More Writing: Advice For Low-Income African-Americans Regarding Career and Small Business Success

 

Preamble:

I wrote this article a while back and submitted it to a home business magazine.  My goal was to get an article published and then write a non-fiction book.  Unfortunately, I never heard back from the publication I wrote to.

My top two pieces of advice for African-American people, or any people in the USA, whether or not you have a college degree or a criminal record, are:  1)  Look up "labor market tightness" and try to use that idea and LinkedIn to find a job you can get (stock clerk is a good job title in some cases), and 2)  Consider starting a home business, with or without an automated factory (you can build things by hand, too) and using the ideas in my article, below, to make a profit based on your home business...you can sell products on Etsy, eBay, Amazon, or other internet product sales platforms.

Update, 04-06-2026:

Taken out of context, this post might sound like I am being condescending to African-American people, or, worse, like I have a low opinion of black people's intellect.  Many black people are very smart; I wrote this article because I challenged myself to write an article that could help black people who might be struggling with income.  Statistically, many black people are not making enough money.  Basically, this article arose out of a desire, by me, to "think of something that would actually help lots of black people in the USA."  It is not intended to pigeonhole African-Americans as untalented or unable to make money.  Please understand that I am not racist at all, and that this article was written in the spirit of service and is not intended to sound prejudiced.  I wrote another post right before this one where I said I was "going to try to help black people in honor of the Black Lives Matter movement," so that is the context that this post should be taken in.  Black people are every bit as smart as white people in the USA, and beyond; it's just that historical crimes against African-Americans have left black people in a situation where sometimes such people have less money and less access to educational resources than others in the USA.  That is why I wrote this article--to help fight racism.

Main Article:

Maximizing Sales Volume With Math

Albert Einstein was known for his famous thought experiment, in which he imagined riding on a beam of light.  More business-related, the famous business leader Andrew Grove wrote about the thought experiment of a “breakfast factory” as a means to understand the job of a manager in his book, High Output Management.  Here, I present a thought experiment that is important and potent for increasing home business income:  The idea of a robotic chess sets home factory.  You don’t need to be doing anything close to this particular idea for the mathematical idea I present in this article, which is called “multiple linear regression,” to benefit you and unlock new profit potential for you.  Consider the material I cover in this article, and you will see how your home business can benefit—without needing more employees.  You can do it alone with this powerful statistics technique.

You may have heard of the concept of “keys for success” in business literature.  Here, I will show you how to use mathematical techniques to identify the expected value of sales volume of your business using key factors that you identify that are strongly correlated with sales volume.

Let’s step into the chess sets manufacturing thought experiment.  Suppose you are an electrical engineer and C++ programmer with some understanding of robots.  You have checked online, including on Amazon.com and Etsy, and you have noticed that there is a huge market for selling chess sets.  On Amazon in particular, you can identify the sales volume over the past month.  As of this writing, there are dozens of chess sets being sold on Etsy, and some of the chess sets on Amazon are selling thousands of copies per month.  In short, the chess sets market is big and booming.

What if the competition is too intense?  You calculate the cost of wood and paint—neglecting overhead—and see that if you wanted to construct and paint a chess board and 32 chess pieces, it might cost 15 dollars to produce each set.  Many of the chess sets listed sell for only around $20; the profit margins might be very low if you don’t know what you’re doing and your sales volume comes out too low.  Also, the sales vary widely from one chess set offering to another.  On the Amazon pages, it’s clear that some chess sets have been selling as many as 60,000 in the past month, whereas some have sold only around 1,000 in the past month.  With profit margins as low as they may be for these chess sets, it is going to be critically important to try to maximize the sales volume of your chess sets offering in this market.

So, what can be done?  Initially:  Find a collection of perhaps about 5-15 variables that are strongly correlated with sales volume of chess sets.  Doing this can be so powerful and clarifying.

Here’s how to do it:  Identify variables that you see that differ from one chess set offering to another.  You might have a numerical rating for “magnetic-ness” of the chess set; what percent of the volume of the chess set components appear to be magnetic?  Other quantifiable factors include size of the chess board, ease of carrying the board and pieces, price of the chess set on Amazon, and the extent to which the chess pieces are crafted artistically.  Find many factors, and then use internet resources to find the variables that are most closely correlated with sales volume.  Basically, you are testing the variables to see if they are linearly correlated with each other—the correlation tells you, if you select a line that is optimal for capturing the linear relationship between the points in the scatter plot that you generate, how strong that relationship is.

Take the most correlated variables, and put them into a multiple linear regression model…you can find an online multiple linear regression calculator easily using a search engine.  Now, we are going to take the variables that were strongly correlated with the sales volume, and use all of them together to find another line—one that is multidimensional—that will help us get a good, close estimate of how much the sales volume variable will be given the values of these other “predictor” variables.

The final formula will look something like this:

Y = c1 * x1 + c2 * x2 + c3 * x3 + … + c_k * x_k

Here, k is the number of variables.  Each constant coefficient c1, c2, … , c_k is a number that is either positive or negative (typically it is never 0) that tells us, when the associated variable is x_i and this coefficient is c_i, how much does the variable Y go up or down when, all other things being equal, the value of x_i is increased or decreased?  Coefficients that are large and positive, relative to the other coefficients, suggest that even a small increase in the associated variable will increase sales volume for the product.

Simple linear regression, which yielded the initial correlations, is like “fitting clothes to your body’s form.”  The line is like a dress for the scatter plot, and the goal is to find the dress with the least disagreement between the form of the dress (the straight line) and the form of the person‘s body (the scatter plot), with the idea that the closer the points all are to the straight line, the better the fit—imagine if a dress is too big for its wearer.  In linear regression, to say the line is a good fit, we want to say that the points are close enough to the line that they could be somewhat closely predicted by the behavior of the line itself alone.  (When considering multiple linear regression, the metaphor is less applicable, but the concept is similar to simple linear regression.)

With this, your small home business can be a big success, with whatever means and materials you use to produce the product of your business.  By being analytical and availing yourself of the best tools mathematics has to offer, you can learn to compete, create, and sell with excellence and ease.