Fixing Chicken Soup for the Con Artist’s Soul

“The Four Hour Workweek” is an incredibly sleazy book that everyone collaborating on this project should read.

The most concise review-in-a-sentence of an book I’ve ever heard was to call “The Four Hour Workweek” “Chicken Soup for the Con Artist’s soul”.

Why is this book worth reading, what’s wrong with it, and how do we fix it?

Tim Ferris’s poison apple hereafter referred to as 4HWW is the ultimate toolbox for effectively and efficiently dumping your work and your problems on someone else. Really, you can think of a large part of this book as a manual on micro-outsourcing. That’s the novel part of the book for our purposes anyhow. The main business concept that Ferris advocates in 4HWW is the “Muse”, his word for a small business that relies almost 100% on outsourced work. In a textbook 4HWW “muse”, orders may be taken online, passed automatically to a fulfillment house that fills and ships them to the customer. All customer service, billing, ordering, and virtually every other aspect of normal business then gets outsourced to virtual assistants or virtual assistant agencies overseas where white collar labor is extremely cheap. The creator of the muse then gets to sit back and watch their net profits roll in without lifting a finger from this net-positive chain of B2B relationships. Meanwhile the real work is all being done either by fulfillment houses or by impoverished people overseas willing to work for virtually nothing because they’re just happy to have an indoor job.

Ferris also advises on how to generate products that these “muse” microbuisnesses are to sell. In general, the idea is to look for a niche that nobody is directly and specifically serving and then apply an already existing generic product to that niche. As an example, he holds up his energy drink business where he successfully re-branded an pre-existing white label energy drink as a body-builder-specific energy drink and started aggressively marketing them to fitness fanatics. He made good money with this set up, and argues that the customers are well served because they found a product that they enjoy that they otherwise may not have discovered (or felt the same way about) if it hadn’t been for his targeted branding and marketing.

While some look at Ferris’s muses as Capitalism doing what Capitalism does best and efficiently matching a capacity to supply with a consumer demand in a way that make a profit of the owners, I clearly take a more cynical view. In the bodybuilding energy drink example, where is the value added in the big picture? What does it improve in the world? Bodybuilders with a caffeine dependence may be happy with his product, but wouldn’t they have been just as happy with the white label drink by any other name? Or maybe with whatever other energy drink they would have tried instead had they not been presented with Ferris’s first? Sure, a politician would be quick to say that his business “creates jobs” but does it really do a good job of that if the overall production of energy drinks is unchanged? Isn’t he just siphoning off some of the market share from the larger companies into his smaller focused demographic company? To me, the only real thing of value he’s added that keeps this muse from being a total rent-seeker is that he has expedited the consumer’s product search. He has presented a certain demographic with a product that takes less brainpower for them to choose because his marketing is targeted at them. I think we should be able to hold ourselves to higher value-generation standards than that.

So how do you un-sleaze 4HWW? Simple: treat it like a toolbox rather than a recipe book. Nothing says you have to share the lazy attitude towards value creation and social responsibility that comes across in the book.

Most of the tactics that Ferris shares for the creation of his muses applies just as well to a small scrappy company with only a handful of employees trying to get a new product off the ground. The whole point of the book is that one person can accomplish a lot by setting up business systems that are built on the backs of others’ B2B services. If those services are available and affordable and your small business lacks either the in-house expertise or the man-hours to get the job done, it’s often cheaper and faster to hire sizeable portions of your task out than to maintain the staffing to fill those roles internally.

In summary: The Four Hour Workweek is very much worth a read even if you do have to hold your nose. It’s a hell of a toolbox and makes a lot of interesting points for anyone thinking about running a lightly staffed company with big ambitions.