Skip to main content
Select Language:

Category Archives: Networking

The Power Of Timing: Understand Ground-Floor Opportunity

Posted on by 3

We’ve all heard the saying “Timing is everything,” but what exactly does that mean? Is it luck coincidentally taking advantage of a situation that happens to present itself? In business, knowing the best time to make a move is a skill. Learn more about the power of timing through the ground-floor opportunity approach.

Why Timing Is So Important In Business

The power of intuition can never be underestimated, and instinct can only help in getting your timing right. Good timing isn’t always just about being in the right place at the right time, though. It’s also a skill that can be learned, and at times it just takes a little present moment awareness. It can be as simple as persuading someone by listening to them first and presenting your case later.

In business, good timing means matching your product or service to the wants and needs of the current marketplace. It requires the right place and the right time. Think of it this way, business ideas and opportunities are like cars. You have your NASCAR speed demons, and you have your beat-ups that make you worry whether or not they’ll get you where you need to be.

If you’re trying to make money fast, are you trying to create your riches with a race car or a jalopy? In other words, if you don’t have a concept or at least one product or service that’s super hot right now, your chances of creating wealth in your business quickly diminish.

The Ground-Floor Opportunity

Unfortunately, most people hop on a trend when it’s already too late. On the other hand, being too early is no better. You have to learn how to gauge and time the market. You have to know when to get in and when to get out!

Your intention must be to get in on a “ground-floor opportunity”, meaning demand is high and supply is low. That’s when the elevator is going up. When supply overtakes demand, it’s time to get off the hell off!

There are a couple ways to take advantage of ground-floor opportunities:

  • Copy someone who is making a mint 
  • The Piggyback technique

By copying someone else, you can do the same thing they’re doing and improve upon it. Use the original as a proven blueprint to success.

The Piggyback technique is a way for you to affiliate with someone or something that’s already a winner. It brings new meaning to the phrase “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!” It’s often faster and easier to affiliate with a company that’s already up and running rather than to start from scratch. Why reinvent the wheel? They may have exclusive products or a major distribution network in place, rare technology, or expensive production facilities already established.

Exercise: Find A Ground-Floor Opportunity

Can you think of an easier way to “get rich quick” than to have the rights to a hot, highly-in-demand product, and then market the hell out of it? Timing is everything. If you choose the right product at the right time, your road to wealth will be decidedly faster and easier!

What product or service can you sell and market that is in demand currently? Please share your examples in the comments!

This article has been updated for relevancy and accuracy. It’s original publish date was 05/07/10.

Effective Business Systems: Create Wealth With Less Struggle

Posted on by 3

Effective business systems are key to making your company a success. Stop yourself from becoming too bogged down and overwhelmed with these three strategies.

Establish Effective Business Systems With These 3 Categories

What’s the point of starting a business? To make more money, yes or yes? And what’s the point of that? So you can do more of whatever you want, whenever you want.

If you haven’t experienced this for yourself, though, then you might have heard: that’s often not what happens, at least not at first. People get caught up in their business. A lot of the time, they work harder. They do so out of necessity to make sure that it’s running, thriving and growing. Other times, they do so out of fear or over-reacting panic that without their presence, the business will collapse.

In other words, the business—for one reason or another—takes them over. And that’s not unusual especially at the beginning stages. However, if you find yourself in that same “supervisory” position after years and years, then I’d say you made things harder on yourself than you had to. That’s because the freedom of accumulating wealth through business is directly related to how well you structure your business’ foundation.

What happens if you try to build a house on a weak foundation? It eventually cracks, caves in, or turns into the leaning Tower of Pisa. The business equivalent of building a solid foundation is creating a system. You need repeatable methods and procedures that produce profit. The idea is to systematize your business so that you can effectively and efficiently sell and support your product or service in bigger numbers as you grow.

So how do you create an effective business system?

Keep it simple. When it comes down to it, an effective business system should consist of only 3 categories:

  1. Marketing: getting people to know about what you have to offer
  2. Production: getting the products and/or services made, distributed, or performed
  3. Administration: accounts payable/receivable, human resources, finance, assistants, etc.

Each part requires specific processes so they run smoothly. Aim for flawlessness, but be prepared to settle for “almost automatically”. The idea is to create a well-oiled machine—a money machine. And what do machines do best? They repeat the same functions over and over. Your system must be a repeatable process that can work without you!

Why does your business need effective systems?

If you want to gain wealth, you can’t have a ceiling on your income. Your earnings must be unlimited. If you have to be physically present for your business to work, it can only grow to the extent that you can personally handle. It doesn’t matter how brilliant and energetic you are, you still only have but so much time in a day! You have to eat, sleep, relax, talk, think, meditate, spend time with family and friends …

In other words, all the things you’d rather be doing instead of stressing.

 

What good is creating wealth if you’re killing yourself in the process?

Work on the business, not in the business. Creating a system is what gives you freedom to do just that. With a strong system in place, you’ll two have options:

 

You’ll have the flexibility to hand it over to competent managers and have an excellent source of passive income
You can sell the business and become an instant millionaire.

The more solid your business foundation, the quicker it can happen. In both cases, because you created a system, you win. An effective system that works, instead of you working, is an absolute must in order to enjoy the ride.

Exercise: Share Your Effective Business Systems

1. Have you had successes with growing your business in ways it can thrive even when you are not around? If so, share your tips and strategies here.

2. If you have not gotten to this point (yet!) share your struggles and challenges—you might be surprised with the support and feedback from the others in our community.

Make sure to leave a comment below and share your insights on effective business systems with all of us.

This article has been updated for relevancy and accuracy. It’s original publish date was 02/25/10.

Making Connections

Posted on by 35
hands making square

The time and date is set. You made sure you arrived early because you wanted to do everything you could to make a good first impression. It’s your favorite “after-work” haunt so you’ll feel right at home.

You’ve rehearsed your intro, keeping things light and hopefully funny, but you’re anticipating the words that’ll give you an opportunity to really get the conversation going. At the end of the day, though, you just hope you like them and they like you.

Sounds like going out on a first date, yes? My partner and I “date” as much as we can, but a first date has been so long for me I’m not sure I’m the guy you want dating advice from!

I do know something about creating great first impressions with potential clients or business partners. Just like any other human connection, there are things we can do to give ourselves a chance of making a great impression and set ourselves up to get what we’re looking for.

In fact, most of the top marketers in the world hardly ever talk about product! They talk to get people to like them, so when the moment comes the selling is easier.

The one thing that’s critical for everything in life—not just in negotiations but in making a connection with anyone—is to create affinity. Affinity is closeness, warmth, and likeability. People generally act based on emotion (Something to remember when marketing!), and then they justify their decisions with logic.

In other words, people will usually give a much better opportunity to someone they like.

I’m not talking about flattering butt-kissing. That’s fake affinity. More than likely most people will sniff that out and get turned off quickly. Genuine affinity means genuinely intending to make an honest and real connection with the other person.

We do it all the time and probably don’t think about it much: finding something in common. I’m like you is another way of saying I like you. Take this to another level by stating your intention for a win-win situation early and often. It’s as simple as saying something like, “I want to make sure this works for you.”  

Also, think about how disempowering the word “but” can be in a conversation. Think about what it feels like when you are trying to get your point of view across to someone, and they respond by saying, “Yeah, but …” It’s as if everything you just said was negated. It stings. Avoid “buts”.

These things work great for when you’re trying to convince your partner to see the movie you want to see, or get your kids to eat their vegetables, or get a vendor to give you the pricing you’re looking for.

There is another level to this, though, a spiritual warrior component. Your intention has to be genuine caring for what the other person wants, and the focus and confidence to know that you can create the win-win. How Zen can you get?

Over the next week or so, use due discretion and try to make connections with strangers if the moment is appropriate. You don’t have to try to “get” something from them. Just create affinity. Use phrases that show you understand. If you disagree, make your point without saying “but”. Do this with people that you know! Let us know what happens!

 harvsignature

Building an Online Database

Posted on by 36

If you’re already in business—and new to online business—it means integrating your existing customers into your online marketing efforts.

For every single person that comes through your door, when they come to the cash register to pay—whether it be by check, Visa, or cash—you get their first and last name, and email address. Every single time! If they object, you kindly remind them that preferred customers get great discounts.

The reason for this is very simple: if you have their email address, you now have the potential to contact them for free from now on! You don’t have to physically mail anything except your actual products. Brochures used to mean at least a buck per piece by the time you add the cost of producing them or a sales person to call them up. By email it’s free!

This is a perfect example of how you raise your profits instantaneously by using this one simple technology that’s been around for almost decades. If you collect the first name, last name, email address, it allows you the ability to personalize every single email that goes out to all of your customers. You just put first name, last name, email address, date they came in, what they bought; one line for every customer. That’s all you have to do.

You’ve just built a database. You can take anything separated by commas and import into any program. People perceive this to be very difficult, but when you break it down it’s super easy.

It doesn’t seem like much when we’re talking about one email to one person. But what about sending to 500 people; mail merges by the date they came in, whatever they did, how much they spent? Within three minutes 500 customers get an announcement of a special offer for them. Do you think that within 24 hours you’ll notice an uptick in clicks, calls, or feet through the door? Of course!

It’s the simplicity of email. It’s faster than Federal Express. It’s faster than fax. You press a button, it’s there. And you can personalize it just for them.

Do you think you’re going to email something to 100,000 people or 500,000 people and you’re not going to make something extra in profit? We can send personalized emails to hundreds of thousands of people every single month and generate a lot of money from that.

Mind you, it can take a couple of years to create that kind of list, but so what? Two-years well spent to begin making $100,000 per month, yes? Think about it. If you send out an email to that list of 100,000, you’ll make a minimum of $100,000 from mailing that list just once! If we do that every month, you do the math. It’s a pretty powerful asset to have.

Just start with something. You don’t have to go high-tech. You don’t have to have automatic everything. Just get online and start marketing, start learning, and start experiencing, because if you don’t, your competitor is going to!

Stay simple. Stay clean. Get the job done. Your job is to be online, to be in business; get the customer to give you their information and buy from you. Whatever your goal is, get that job done online.

https://bit.ly/UltimateInternetBootcamp

What Exactly Do You Do Again?

Posted on by 32

iStock_000011860969Small 640

Imagine that you’re on an airplane next to somebody. You know how it is—sometimes you can tell whether someone is open to conversation or whether a polite ‘hello’ will do. But if you get into a conversation, of course the question comes up: “So what do you do?

Most people will try to narrow it down into a few words: a manager at such and such a place; salesperson; lawyer, etc. In short, the answer, as impressive as it may be, is usually something that elicits, at best, an “Oh, that’s interesting,” unless it’s something like Sea World animal trainer or something really out of there.

Do most people fare any better at networking events where the answer to what you do is actually, really important? I don’t know, but if you’re giving “airplane” kinds of answers, I’d be surprised if anything beneficial would come out of that kind of networking.

In sales, in business, you have to be able to clearly articulate what you do in such a way as to make the person you’re communicating with say, “Wow, how do you do that?” Your ability to summarize the benefit of your product or service is the key to success in selling. If you can do that, you can make all the sales you want to make for the rest of your life.

If you can’t summarize what you do that way, it means that you don’t understand what you’re selling. If you don’t understand what you’re selling, it’s impossible for your customer to understand.

All people are concerned about is what your product or service does. How can it change lives? How does it improve someone’s work or family life? What does it do? What’s the before and after difference? That’s what people want to know.

Successful businesses know exactly what they specialize in and then become absolutely excellent in their area of specialization. A rule in business and in selling is that you never take on more than you can do with excellence. You don’t try to be all things to all people.

Companies that go under start off with one area of specialization, become successful, and then think they can walk on water. They start to offer everything in a mediocre way, and then mediocrity becomes everything they do.

Unsuccessful people try to do all kinds of things, but that’s like trying to ride three bicycles at once. Successful people pick a single focus, and they concentrate on that. The only way that you can succeed in life is by becoming an expert in what you do: an expert not only in your own mind, but in the minds of others. They must know that you are very good at what you do.

One of the big frustrations we have in life is when we waste so much time on low probability prospects who turn us off, turn us down, reject us, and we start to think we’re no good, or the product is no good, or life sucks, when that’s not the case, yes? We’re just talking to the wrong people. And much of the time, we’re talking to the wrong people because we haven’t really focused in on what we have to offer.

What are your stories of turning a business—or anything—around from trying to do too many things with little success to finding success in a single focus? Was it business? Career? Relationships? The Millionaire Mind community wants to hear from you!