What is your biggest asset? Well if you are young, it has to be time. You are going to trade it successfully over a period of time and you are going to become rich.

Let me throw a bet – if you were to be given all the wealth of Buffett, Ratan Tata or Azim Premji will you exchange your life for theirs? I am asking this question to the 20-24 year old reading this blog. Chances are you will not. At least I do not think I will want to do that deal. Not even at age 57.

So that brings me to the question that I have to answer EVERYDAY.

What is your business plan for your blog Mr. Subramanyam?

How many people visit your blog? what gender? which countries,…..

Sadly my answer to all these question is “I do not know”. I have not really applied my mind to any of these qualitative factors. If I want to ‘encash’ my blog, I will have to get far more organised and less political if I need to make money. I have no intentions of doing that. I have developed a nice brand by just being there for 10+ years.

I do get paid by Google Adsense -but that takes care of my monthly electricity bill and telephone bill and is way belhoow what I would do if I were engaged for money.

However, my blog is not free. You are paying me with your most valuable asset – TIME.

It is a great pleasure to go around the country and meet with a variety of audience. The best surgeons, physicians, IFA, wealth managers, sales people, students, trainee army people, trainee policemen, housewives, bankers, life insurance salesmen, regulators…I have really met a sea of humanity across the spectrum. It is incidental that I get paid most of the times. When I do for the regulator, I get paid a lot lesser than what i charge the normal clients.

All these people like the readers of my blog give me their BIGGEST ASSET – a share of their time. Say they spend 8 minutes a day – that is out of the 960 non sleeping hours that they have. Are they not paying me? Sure, they do not pay cash.

I guess they trust me. I got a call from a doc yesterday saying “i went to an Ifa he has made a mess of my portfolio..will you clean it up for a fee’? I said sure, I know they read my blog regularly. So in a way it is paying, is it not?

Even better is that since I am not actively seeking Investment related work maybe I am getting less. Maybe if I had a sales and marketing team I would have got many more leads, which would have given a better yield.