Good Grape Wine Company

December 19 2008

Blogging vs. the MBA

When Gary Vaynerchuk remarked at the recent Wine Blogger Conference in Sonoma, “There is no reason a wine blog cannot earn $100,000 a year in revenue,” a lot of people sat up in their chair.

It was that bromide that was the scuttle of the conference.

But, what happens when you look at blogging and our niche, wine blogging, against criteria, like, say, the time value of money and you compare that time spent against another time investment like earning your MBA?

Can somebody credibly make a case that engaging in blogging and social media is a better use of time than earning an advanced degree?

Practically speaking, if you hold down a full-time job, have a family, or at the very least a spouse, actively blog AND you want to get an MBA, something is going to have to give – and that something is likely going to be blogging.

This topic is top-of-mind because I very much would like to earn my MBA.

The reality is, though, as a 36-year old man who likes start-ups and early stage ventures, my ship has sailed in terms of climbing a Fortune 500 career ladder into the Captain of Industry chair.

More likely, an MBA allows me to do a couple of things – offset a resume deficiency for having earned a liberal arts degree, round out my business acumen into insights into operations, broaden my perspective from what has traditionally been a sales and marketing expertise and, the big thing, give me enough education so that I can teach at the university level.

But, again, therein lays the rub.  There’s not a chance I could get an MBA and maintain a blog.  Wouldn’t happen.  It is very hard to do more than a few things at one time and do them all at a very high-level. I think most people would agree with this.

Given that, I guess you need to look at, well, MBA and Finance-like criteria to see, pragmatically, what the best way to spend your time might be:  the “time value of money” and the “net present value.”
Clearly, I am a neophyte here, and the last math class I took was a 100-level Algebra class as a pre-req. for an Executive MBA program I was accepted to, but didn’t enroll in.  Before that, I took “math for liberal arts” at 8:00 in the morning as a freshman in college, the only thing that motivated me to go to class was the fact that I could stare at a beautiful girl that didn’t know I existed. 

I’m paraphrasing from a couple of places on the web, but a Net Present Value (NPV) is:

The present value of the future cash flows less the cost of the investment. The NPV is a direct measure of “cost versus benefit.” It represents the economic profit to be earned by making an investment.

This basically means what is the value of future cash flow versus present investment.  If an MBA costs me $50K in tuition, but earns out over a lifetime in $350K in additional earning opportunities, then the NPV is very good.

The Time Value of Money is (again paraphrased):

The idea that a dollar now is worth more than a dollar in the future, even after adjusting for inflation, because a dollar now can earn interest or other appreciation until the time the dollar in the future would be received.

In action, the “Time Value of Money” basically says a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.  I translate this to a blog.  Creating a blog that earns readers is surprisingly difficult to do, but if you can do it, then certainly that has value, even if it’s not monetary, yet who knows where the future will go because whatever value it has now will surely increase in time, specifically against scrapping it thinking you can start over in two years time.

Interesting questions to ponder … 

Does one go with the sure thing in terms of return on investment and earn an MBA, or do you continue to invest your time and your passion into a blog that drives a ton of satisfaction with the uncertainty of not knowing how your blogging will yield any dividends in the future?

Throwing out MBA and finance criteria and analogizing to Vegas, which we can all relate to, may be simpler.  Because I can always earn an MBA, now, or a decade from now, the SURE MONEY is on blogging. 

Or, as Albert Einstein said, “I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.”

Though, I’m still not quite certain about that Vaynerchuk guy and his proclamations.

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