Entrepreneurship on ngmarley.com

My Coffee House that Never Happened

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A beautiful sight

When I was around 20 or 21 (half my age ago), I wanted to start a coffee shop.

I’ve loved the coffee house vibe, e.g. from Friends. Loved coffee, lattes. Who doesn’t?

The hamburger shop/grill across from the university’s computer science department had just shut down. And it was a perfect location, because it was a corner that stuck into the university.

Priorities - Freedom is the Goal

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Gotta start ’em young.

Last night I saw this Instagram clip of Bob Odenkirk answering the question of who he’s most jealous of. His answer? “Anybody who’s got young kids.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/DMtE6dnSrlN/

That’s the goal, that’s the best job of all — being a good, present parent. IYKYK. It’s the best time of life, the most hectic, and you just want a break. But at the end of it all, you wish you’d had more of this time. Someday, the shoes and toys won’t be scattered all over the living room floor. And you’ll wish you had the time back.

Everything is an Offer

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Everything you see in life was or is at some point an offer that somebody created, and someone else (e.g. you) paid for. You traded stored energy (money) for a thing which provides Value to you.

“Value” is vague and thrown around often but it’s the worth that you assign to a thing. If the value (perceived benefit) is not worth the cost, you don’t buy that thing. Simple as.

Opportunity is Disguised

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Opportunity doesn’t always look like opportunity. It’s disguised.

A couple opportunities I’ll have tomorrow:

Sports App

I’ve been talking with someone in Alberta who does hockey stats, and he’s wanting to launch an app to use AI to improve on old, clunky UIs. There’s a clear, underserved market for this. How could I best serve him (without thought to my own interests for now — just try and help).

Transitions

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sunrise over a rural southwestern Missouri hayfield field w/a round haybale and native trees in the background.

Some days I wish I had my old blog because it’s easier just to write whatever I want about whatever I want. I haven’t started a Substack yet. So I feel like I have to create something that’s polished or that’s directed in certain way or has a theme, whereas my personal blog is just whatever the hell I wanted to write because it was mine. It was raw and real and it was about me, I didn’t have to go with a certain theme or something. And maybe I don’t have to do that with a Substack blog either, I don’t know.

Customer Service for Businesses and People Too

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The first interactions with your company or organization really the the most important ones. It’s what makes your company in a person’s mind – be it good or bad. It’s the initial filter that everything else passes through. It’s also really really hard to turn around a negative first impression.

I’ve been in service-oriented positions before, and in positions where I didn’t have to offer great service, but chose to anyway. It’s really made a huge difference in both how customers perceived me, and in the way I felt afterwards. Like I was actually helping out vs. just “doing my duty”.

On Being Prolific

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Cut to the chase - I’ve decided to commit to being prolific. YOLO, and I’ve got so much stuff that I’ve worked 80% on, then just left it there. Articles that I’ve left it on my hard drive, never published. Ideas for amazing things, workshops, businesses, just left in my notebook.

A couple weeks ago, I had an idea for a non-profit. It just came to me in the shower, but it was so detailed, and the potential upside so big, that I had to write it out. It’s just sitting in Evernote now, but I’ll be publishing that publicly very soon.

Foundations

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Foundations - Name of a non-profit organization to work with young people and teach them to make good decisions.

The basic idea is that the decisions we make, big and small, are the very reason that we’re exactly who & where we are at this moment in life. So, for people to affect their future in a positive way, they’ve to have a solid base of decisions. The non-profit would organize a workshop for juveniles (both delinquents and school children) to not only demonstrate the power of decisions, but give very specific tactics for pragmatic implementation of making good decisions. Teaches basic entrepreneurship and community involvement.

Finally, some solid goals.

Mon, 24 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Sunset on a Highway in Alabama

Feel like I’ve had a breakthrough tonight. Maybe it’s a combination of being alone for a few hours (INTJ - I charge up on being alone), or maybe it’s the slight lift that I got from the cup o’ tea that I had a little bit ago, but it’s starting to click.

For years, I’ve wanted to “travel the world” and be mobile, yet make an income at the same time. But it was so hard to envision without getting a time-consuming and draining customer support job.

10 Ideas to improve your site's SEO

Sun, 24 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

SEO

I wrote these ideas for a local photographer that I know, who was asking on Facebook about SEO for her website. But since I think they’re pretty generic, these could apply to just about anyone with a local business. So I’ll just share them on here for everyone, and point her to this post.

SEO is basically broken into 2 things:

How relevant is your site’s content to the people searching for it? You improve this by optimizing your site - content and meta information (e.g. meta tags, internal links to other pages on your site, etc.)
How popular is your site? (Sites with the same relevance, but more popular = higher in Google results.) This means how many “backlinks” your site has, which is other people/websites linking back to yours. You improve this by what’s called “link building”.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s a list of ideas that might help improve any site’s SE rankings.

Another redesign

Wed, 15 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Switched themes again, this time so that the site would have a responsive theme. The theme is a default WordPress theme, ‘Twenty-Fifteen’ by Automattic. It’s got a large default font, is clean and responsive… I’m not looking for much in a theme, and this one ticks off all the boxes, for now.

Also, hope to have some more posts up soon. I’ve got a few projects in the works, namely, my consulting site, nathanmarley.com and some book ideas that I need to flesh out. Also working on a Northwest Arkansas local cleaning service business that I’m running with my wife, Maid in NWA.