large enough sample size in terms of my business.  What if the work dries up?  The last thing I would want is to bring someone in and then later have to let them go because my fledgling business takes a bad turn.

There isn’t enough work yet where I’m incapable of doing everything myself, but I am starting to find it annoying coming in on the weekend to do secretarial and other administrative tasks.  The biggest reasons why I would like to hire someone, however, are as follows:

1) Sometimes people see me as less professional because I do not have a support staff/a secretary/assistant.  My profession is the type where one is expected to have a personal assistant.

2) Sometimes I feel that I could focus more on marketing my business if I didn’t have to spend so much time on administrative tasks.

3) Sometimes I’ll be out of the office for a few hours, and during that time the telephone rings straight to voicemail.  I worry that prospective clients may hang up during that time.  I also worry about not having someone at the base of operations if I need something faxed/emailed to me when I am working remotely.

Another concern for me is the extra red-tape/paperwork involved in having an employee.  It’s a definite downside to not being the sole worker.  I’m also not the best delegator so I worry how productive it would be for me to even have a secretary/assistant.

Finally, I like being solo.  I like that I can do what I want (when I want) without feeling judged.  I’ve worked in enough places to know that even if you are the boss, employees will be looking to you for guidance and direction.  There’s a certain amount of pressure that goes along with that–even though I believe it’s what’s naturally occurring anyway.

The Economy

In this economy, it would be really rewarding for me to be able to provide even a part-time job to another person.  That’s one of the ultimate goals (of mine) for owning a business.  But because the economy is so bad, I also don’t want to have to let someone go if my business slows down.  Finally, all my instincts are those of a boot-strapper, working hard to build up something from nothing.  It terrifies me to increase the expenses right now, so early in a business and when I’m trying to keep expenses to a minimum.

Conclusion

I know there’s not enough information about my specific business to ask your advice, but I would love to hear your thoughts on when a business knows it’s time to expand.  When is the time to bring in a new employee?  As always, your thoughts are greatly appreciated and personal stories are always welcomed as well.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Today, I decided to look at the excel function AND. What does it do exactly? First, I would like to clarify that there are two main ways you would use the “AND” function. You can either use it in a nested if statement or you can use by itself. You might not understand what I mean but I will explain this much more clearly with examples.

Why You Would Use The Excel AND Function

There are many different ways to use the “AND” function. Basically, it is used to verify if a number of conditions are ALL met at once. It’s important to understand this. The objective of the function is to verify that all conditions are met. You could use 2 5 or even 10 conditions to verify. If only one of those is false, the function will return a negative value.

How Do I Use The And Function?

The first question to ask yourself is: “What type of value do you need the function to return?”

Basically you have two options:

#1-The function will return “TRUE” (if all conditions are met) or “FALSE” (if at least 1 condition is not met)

#2-You can decide what the function will return in both cases

The solution #1 only requires the use of “AND” while the solution #2 uses a nested function “IF(AND)”. If ever you are interested in reading more about nested functions in excel, you can visit a post we wrote about it here. Obviously, the second one is much more flexible and that is the one I would normally use. However, let’s start with a quick example of the “AND” function.

If I had this table of rankings and wanted to easily see which players are Russian, have played under 20 tournaments and whose name is less than 18 characters, here is what I could do:

AND (condition #1, condition #2, condition #3)

In this case, I would do:

=AND(E2=”RUS”,G2<20,LEN(C2)>18)

You can see the result here and in fact I could use conditional formatting to make it even more obvious:

Let’s imagine however that I would want to use either a formula or change the way the information is presented. Then, it would be easier to do an “IF AND” excel function as follows:

=IF(AND(E2=”RUS”,G2<20,LEN(C2)>18),”OK”,”")

As you can see, the difference is very small between the two so I think in most cases, it makes a lot more sense to use the “If And” function.

You can download the spreadsheet here.

Popularity: 1% [?]