Time Value of Money

I haven't posted anything in a little while, but over the last several months, work has been getting to me. Just regular visual effects work. It's quite fun and entertaining, but like many of you know, I have higher aspirations. Since I filed for a business license (sole proprietorship, at the moment) at the beginning of the year, I've run through several ideas that have been backlogged in my head, of which only Lisa, and a select few coworkers with NDAs, have been privy to.

The last several weeks have involved me banging my head against a wall to create a workable prototype with materials I acquired from Burman Industries in Van Nuys. They were great in helping to decide what materials would be beneficial to the construction of my product. However, next week will be the culmination of several months of preparation and decision making, as I have a consulation with T2 Design, a local manufacturing and marketing firm here in the Santa Monica area. I hope to gain a little more detail in final prototyping for my product, and possibly arrange for some marketing and distribution. They were one of the companies featured on American Inventor last year, and my research led me to them as well as several other product design and marketing companies in the area.

Anyway, I thought I would do some time/money breakdowns for what's in my head. While Time Value of Money strictly relates to investments, I found it could be another apt description for gaining money while not actively working, which begins below.

I was looking online at NetJets, which has fractional jet ownership.. Don't ask me why I jumped onto that page, but I was interested. They have a Marquis Jet Card, for the low price of $115,900, you can use their jets for 25 flight hrs. That's about $4600/hr.. That got me thinking. How could I earn that much an hour? It's an exercise in futility, as it'll take forever to work up to that amount, but let's try it anyway. I'll round it out to $5000/hr. Which comes to about $43,800,000 a year (24hrs/365days). For comparison, Steven Spielberg made $332 million last year. That's about $38,000/hr (24hrs/365days).

If I wanted to sell my product, let's just say for a profit of 20 cents each ($0.20), I'd have to sell 416 of them per min, or about 7 per second. If there are around 3000 Walmarts here in the states, I'd have to sell about 0.13 of my products per store.. Rounded up to 1 per store is definitely overkill, but there are times when stores are closed, things are out of stock, etc. But the greater problem arises. There are not enough people to buy this product! The US Census predicts a rise to 115 million households by the year 2010. If each one of these households were to buy my product to meet that 416 items sold per minute, I would reach my target audience in 191 days. Each household would have that product and wouldn't need it again. But what about the population of the states? 300 million people. It'd take only 500 days for everyone to have one. At that's at a rate of only 416 per minute.

In a nutshell, in order for me to make $5000/hr, it would take, in a perfect scenario, selling my product continuously every second of every day for 191 days for a personal profit of 20 cents each.