The day the world stopped spinning.
Saturday, 12 December, 2009, the world stopped spinning. For me at any rate.
There are those days that happen in each of our lives when through the experience of being a living, moderately normal human, we acknowledge that the daily progress of change has added a soupçon of challenge each day to our lives more than it had the day before, and that as those morsels of life challenges accrue, inertia and complacency are bestowed not just to our broad shoulders, but to our very souls as well.
If one has any ambition about them whatsoever then this realization only comes to us when all of our forward progress finally comes to a screeching halt over the least of trivialities and usually at a mission critical moment.
That moment when all forward progress stops is usually replaced by that first momentary sensation of regression – the feeling that somehow things are not just slowing down anymore but starting, in effect, to go backwards. And as the momentum builds in reverse we struggle and fight to regain control. Like a driver who has lost their power steering on an icy road, we fight, struggle and wrench the wheel in the earnest demand for supremacy and domination of our environment – we *will* bend it to our will. We will regain control of the car, and guide it safely forward and out of harms’ way once more.
Like the driver, sometimes we are successful and we regain control. We regain the momentum forward and continue on, having shaken loose some of the weighty issues that have led us into a dangerous driving situation. In other cases we lose control and through reaction or over-reaction we actually make things worse, endangering not only us but those who depend on us and those for whom we care.
And then in some very few cases we relinquish control and simply urge the car to come to a quiet rest, neither fighting for control nor recklessly throwing ourselves into a panic of pride and incompetence but rather gently observing the situation and resolving to act rationally when the first opportunity to make a difference becomes available.
A friend recently mentioned that wisdom is gained from experience; experience is gained through learning from errors; and errors occur from making choices. Wisdom, then, comes from making choices and learning from our errors. And one of the lessons is that although decisive action is critical to solving a tenacious and overwhelming problem, more important still is having the patience to make the right decision at the right *time*.
And so we revise our hypothesis and learn once more that the path to wisdom isn’t simply being a decider, nor is it simply observing life, but it is the considered timely action that yields the best results.
And so as the mass and inertia of accumulated challenges have sent my life spinning for several years now, I have observed closely. I have watched the dangers flash by: the dangers of economic instability, career jeopardy, family instability, political instability, and personal safety and well-being – all these and more have slid past me at warp speed, just as the car spins on the black ice.
I have resisted the urge to reach out to that steering wheel and yank it in the opposite direction; to fight the spin and force friction and my will to battle the wild inertia of a spin on treacherous terrain, and by that resistance I have bided, waiting for the right opportunity to act, preparing my response for the occasion when the car has faced the right direction once more and by carefully turning into and then out of the spin I can guide the car back onto the road and actually use the momentum to regain control and guide my car and person safely on my way once more.
I redirected the stress from the challenges I bear to the stress of patience, and in so doing was able to see the stresses of my cares more clearly for what they truly are - the accumulation of thousands of days of cares, worries and frets belonging to choices that have long since passed added together with the worries , fears and hopes of today.
Those past issues were playing far too big a role in defining and directing my reactions to what is facing me now, and like with the driver, they represented distractions and pot holes that could easily tip the balance from a safe recovery to a dangerous crash. Patience allowed me to avoid taking the wrong reaction and still act in a timely manner to steer my life away from the dangerous, risky habit of trying to control for control's sake and allowed me the space to breathe and calmly guide my life to safety and return to forward progress.
By following that fundamental premise of considered timely action, the spinning has stopped and safety and control have been regained. The world stopped spinning for me on Saturday.
I'm still shaken up, worried and concerned that I carried all that extra baggage with me, but now I have a chance to deliver on my promises, achieve my objectives and I no longer have that overwhelming level of stress inhibiting my ability to live the way I want to.
All because the spinning stopped.
14 December, 2009
31 August, 2009
Launch Day!
Launch Day for The Millionaires' Race to 2010.
Today’s the big day! The start of The Millionaires Race to 2010! And there is a *lot* of work to do. Our web site’s still under construction and will be up a bit later with lots of neat new features, but that shouldn’t slow you down from getting started in the Race to 2010! Now’s the time for you to launch yourself into a brand new project that will help both you and your country get back into the innovating, economic growth spurt that we really need to get this country back on track. And we’re going to help you!
Throughout the year we’re going to be landing in cities right across Canada and the US promoting the Race and the income generating projects of our participants. We’ll help you sell your products, your books, your services – we’ll go the whole nine yards on our road trip across the nation(s).
As we stop in various cities we’ll also work directly with a number of you to help make your dreams of success a reality.
So take time today to put your plans on paper, and get to dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s so you can get your project under weigh. And maybe a year from now we’ll be showing you off to the country as one of the continent’s newest millionaires!
Throughout the day today I will be posting new stories, new blogs, new tools and a whole lot more to get you revved up, excited and rolling on your way to financial freedom. Opportunities will be made available to come on tour with us or to help you get rolling, so don’t be shy – check back frequently throughout the day, as new updates will be released all day long!
Cheers and have a great Race Day!
C./
Today’s the big day! The start of The Millionaires Race to 2010! And there is a *lot* of work to do. Our web site’s still under construction and will be up a bit later with lots of neat new features, but that shouldn’t slow you down from getting started in the Race to 2010! Now’s the time for you to launch yourself into a brand new project that will help both you and your country get back into the innovating, economic growth spurt that we really need to get this country back on track. And we’re going to help you!
Throughout the year we’re going to be landing in cities right across Canada and the US promoting the Race and the income generating projects of our participants. We’ll help you sell your products, your books, your services – we’ll go the whole nine yards on our road trip across the nation(s).
As we stop in various cities we’ll also work directly with a number of you to help make your dreams of success a reality.
So take time today to put your plans on paper, and get to dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s so you can get your project under weigh. And maybe a year from now we’ll be showing you off to the country as one of the continent’s newest millionaires!
Throughout the day today I will be posting new stories, new blogs, new tools and a whole lot more to get you revved up, excited and rolling on your way to financial freedom. Opportunities will be made available to come on tour with us or to help you get rolling, so don’t be shy – check back frequently throughout the day, as new updates will be released all day long!
Cheers and have a great Race Day!
C./
09 August, 2009
Couponing and Cash for Clunkers.
One of the biggest lessons I learned about marketing came at the expense of The Hudson's Bay Company in Canada. It's the oldest company in the continent dating back from the discovery of North America, and as one of the very first trading post companies it has been in operation since the year 1670.
It is still in operation today but under American ownership as a result of numerous management mistakes and fiduciary failures which needed to be corrected by someone with deeper pockets and a better management team. I'm not 100% sure that their owners (the holding company that owns Lord and Taylor's) are necessarily that team, but they will certainly do no worse.
How does the Hudson's Bay Company of Canada have anything to do with our government's Cash for Clunkers program? Good question. I have a great answer.
The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) went through tumultuous financial times in the 80's and 90's like most retailers. They tried to buy a number of other chains in order to diversify their market reach and expand market dominance of the hard-fought department chain consumer market and to reposition their products for re-sale as they went through their product aging cycle/ Clothes that were unable to sell in HBC would be sold at a discount through their lower cost Zellers subsidiary and so on.
So far so good. But things go off the rails in this story right about....now.
The department store industry during this era was faced with a massive change in consumer spending thanks to the evolution of box stores and mass market retail sales clubs. Now the all-in-one stop department stores were no longer competitive on pricing and their product lines were being put in direct competition with good quality, low cost substitutes. Throw in a recession or two in Canada and you have the makings of financial disaster.
Right about then there was a management philosophy that was prevailing over experience and common sense in businesses around the world that hit the company in several key and devastating ways. Over time I'll go into other aspects and applications, but one of them was inflicted on/by their marketing department in specific that applies to this story.
There are certain words that will always draw attention in any piece of advertising: New, Sale, Half-Off. Those kinds of things always get attention and almost always draw in customers looking for a great deal.
The new philosophy at the marketing department was implemented post-haste. Once a month the company would have a blockbuster sale and advertise it extensively using each of those key, top-draw advertising bell-ringers.
Inventory flowed, sales figures climbed, Hallelujah's were said. Monster sales volumes occured as thousands thronged to get the best deals of the season. Profit margins were low, but volume made it profitable.
Then sales trickled off. No one seemed to need the products they had just bought in such massive quantities once the sale wore off. Sales figures for the rest of the month were down, but since they had had such a great sale to start the period, their overall numbers still looked good. The sale to start the next month again was a huge hit - throngs came by the thousands and staff simply could not keep up with demand. Again, a big success and a big sigh of relief as the month started off so well.
But again the numbers for the rest of the month were off. They still were not gaining any real market penetration and the overall numbers were still down as they kept losing marketshare to the box stores and Walmarts that kept popping up all over the place.
Well, if it's working on a monthly basis, let's see if it will work on a weekly basis?
So they did. The big sales started to show up every weekend, tailored to meet the needs of their biggest customers - the families who needed the one-stop convenience that a department store offered.
Again the company was rewarded - the public loved the idea of being able to go get stuff every weekend at huge discounts, and for a few months the volumes on the weekends soared outrageously, even leading the company to believe that they might be able to recoup some of that lost marketshare and start gaining it back.
But the company next noticed a horrible trend - no one was shopping during the week! The customers now shopped only on weekends - literally! Some stores that ordinarily would do $50-100 k in business on a weekday would be lucky to do $1000 for the entire store in total. But the costs of running the stores stayed constant - they still had to staff every department, keep the inventory on the floor, clean the facilities, etc because of the long term rental agreements that the malls they were located in had included in their rental contracts. And the properties were far too valuable to give up. So those stores *had* to lose money 5 days a week so that they could make money on the other two. Hmmmm.....not so good.
And then came the kicker - the consumer had learned the drill. They now knew that HBC would continue to offer these sales days because they had to in order to move inventory and keep from financial crisis from lousy cash flow. Now the consumer could relax their spending and only shop for the quantities they needed in the short term and only on sales days.
HBC's sales volumes plummeted, even on their big sales weekends. And now their customers were trained by the company not to shop the rest of the week either and sales volumes there were almost non-existant. What idiot would pay double for a fridge, shirt, lawn mower or vacuum on a Monday when they could go one day earlier or 5 days later and buy it half-off?
Worse still, they had sold the customers all that the customers would need for months to come in advance and now they didn't need the store anymore. They *could* shop, but there was no incentive that said they *had* to shop.
The company was in panic mode. It was so stressed out it took little time to learn the lessons of the day then and went straight to desperation mode. If the customer was driven by sales prices, then that must be where the solution lay. Now once a month 80% off days showed up. Couponing, discounting, desperation set in. The company was heading straight to disaster.
Sooner or later the day came when their maximum discounts were no longer enough to lure in customers. Combined with crippling overstocking of unmovable inventory the company faced financial collapse. Stores were sold off, the company shrank in desperate cost cutting measures...layoffs, angry creditors...you know the drill.
Again, the question applies - how does this apply to the Cash for Clunkers deal?
Car sales to domestic manufacturers have been sliding for years. The big three did all the financing and discounting deals they were prepared to do and again had spikes and collapses in sales that left them holding millions of vehicles in inventory and empty bags of profit. The solution? A huge discount to drive a selling spree, in this case sponsored by the federal government. And as soon as that incentive ends, just precisely when do you expect anyone will need to buy a car again? The drought that follows the big sale may just be the last nail needed to seal the coffin on our domestic car industry the way improperly planned sales spikes nearly destroyed the oldest company on the continent.
Add to that an energy tax that will punitively increase the cost of gas and a requirement to increase the manufacturing cost of vehicles to meet the arbitrary mileage requirements of new legislation concerning vehicle manufacturing and the pitifully weak domestic industry as a whole faces extinction.
There is no doubt that the industry needs a boost or faces catastrophic failure, but so did the department store industry in Canada in the 80's and 90's. The solution wasn't to spike sales at the cost of future sales then any more than it will be for our car industry today.
The solution is finding the right products that people want to buy and offering them with better wuality and better pricing. Oh, and get rid of the dealerships that are eating up your profit margins and giving the industry a perpetual black eye. Make car buying a thing people want to do, not something people abhorr more than having a root canal and quadruple bypass 2-for-1 special. In other words, run your business properly and you won't need to have the massive sales except when you have surpluss inventory that you need to clear out. Which is what sales were designed for in the first place.
It is still in operation today but under American ownership as a result of numerous management mistakes and fiduciary failures which needed to be corrected by someone with deeper pockets and a better management team. I'm not 100% sure that their owners (the holding company that owns Lord and Taylor's) are necessarily that team, but they will certainly do no worse.
How does the Hudson's Bay Company of Canada have anything to do with our government's Cash for Clunkers program? Good question. I have a great answer.
The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) went through tumultuous financial times in the 80's and 90's like most retailers. They tried to buy a number of other chains in order to diversify their market reach and expand market dominance of the hard-fought department chain consumer market and to reposition their products for re-sale as they went through their product aging cycle/ Clothes that were unable to sell in HBC would be sold at a discount through their lower cost Zellers subsidiary and so on.
So far so good. But things go off the rails in this story right about....now.
The department store industry during this era was faced with a massive change in consumer spending thanks to the evolution of box stores and mass market retail sales clubs. Now the all-in-one stop department stores were no longer competitive on pricing and their product lines were being put in direct competition with good quality, low cost substitutes. Throw in a recession or two in Canada and you have the makings of financial disaster.
Right about then there was a management philosophy that was prevailing over experience and common sense in businesses around the world that hit the company in several key and devastating ways. Over time I'll go into other aspects and applications, but one of them was inflicted on/by their marketing department in specific that applies to this story.
There are certain words that will always draw attention in any piece of advertising: New, Sale, Half-Off. Those kinds of things always get attention and almost always draw in customers looking for a great deal.
The new philosophy at the marketing department was implemented post-haste. Once a month the company would have a blockbuster sale and advertise it extensively using each of those key, top-draw advertising bell-ringers.
Inventory flowed, sales figures climbed, Hallelujah's were said. Monster sales volumes occured as thousands thronged to get the best deals of the season. Profit margins were low, but volume made it profitable.
Then sales trickled off. No one seemed to need the products they had just bought in such massive quantities once the sale wore off. Sales figures for the rest of the month were down, but since they had had such a great sale to start the period, their overall numbers still looked good. The sale to start the next month again was a huge hit - throngs came by the thousands and staff simply could not keep up with demand. Again, a big success and a big sigh of relief as the month started off so well.
But again the numbers for the rest of the month were off. They still were not gaining any real market penetration and the overall numbers were still down as they kept losing marketshare to the box stores and Walmarts that kept popping up all over the place.
Well, if it's working on a monthly basis, let's see if it will work on a weekly basis?
So they did. The big sales started to show up every weekend, tailored to meet the needs of their biggest customers - the families who needed the one-stop convenience that a department store offered.
Again the company was rewarded - the public loved the idea of being able to go get stuff every weekend at huge discounts, and for a few months the volumes on the weekends soared outrageously, even leading the company to believe that they might be able to recoup some of that lost marketshare and start gaining it back.
But the company next noticed a horrible trend - no one was shopping during the week! The customers now shopped only on weekends - literally! Some stores that ordinarily would do $50-100 k in business on a weekday would be lucky to do $1000 for the entire store in total. But the costs of running the stores stayed constant - they still had to staff every department, keep the inventory on the floor, clean the facilities, etc because of the long term rental agreements that the malls they were located in had included in their rental contracts. And the properties were far too valuable to give up. So those stores *had* to lose money 5 days a week so that they could make money on the other two. Hmmmm.....not so good.
And then came the kicker - the consumer had learned the drill. They now knew that HBC would continue to offer these sales days because they had to in order to move inventory and keep from financial crisis from lousy cash flow. Now the consumer could relax their spending and only shop for the quantities they needed in the short term and only on sales days.
HBC's sales volumes plummeted, even on their big sales weekends. And now their customers were trained by the company not to shop the rest of the week either and sales volumes there were almost non-existant. What idiot would pay double for a fridge, shirt, lawn mower or vacuum on a Monday when they could go one day earlier or 5 days later and buy it half-off?
Worse still, they had sold the customers all that the customers would need for months to come in advance and now they didn't need the store anymore. They *could* shop, but there was no incentive that said they *had* to shop.
The company was in panic mode. It was so stressed out it took little time to learn the lessons of the day then and went straight to desperation mode. If the customer was driven by sales prices, then that must be where the solution lay. Now once a month 80% off days showed up. Couponing, discounting, desperation set in. The company was heading straight to disaster.
Sooner or later the day came when their maximum discounts were no longer enough to lure in customers. Combined with crippling overstocking of unmovable inventory the company faced financial collapse. Stores were sold off, the company shrank in desperate cost cutting measures...layoffs, angry creditors...you know the drill.
Again, the question applies - how does this apply to the Cash for Clunkers deal?
Car sales to domestic manufacturers have been sliding for years. The big three did all the financing and discounting deals they were prepared to do and again had spikes and collapses in sales that left them holding millions of vehicles in inventory and empty bags of profit. The solution? A huge discount to drive a selling spree, in this case sponsored by the federal government. And as soon as that incentive ends, just precisely when do you expect anyone will need to buy a car again? The drought that follows the big sale may just be the last nail needed to seal the coffin on our domestic car industry the way improperly planned sales spikes nearly destroyed the oldest company on the continent.
Add to that an energy tax that will punitively increase the cost of gas and a requirement to increase the manufacturing cost of vehicles to meet the arbitrary mileage requirements of new legislation concerning vehicle manufacturing and the pitifully weak domestic industry as a whole faces extinction.
There is no doubt that the industry needs a boost or faces catastrophic failure, but so did the department store industry in Canada in the 80's and 90's. The solution wasn't to spike sales at the cost of future sales then any more than it will be for our car industry today.
The solution is finding the right products that people want to buy and offering them with better wuality and better pricing. Oh, and get rid of the dealerships that are eating up your profit margins and giving the industry a perpetual black eye. Make car buying a thing people want to do, not something people abhorr more than having a root canal and quadruple bypass 2-for-1 special. In other words, run your business properly and you won't need to have the massive sales except when you have surpluss inventory that you need to clear out. Which is what sales were designed for in the first place.
Marketing to sell a Million by September next year.
I shared a rough outline of what you can do to make a lot of money fairly easily, and a little bit of how it could work. Now I am going to get to one of the two subjects that determine whether you’re going to be successful at it –how to get your customers to notice you.
This is the difference between Marketing and Advertising.
Advertising is sending a message out to attract customers. Marketing is making sure your product and your customers have a great meeting.
‘Sales’ is what happens when that great meeting results in a buying decision.
I do not pretend to have the penultimate sales advice – I’m good, very good, but it isn’t what I focus on. My focus is almost exclusively on Marketing because if it is done properly then every sales professional will tell you that they *love* working for you because 90-95% of their job is done for them. Their leads are all warmed up, the customer already is familiar and educated about the product, the pricing is already structured to be affordable but valued by the customer, all the upkeep and service agreements are all thought out and work for everyone – the complete package is buying-decision-ready. The sales pro then really just needs to tip the scales, collect the orders and keep in contact with the customer to make sure they are happy while leaving the door open for any follow-up orders or referrals.
So if I do my job properly, my team’s job is made much, much easier, and everyone makes a *lot* more money and everyone, including the customer, is a lot happier about it.
So recently I told you to build a product that allows you to share a knowledge base or skill that you have with others who can benefit from it. Whether it’s crafting, cooking, cleaning, carpentry, plumbing, computers, electronics assembly, shopping, history, music, entertainment or anything else, there is an infinite supply of topics that your personal take on could be of value and interest to others.
I also told you that you could format it in a way that you could give courses on how to do what you know how to do. Those courses could add a whole new revenue stream and introduce your products to whole new audiences.
I then told you that a second product in that field could just be what you need to go over the top.
But I didn’t tell you how to do the Marketing to get it in your customers’ hands.
Here’s one approach you could use – remember, just like I described in my earlier blog, there are literally thousands of ways to market your products and services. This is just one example.
Let’s say you’ve written a book on negotiating contracts. It’s pretty safe to bet that not *everyone* you meet in a department or book store is going to want or need to read that book.
Who does need that information? I can think of dozens of groups that would benefit tremendously from it and from a presentation that tailors the interpretation of the book to their needs. Chambers of Commerce, union reps, sales professional development associations, business students at university and college, law students, legal firms, insurance companies, realtors, and many, many more groups and organizations need that kind of information. So do the spouses who run the households, by the way. They do all the negotiating within the family, with suppliers for services and products for the home, work out the insurance policies and coverage, negotiate and organize schedules, and so on. Ever notice that no one has set up professional development days for those who professionally manage our families and our homes? We might want to work on fixing that. Just a thought.
So if you targeted each of those groups above in each neighbourhood near where you live then you should be able to build a pretty decent list of groups that would be interested in hearing what you have to say.
Your next step is to put together the most enticing invitation you can possibly come up with for each group. You want to find a way to present to them and get paid for doing it. Send invitations to every member, to the Chambers, to the local media, to any relevant people. Send reminder notices as the days get closer. Do follow up calls to anyone who calls to ask info about the event. Try and get on local radio or TV to talk about the event. Send letters to the editor and articles to your local papers discussing what's going to happen at the event or why the subject is very topical and important right now. Once you have the list of attendees, this will also give you the opportunity to sell your product – in this case the book on negotiating contracts.
Or you could combine the two and sell your courses and include a copy of the book for free by factoring your profit margin into the cost of the course.
You could also team up with others in your neighbourhood or subject matter and sell the courses or books in package deals to widen the reach of customer base and minimize your per presentation costs by splitting it between the various presenters.
So let’s take some specific examples and do the math, shall we?
Your local Chamber of Commerce has a list of member companies, usually several thousand long and for a nominal fee or free you should be able to send an invitation to all member companies as a special opportunity just for their members. Out of that list, if you have a successful invitation, you should probably expect to get about 5% response rate or at least 50-150 calls, of which you’ll probably close about 1/3 as sales. (These numbers I’m using are industry standards for moderately successful mail campaigns.)
That means that you should be able to expect between 16 and 50 sales by inviting your local CoC. Assuming each other group listed above produced similar results, then you could roughly multiply that number by the number of groups you invite. If you invite 10 groups, you’ll probably end up with approximately 300 paying customers for an event or a book sale.
If you make $25 in profit from each sale, then one event should have a single payout of $7500 or more in your pocket before taxes.
If you want to earn $1,000,000 on that basis, you only need to host 134 events.
If you were able to make as much as $50 in profit per sale, you would only need to host 67 events to make your target income.
That means having an average of a little more than one event per week.
That’s the kind of schedule that most people can handle.
Sure, most of the events will probably be out of town because you’ll run out of local options fairly quickly, but think about it. The only day you really have penciled in each week is the one you deliver your presentation on. Everything else in your life suddenly became a *lot* more flexible.
And don’t forget the $7,500+ per week incentive.
See, what happens here is that you find your customers in an environment in which they see your product for the value it brings to them. If you try and pitch a pool cleaning company to a branch manager at Intel at the office, I can guarantee they won’t be interested. If you pitch them the same option at a pool supplies or patio furniture retailer you are far more likely to get the sale. It’s the same potential customer – but the environment, the circumstances, the sales logic are all completely different.
It’s the ability to meet the customer’s needs that matters. In one environment, they don’t need a pool cleaner. In another it’s a perfectly natural fit. In one case they see no value at all – how is a clean residential pool going to make the world’s largest computer chip manufacturer more profitable? But in the other environment the value makes sense – it’s safer and healthier for your family, it frees up more time to spend with your family, it’s less expensive, better quality…whatever the benefits are, this is where they make *sense.*
By attacking your market in the right environments, where it is natural to the customer to want to do that kind of business, they are already interested in making a buying decision. From there on you add to it by adding in opportunities to reach out to new kinds of customers as well, blending both traditional customer types (busy working business pros for example) with entirely new markets (launching the first PD days for household managers) and offering new products to extend the sales cycle while you’re at it.
In one fell swoop you’ve managed to sell to your traditional client base, a new client base, and to sell add-on revenue.
And if you’re lucky and smart enough to combine your events with those of a couple of other people whose products match up well with yours, then you can shave your costs down and increase your profitability. Of course the more profitable each event is, the fewer events you have to have to achieve your objective of $1,000,000 in new revenue this coming year.
In another blog I’ll start sharing some tips and tricks on how to increase your profitability per event in order to make your goals easier to attain – I just wanted to give you the basic outline of how this can work for now.
Of course there are any number of challenges with this approach. What happens if you don’t like public speaking? You could split the proceeds with someone who is – you write the content, they deliver the show. What if you can’t sell to save your life? Same thing. You split the proceeds with someone who can. What if you can’t write very well. You deliver the show, and have someone work with you to write what you know.
There is usually a way to make this idea work for just about anybody, if you really want to try it, but as I said before, it’s nowhere near the only way to go to accomplish your dreams.
Find your own path and borrow from what you can learn here to make your path more rewarding and productive. That’s what we’re here for.
This is the difference between Marketing and Advertising.
Advertising is sending a message out to attract customers. Marketing is making sure your product and your customers have a great meeting.
‘Sales’ is what happens when that great meeting results in a buying decision.
I do not pretend to have the penultimate sales advice – I’m good, very good, but it isn’t what I focus on. My focus is almost exclusively on Marketing because if it is done properly then every sales professional will tell you that they *love* working for you because 90-95% of their job is done for them. Their leads are all warmed up, the customer already is familiar and educated about the product, the pricing is already structured to be affordable but valued by the customer, all the upkeep and service agreements are all thought out and work for everyone – the complete package is buying-decision-ready. The sales pro then really just needs to tip the scales, collect the orders and keep in contact with the customer to make sure they are happy while leaving the door open for any follow-up orders or referrals.
So if I do my job properly, my team’s job is made much, much easier, and everyone makes a *lot* more money and everyone, including the customer, is a lot happier about it.
So recently I told you to build a product that allows you to share a knowledge base or skill that you have with others who can benefit from it. Whether it’s crafting, cooking, cleaning, carpentry, plumbing, computers, electronics assembly, shopping, history, music, entertainment or anything else, there is an infinite supply of topics that your personal take on could be of value and interest to others.
I also told you that you could format it in a way that you could give courses on how to do what you know how to do. Those courses could add a whole new revenue stream and introduce your products to whole new audiences.
I then told you that a second product in that field could just be what you need to go over the top.
But I didn’t tell you how to do the Marketing to get it in your customers’ hands.
Here’s one approach you could use – remember, just like I described in my earlier blog, there are literally thousands of ways to market your products and services. This is just one example.
Let’s say you’ve written a book on negotiating contracts. It’s pretty safe to bet that not *everyone* you meet in a department or book store is going to want or need to read that book.
Who does need that information? I can think of dozens of groups that would benefit tremendously from it and from a presentation that tailors the interpretation of the book to their needs. Chambers of Commerce, union reps, sales professional development associations, business students at university and college, law students, legal firms, insurance companies, realtors, and many, many more groups and organizations need that kind of information. So do the spouses who run the households, by the way. They do all the negotiating within the family, with suppliers for services and products for the home, work out the insurance policies and coverage, negotiate and organize schedules, and so on. Ever notice that no one has set up professional development days for those who professionally manage our families and our homes? We might want to work on fixing that. Just a thought.
So if you targeted each of those groups above in each neighbourhood near where you live then you should be able to build a pretty decent list of groups that would be interested in hearing what you have to say.
Your next step is to put together the most enticing invitation you can possibly come up with for each group. You want to find a way to present to them and get paid for doing it. Send invitations to every member, to the Chambers, to the local media, to any relevant people. Send reminder notices as the days get closer. Do follow up calls to anyone who calls to ask info about the event. Try and get on local radio or TV to talk about the event. Send letters to the editor and articles to your local papers discussing what's going to happen at the event or why the subject is very topical and important right now. Once you have the list of attendees, this will also give you the opportunity to sell your product – in this case the book on negotiating contracts.
Or you could combine the two and sell your courses and include a copy of the book for free by factoring your profit margin into the cost of the course.
You could also team up with others in your neighbourhood or subject matter and sell the courses or books in package deals to widen the reach of customer base and minimize your per presentation costs by splitting it between the various presenters.
So let’s take some specific examples and do the math, shall we?
Your local Chamber of Commerce has a list of member companies, usually several thousand long and for a nominal fee or free you should be able to send an invitation to all member companies as a special opportunity just for their members. Out of that list, if you have a successful invitation, you should probably expect to get about 5% response rate or at least 50-150 calls, of which you’ll probably close about 1/3 as sales. (These numbers I’m using are industry standards for moderately successful mail campaigns.)
That means that you should be able to expect between 16 and 50 sales by inviting your local CoC. Assuming each other group listed above produced similar results, then you could roughly multiply that number by the number of groups you invite. If you invite 10 groups, you’ll probably end up with approximately 300 paying customers for an event or a book sale.
If you make $25 in profit from each sale, then one event should have a single payout of $7500 or more in your pocket before taxes.
If you want to earn $1,000,000 on that basis, you only need to host 134 events.
If you were able to make as much as $50 in profit per sale, you would only need to host 67 events to make your target income.
That means having an average of a little more than one event per week.
That’s the kind of schedule that most people can handle.
Sure, most of the events will probably be out of town because you’ll run out of local options fairly quickly, but think about it. The only day you really have penciled in each week is the one you deliver your presentation on. Everything else in your life suddenly became a *lot* more flexible.
And don’t forget the $7,500+ per week incentive.
See, what happens here is that you find your customers in an environment in which they see your product for the value it brings to them. If you try and pitch a pool cleaning company to a branch manager at Intel at the office, I can guarantee they won’t be interested. If you pitch them the same option at a pool supplies or patio furniture retailer you are far more likely to get the sale. It’s the same potential customer – but the environment, the circumstances, the sales logic are all completely different.
It’s the ability to meet the customer’s needs that matters. In one environment, they don’t need a pool cleaner. In another it’s a perfectly natural fit. In one case they see no value at all – how is a clean residential pool going to make the world’s largest computer chip manufacturer more profitable? But in the other environment the value makes sense – it’s safer and healthier for your family, it frees up more time to spend with your family, it’s less expensive, better quality…whatever the benefits are, this is where they make *sense.*
By attacking your market in the right environments, where it is natural to the customer to want to do that kind of business, they are already interested in making a buying decision. From there on you add to it by adding in opportunities to reach out to new kinds of customers as well, blending both traditional customer types (busy working business pros for example) with entirely new markets (launching the first PD days for household managers) and offering new products to extend the sales cycle while you’re at it.
In one fell swoop you’ve managed to sell to your traditional client base, a new client base, and to sell add-on revenue.
And if you’re lucky and smart enough to combine your events with those of a couple of other people whose products match up well with yours, then you can shave your costs down and increase your profitability. Of course the more profitable each event is, the fewer events you have to have to achieve your objective of $1,000,000 in new revenue this coming year.
In another blog I’ll start sharing some tips and tricks on how to increase your profitability per event in order to make your goals easier to attain – I just wanted to give you the basic outline of how this can work for now.
Of course there are any number of challenges with this approach. What happens if you don’t like public speaking? You could split the proceeds with someone who is – you write the content, they deliver the show. What if you can’t sell to save your life? Same thing. You split the proceeds with someone who can. What if you can’t write very well. You deliver the show, and have someone work with you to write what you know.
There is usually a way to make this idea work for just about anybody, if you really want to try it, but as I said before, it’s nowhere near the only way to go to accomplish your dreams.
Find your own path and borrow from what you can learn here to make your path more rewarding and productive. That’s what we’re here for.
05 August, 2009
The Unreachable Stars.
Of course life always catches us when we least expect it. The rainy day fund is always sucked dry just before it actually rains, the insurance on the other driver's vehicle lapsed two days before the accident, the money runs out before the month does - whatever the circumstance, the point remains the same. We are often subject to those whims and fates that are just a tad oustide our circle of immediate control.
We often ask for it by the lives we lead. I know *exactly* why I have a back problem - I went asking for it by doing a lot of things no sane person should put their backs through during those early years known as 'the invincible years.'
This week has been little different. Work is work - the hours are long, and the pay is perhaps not what one would like, but it's my job and I'm proud of it. My projects always beckon, and I always wish I had more time for them. And home had the blissfull scenario of having a rush job to prevent an attack of seasonal bugs and rodents from deciding to invade my home which ate up my entire weekend outside in the hot, hot sun.
But what sustains me, outside of the love of my family and friends, is my ever-insatiable quest to achieve my dreams by helping others. Seems weird, probably, I know, but it's true nonetheless.
Most of my friends are doing reasonably well and the best help I can give them is a friendly smile and a sincere interest in their lives and well-being. Some deserve a shoulder and warm hearted word to help them keep their world together during their truly heartbreaking trials.
And others, like me, aim to reach for the stars, and so by striving, change them.
It's not just ambition, and it's not idle pride that drives them. There's an element of curiosity, true, but in reality we strive to accomplish something worthwhile, something greater than ourselves.
No matter whether lasting a moment in time or an eternity in stone, there are accomplishments and achievements that stand out in a life, in a lifetime, in an era. I fully believe that in each and every person lies the ability to accomplish those kinds of achievements but I also know that the vast majority of us never really take the chance to achieve them.
I read recently where 8/10 people plan to and desire to write a book. Of those people, less than 20 % will try, and of that 20% less than 20% will complete the book, and less than 20% of those will ever send their work to be published. That means that less than 0.0064 % of the population will ever write the books which they have in their hearts desire to write and see it through to publication.
How many other dreams in society are left un-reached for? How many advancements in society are left unachieved because they were never started? How many lives will be lost because no one tried to solve the unsolvable enigmas of science? How many lives could be changed if more people reached the unreachable stars?
We often ask for it by the lives we lead. I know *exactly* why I have a back problem - I went asking for it by doing a lot of things no sane person should put their backs through during those early years known as 'the invincible years.'
This week has been little different. Work is work - the hours are long, and the pay is perhaps not what one would like, but it's my job and I'm proud of it. My projects always beckon, and I always wish I had more time for them. And home had the blissfull scenario of having a rush job to prevent an attack of seasonal bugs and rodents from deciding to invade my home which ate up my entire weekend outside in the hot, hot sun.
But what sustains me, outside of the love of my family and friends, is my ever-insatiable quest to achieve my dreams by helping others. Seems weird, probably, I know, but it's true nonetheless.
Most of my friends are doing reasonably well and the best help I can give them is a friendly smile and a sincere interest in their lives and well-being. Some deserve a shoulder and warm hearted word to help them keep their world together during their truly heartbreaking trials.
And others, like me, aim to reach for the stars, and so by striving, change them.
It's not just ambition, and it's not idle pride that drives them. There's an element of curiosity, true, but in reality we strive to accomplish something worthwhile, something greater than ourselves.
No matter whether lasting a moment in time or an eternity in stone, there are accomplishments and achievements that stand out in a life, in a lifetime, in an era. I fully believe that in each and every person lies the ability to accomplish those kinds of achievements but I also know that the vast majority of us never really take the chance to achieve them.
I read recently where 8/10 people plan to and desire to write a book. Of those people, less than 20 % will try, and of that 20% less than 20% will complete the book, and less than 20% of those will ever send their work to be published. That means that less than 0.0064 % of the population will ever write the books which they have in their hearts desire to write and see it through to publication.
How many other dreams in society are left un-reached for? How many advancements in society are left unachieved because they were never started? How many lives will be lost because no one tried to solve the unsolvable enigmas of science? How many lives could be changed if more people reached the unreachable stars?
30 July, 2009
So you're not a Carpenter...so what?
I get asked by businesses how they can add revenues and 'pick up business.' I'm always amazed that the answers aren't obvious - offer something new that will attract customers or that will get your current customers to buy more often from you.
Ok, smartie pants. I know, "That and a buck will maybe get you a cup of cheap coffee."
No, really. Here's an example.
Suppose you own a restaurant. Most restaurants have a certain seasonality to their customer base. If you run a restaurant near a university or college, then your season depends on when the students are in town. If you operate near a major employer, then your traffic is going to depend on their financial health and their work schedules. If you work out doors, you are dependent on the weather. in other words, you have high and low periods, and you want to find a way to generate more sales in the low periods too.
Fair enough.
I can't count the number of times I've seen this stat, but I know it to be true: The cost of getting a sale from 1 new customer is 7 times as much as getting a sale from a retourning customer.
What that means is that you must advertise, discount, promote, introduce, etc. in order to get a new customer. A returning customer already knows about you and knows what they are most likely to want to buy from you before they start.
So if you want to grow your customer base, it only makes sense to encourage your existing customers to bring new customers with them, thereby doubling your sales and introducing new customers to your business. It's far cheaper and faster than trying to go get new customers from scratch. Honest.
So how do you do *that*, then?
Simple - give them something new when they bring a new customer on board and give them the best experience they've had with you and your sales will go up.
And yes, 2-for-1's do work to a degree, but that doesn't create buzz or lasting interest. It only creates a temporary boost at a dramatic cost.
No, I mean come up with a new product that your existing customers will go nuts for and encourage them to bring in new customers to buy them too.
For restaurants you could try a new cocktail of the week special and a course on making cocktails and a recipe book to sell with it.
For clothing stores, have a retro fashion show and sell a book on your store's history of fashion, along with a whole rack of retro clothes for sale. It'll clear out old inventory, and bring a feeling of belonging to the store to its customers.
For electronics stores sell an E-book on how to wire electronics gizmos when you get them home. We all know those stupid instructions booklets are utterly useless!
The list is endless - really.
The question isn't can you get more sales, the question is what are you prepared to offer to get them? Are you simply going to do a couponing, or are you going to give the customer something they'll remember, talk about and come back with friends to buy something else from you next time?
Ok, smartie pants. I know, "That and a buck will maybe get you a cup of cheap coffee."
No, really. Here's an example.
Suppose you own a restaurant. Most restaurants have a certain seasonality to their customer base. If you run a restaurant near a university or college, then your season depends on when the students are in town. If you operate near a major employer, then your traffic is going to depend on their financial health and their work schedules. If you work out doors, you are dependent on the weather. in other words, you have high and low periods, and you want to find a way to generate more sales in the low periods too.
Fair enough.
I can't count the number of times I've seen this stat, but I know it to be true: The cost of getting a sale from 1 new customer is 7 times as much as getting a sale from a retourning customer.
What that means is that you must advertise, discount, promote, introduce, etc. in order to get a new customer. A returning customer already knows about you and knows what they are most likely to want to buy from you before they start.
So if you want to grow your customer base, it only makes sense to encourage your existing customers to bring new customers with them, thereby doubling your sales and introducing new customers to your business. It's far cheaper and faster than trying to go get new customers from scratch. Honest.
So how do you do *that*, then?
Simple - give them something new when they bring a new customer on board and give them the best experience they've had with you and your sales will go up.
And yes, 2-for-1's do work to a degree, but that doesn't create buzz or lasting interest. It only creates a temporary boost at a dramatic cost.
No, I mean come up with a new product that your existing customers will go nuts for and encourage them to bring in new customers to buy them too.
For restaurants you could try a new cocktail of the week special and a course on making cocktails and a recipe book to sell with it.
For clothing stores, have a retro fashion show and sell a book on your store's history of fashion, along with a whole rack of retro clothes for sale. It'll clear out old inventory, and bring a feeling of belonging to the store to its customers.
For electronics stores sell an E-book on how to wire electronics gizmos when you get them home. We all know those stupid instructions booklets are utterly useless!
The list is endless - really.
The question isn't can you get more sales, the question is what are you prepared to offer to get them? Are you simply going to do a couponing, or are you going to give the customer something they'll remember, talk about and come back with friends to buy something else from you next time?
How to make a Million Dollars.
So you've been patiently reading along, waiting for the day when I tell you step by step how you make a lot of money in less than a year, preferably more than a million dollars, right?
Ok, I will. First, know that this is not the only way to do it, and I have about a hundred other ideas that are every bit as likely to make a lot of money on any given day. This is just ONE way to do it so you know I'm not full of crap.
If you've read any of my prior blogs in preparation for the Race to 2010 and you actually filled out any of the Baselines then you should already have a good idea or two of what skills or knowledge base you may have that others might find interesting. That's your starting point, right there.
The trick is to find a way to share that knowledge or skill with others, this way you can share it over and over again, getting paid each time for the benefit of your talents or expertise.
You can give courses, you can make a DVD/CD-ROM, write a book, develop a website - whatever fits your personality, skills and budget. Then you sell that product to the people who'll use it (and pay for it!)
Simple, right? So why isn't everyone who does that kind of thing filthy rich?
Usually it's a combination of not knowing how to sell their product, where to sell it, or what kind of product is needed by the consumer. Basically it's inexperience in running a business, not in your product itself.
Here's one example:
A carpenter who lost his job building houses in the current economy could write up a book full of step by step instructions on how to make things - bird houses, composters, shelves, armoires, furniture, dining room tables, cabinetry - whatever floats your boat. Then have them published by an on-demand publisher who will charge by the book. You find them online and go for one that gives you the most tools and lowest priced copies for the most minimal investment on your part. You should be able to find it for $50 or less.
Set up a demonstration booth just about anywhere the public passes by that you can legally set one up. Hopefully where you think a lot of potential customers would be likely to be. Have copies of your books and sign up sheets for your courses available for sale and start raking in the dough. You should be able to sell 10-50 copies a day in a reasonable location while demonstrating, plus sell the demo products and sell another 5-20 training class fees per day as well.
If you make $25 profit per book and another $25 per class and another $200 in demo product sales, then you're looking at approx $1450 per day, $7250 per week, $350k per year. Or better.
If your book sells well online or you get a sponsorship to do your demos in home reno stores across the country then you can expect that number to climb quickly.
If you can put together a second book you could add another $700-$1250 per day right there, and you'd be heading up closer to the $700k mark very quickly.
See where I'm going here?
Virtually any area of knowledge or talent or skill can be reproduced and sold. It's how you manage the selling and the quality and value of the product that makes you the money.
I can help you figure out your product, help you design a serious marketing and sales strategy to make it profitable, and help get you launched on your way to making some serious cash - but you have to take the first few steps.
Ok, I will. First, know that this is not the only way to do it, and I have about a hundred other ideas that are every bit as likely to make a lot of money on any given day. This is just ONE way to do it so you know I'm not full of crap.
If you've read any of my prior blogs in preparation for the Race to 2010 and you actually filled out any of the Baselines then you should already have a good idea or two of what skills or knowledge base you may have that others might find interesting. That's your starting point, right there.
The trick is to find a way to share that knowledge or skill with others, this way you can share it over and over again, getting paid each time for the benefit of your talents or expertise.
You can give courses, you can make a DVD/CD-ROM, write a book, develop a website - whatever fits your personality, skills and budget. Then you sell that product to the people who'll use it (and pay for it!)
Simple, right? So why isn't everyone who does that kind of thing filthy rich?
Usually it's a combination of not knowing how to sell their product, where to sell it, or what kind of product is needed by the consumer. Basically it's inexperience in running a business, not in your product itself.
Here's one example:
A carpenter who lost his job building houses in the current economy could write up a book full of step by step instructions on how to make things - bird houses, composters, shelves, armoires, furniture, dining room tables, cabinetry - whatever floats your boat. Then have them published by an on-demand publisher who will charge by the book. You find them online and go for one that gives you the most tools and lowest priced copies for the most minimal investment on your part. You should be able to find it for $50 or less.
Set up a demonstration booth just about anywhere the public passes by that you can legally set one up. Hopefully where you think a lot of potential customers would be likely to be. Have copies of your books and sign up sheets for your courses available for sale and start raking in the dough. You should be able to sell 10-50 copies a day in a reasonable location while demonstrating, plus sell the demo products and sell another 5-20 training class fees per day as well.
If you make $25 profit per book and another $25 per class and another $200 in demo product sales, then you're looking at approx $1450 per day, $7250 per week, $350k per year. Or better.
If your book sells well online or you get a sponsorship to do your demos in home reno stores across the country then you can expect that number to climb quickly.
If you can put together a second book you could add another $700-$1250 per day right there, and you'd be heading up closer to the $700k mark very quickly.
See where I'm going here?
Virtually any area of knowledge or talent or skill can be reproduced and sold. It's how you manage the selling and the quality and value of the product that makes you the money.
I can help you figure out your product, help you design a serious marketing and sales strategy to make it profitable, and help get you launched on your way to making some serious cash - but you have to take the first few steps.
12 July, 2009
My plan for saving Education.
This is my plan for saving the education system. It's doable, implementable, and financially attainable all on its own and it will save the US education system more than $13.5 Billion each and every year.
Whether at the state, province, regional or national levels, the outcry for finding a way to cut the cost and improve the quality of education in North America has never been more vocal and more profound than it is during the current economic crisis.
As always, bureaucrats threaten to cut back on teachers and textbooks instead of looking serious cost factors in the eye or to address key areas of mismanagement in the schools, boards, and education departments.
Sure it’s easy for me to be an armchair quarterback – anyone could challenge my credentials to jump into this debate. I have no kids, I’m not in school, I’m an adjunct professor but not currently teaching any classes – frankly, what could I contribute to the discussion?
The answer is “Quite a lot, really.”
One of the biggest complaints that schools have is the complaint of not having enough textbooks. California looked at having everything go electronic before remembering that one poorly timed rainstorm could destroy not only a laptop computer but a region’s ability to learn.
The reality is that textbooks today seem to cost a lot of money as they are selectively applied to different districts, so no savings seem to be generated by the scale of the markets involved. Plus, different schools have different wear/use/purchase cycles, so buying en masse doesn’t seem to work too well.
But wait a minute… is that really the problem?
No, it isn’t. The problem is that textbooks often cost over a hundred dollars per student per course and the material included does not necessarily address everything covered in that particular course. Often it does not even cover all of the core elements as outlined in the course curricula.
So if the textbooks don’t quite match exactly what we’re looking for, and they’re very expensive, it begs the question, “Can we handle this a better way?”
Suppose that we have staff in each of these boards and departments of education whose sole purpose is to develop and test curricula and teaching tools throughout the year. I know, crazy thought, but suppose that that was something that happened in these boards and departments of education – that we have qualified training and educational experts designing training and educational curricula and training materials; hey, it could happen.
So supposing this were true… Wouldn’t they have to know enough about the material they were working with to be fairly thoroughly knowledgeable about the subjects?
Would it be possible…I mean, just throwing it out there… possible, that *they* could be writing the textbooks? I mean, since they are also writing the curricula and training materials, is it really that big a leap to add in a few salaries for people to actually *write* the textbooks in-house so they include the material covered by the curricula and the curricula covers what’s actually in the textbooks?
OK, ok, I know. Radical thinking here. But how does that save us any money at all, you could ask?
Good question! I’m so glad you did! Now here comes the exciting part! We can have the textbooks printed through a print on demand publisher for $3-10 a book instead of the hundred+ dollars a book that most textbooks cost today. And! Get this… other education departments that want to cut some costs can literally eliminate hundreds of unnecessary curriculum developers and board/department staff by simply buying the materials (at a small surplus for the benefit of the department doing the work) and save both the cost of the textbook mark-ups AND the staffing costs!
But wait! There’s more! Oh, is this plan good or what???
20/20, various news shows, and numerous other witness anecdotal evidence sources have demonstrated that a large number (700 in one NY district alone) of staffers in some of these boards and departments are employees who have been removed from the classroom or other positions for, diplomatically speaking, a number of darned good reasons. And yet the boards and departments are legally unable to fire them and do not want them in the classrooms either, so they are paid full salaries to either not work or to make work.
Why not *put them* to work? Supervise their research and writing of curricula, textbooks, training materials, or other productive elements of the training and educational lifecycle and either they will save you money and do something useful or they will demonstrate their incompetence for the job, insubordination to authority, or other actually fireable offences.
Either way you win. You either stop paying for people who shouldn’t be in the industry or you get some work out of them before they drive us all bankrupt. The key is to supervise them thoroughly, but if you do that one thing, the rest of it actually works.
You save on unnecessary salaries. You save on the purchase price of textbooks. You gain productivity and save on salaries for people who shouldn’t be in the system to begin with…
If a state has 1 million students in it and they have even 3 courses a year for which we can save $90 each on textbooks per course then we can save each state in the Union an average of $270,000,000, or nationally that works out to more than $13.5 Billion (with a B), just in textbooks alone. *Guess at what the salary savings would be on top of that.* Go on, guess.
Suppose that over time we were able to convert upto 7 courses per student per year that way to print on demand published books designed, written and published by the board or the department of each state? We could save $30 Billion or more, right?
How many more teachers could we afford to put into classrooms? How many teachers’ aides? How much better will the quality of education be if it actually covers what the curriculum says it should in the first place? How much more, better, more useful material can be included for the price than we get out of traditional textbooks?
How easy is it to update it and come out with a new edition when it’s print on demand technology?
How easy is it to resolve the tricky classroom issues of copyrights of existing textbooks by having textbooks whose copyrights belonged to the board or the state?
How much more directly can the training materials reflect the needs of the classroom when they work directly with the teachers teaching from the work of their colleagues in the boards?
How great is it that we can finally find a way to either get rid of administrative deadwood or put it to work doing something useful for a change under direct active supervision?
My textbook plan isn’t a cure for all of the ills in the education system to be sure, but does it make any sense to look a gift horse in the mouth?
Whether at the state, province, regional or national levels, the outcry for finding a way to cut the cost and improve the quality of education in North America has never been more vocal and more profound than it is during the current economic crisis.
As always, bureaucrats threaten to cut back on teachers and textbooks instead of looking serious cost factors in the eye or to address key areas of mismanagement in the schools, boards, and education departments.
Sure it’s easy for me to be an armchair quarterback – anyone could challenge my credentials to jump into this debate. I have no kids, I’m not in school, I’m an adjunct professor but not currently teaching any classes – frankly, what could I contribute to the discussion?
The answer is “Quite a lot, really.”
One of the biggest complaints that schools have is the complaint of not having enough textbooks. California looked at having everything go electronic before remembering that one poorly timed rainstorm could destroy not only a laptop computer but a region’s ability to learn.
The reality is that textbooks today seem to cost a lot of money as they are selectively applied to different districts, so no savings seem to be generated by the scale of the markets involved. Plus, different schools have different wear/use/purchase cycles, so buying en masse doesn’t seem to work too well.
But wait a minute… is that really the problem?
No, it isn’t. The problem is that textbooks often cost over a hundred dollars per student per course and the material included does not necessarily address everything covered in that particular course. Often it does not even cover all of the core elements as outlined in the course curricula.
So if the textbooks don’t quite match exactly what we’re looking for, and they’re very expensive, it begs the question, “Can we handle this a better way?”
Suppose that we have staff in each of these boards and departments of education whose sole purpose is to develop and test curricula and teaching tools throughout the year. I know, crazy thought, but suppose that that was something that happened in these boards and departments of education – that we have qualified training and educational experts designing training and educational curricula and training materials; hey, it could happen.
So supposing this were true… Wouldn’t they have to know enough about the material they were working with to be fairly thoroughly knowledgeable about the subjects?
Would it be possible…I mean, just throwing it out there… possible, that *they* could be writing the textbooks? I mean, since they are also writing the curricula and training materials, is it really that big a leap to add in a few salaries for people to actually *write* the textbooks in-house so they include the material covered by the curricula and the curricula covers what’s actually in the textbooks?
OK, ok, I know. Radical thinking here. But how does that save us any money at all, you could ask?
Good question! I’m so glad you did! Now here comes the exciting part! We can have the textbooks printed through a print on demand publisher for $3-10 a book instead of the hundred+ dollars a book that most textbooks cost today. And! Get this… other education departments that want to cut some costs can literally eliminate hundreds of unnecessary curriculum developers and board/department staff by simply buying the materials (at a small surplus for the benefit of the department doing the work) and save both the cost of the textbook mark-ups AND the staffing costs!
But wait! There’s more! Oh, is this plan good or what???
20/20, various news shows, and numerous other witness anecdotal evidence sources have demonstrated that a large number (700 in one NY district alone) of staffers in some of these boards and departments are employees who have been removed from the classroom or other positions for, diplomatically speaking, a number of darned good reasons. And yet the boards and departments are legally unable to fire them and do not want them in the classrooms either, so they are paid full salaries to either not work or to make work.
Why not *put them* to work? Supervise their research and writing of curricula, textbooks, training materials, or other productive elements of the training and educational lifecycle and either they will save you money and do something useful or they will demonstrate their incompetence for the job, insubordination to authority, or other actually fireable offences.
Either way you win. You either stop paying for people who shouldn’t be in the industry or you get some work out of them before they drive us all bankrupt. The key is to supervise them thoroughly, but if you do that one thing, the rest of it actually works.
You save on unnecessary salaries. You save on the purchase price of textbooks. You gain productivity and save on salaries for people who shouldn’t be in the system to begin with…
If a state has 1 million students in it and they have even 3 courses a year for which we can save $90 each on textbooks per course then we can save each state in the Union an average of $270,000,000, or nationally that works out to more than $13.5 Billion (with a B), just in textbooks alone. *Guess at what the salary savings would be on top of that.* Go on, guess.
Suppose that over time we were able to convert upto 7 courses per student per year that way to print on demand published books designed, written and published by the board or the department of each state? We could save $30 Billion or more, right?
How many more teachers could we afford to put into classrooms? How many teachers’ aides? How much better will the quality of education be if it actually covers what the curriculum says it should in the first place? How much more, better, more useful material can be included for the price than we get out of traditional textbooks?
How easy is it to update it and come out with a new edition when it’s print on demand technology?
How easy is it to resolve the tricky classroom issues of copyrights of existing textbooks by having textbooks whose copyrights belonged to the board or the state?
How much more directly can the training materials reflect the needs of the classroom when they work directly with the teachers teaching from the work of their colleagues in the boards?
How great is it that we can finally find a way to either get rid of administrative deadwood or put it to work doing something useful for a change under direct active supervision?
My textbook plan isn’t a cure for all of the ills in the education system to be sure, but does it make any sense to look a gift horse in the mouth?
11 July, 2009
Do I Feel Lucky?
Do I Feel Lucky?
(A Competitive Intelligence Blog.)
Over the last 7 days several news stories have emerged about key breakthroughs in deciphering major encryption patterns – one was a cypher system developed at the founding of our nation that had not been broken until now, and the other popularly reported story was the fact that with at least a 44% accuracy rate that the Social Security system of assigning numbers to applicants can be deciphered with extraordinarily minute amounts of personal data (all of which is freely and publicly available).
In most respects this news doesn’t have the slightest impact on the day to day lives of the average American, and no one is really paying a whole lot of attention to it.
As far as competitive intelligence goes, most American corporations aren’t paying any attention to it either.
As I delve into the subject more and more as a way to teach, explain and identify tools, opportunities, and risks from competitive intelligence research and analysis, I keep tripping over elementary steps that I haven’t had to carry out for years that are now ever more important than before.
Here’s one of them…
Much has been made of the ending of the Cold War as the basis for substantially reduced need for human intelligence activities and substantially reduced pre-employment screening and interviewing. This in turn has led to substantial reductions in the kinds and quantities of in-house mentoring and supervision that used to take place to both develop talent in-house and to protect individuals and companies from potentially disastrous hires.
Since we’re no longer looking for ‘Reds under the Beds’ or any of those traditional misnomers for those relatively harsh hiring restrictions in place during the peak of the Cold War, theoretically this should have saved us millions, even billions of dollars nation-wide, creating immense prosperity, and in some ways it did. It can be argued that the 80’s and 90’s represented periods of unprecedented growth as a result of the freeing of the employment restrictions and the reduced costs of hiring and monitoring and supervision.
That argument, though, falls flat very quickly when you also include the point that was predominant with every insurance salesperson and presentation that has ever been made in the last 25 years – the baby boomers’ retirement savings plans were the primary source of that economic boom, not the ‘peace dividend.’
Now how does this tie in to the news stories about breaking cyphers and encryption systems?
One of the key things that happens to be in the news today is the requirement of employers to do adequate background checks to make sure that employees, new and long-term are all legally allowed to work here. This is to help minimize risks involved in hiring illegal immigrants and undesirables like terrorists and criminals on the run.
To facilitate this activity employers have been given access to double blind systems that the government offers to submit SSNs to that the government can then read in order to determine a worker’s authorization to be here.
Now that the SSN encryption system is broken, even partially (and 44% odds are pretty darned good ones for gambling with) any organized crime syndicate can replicate with substantial ease the SSN’s of citizens from across the country, living, dead, missing, or adjusted so as to pass this inspection methodology in spite of itself by taking publicly available data and using it to generate false identities and documents.
It also means that corporate id theft is liable to explode in the coming months and years.
Imagine if you will that you’re a crook out to make a big heist and make it look legitimate.
You take the name of a corporate executive from the articles of the Wall Street Journal. You look online for that executive’s biography and become familiar with the details of their career and their personal background from freely available public sources. You even get your hands on the last 4 digits of their social security number from a number of sources as organizations, companies, and government agencies often use them as usernames or identifiers for their employees and customers.
You feed any of this information into the algorithm that spits out the rest of the individual’s SSN. Once you have this information, you generate the relevant correspondence trail that creates new legal documentation of the identity and get yourself a new SSN card, a new driver’s license out of state, new unused credit cards, a new passport even.
You then set up a business in a non-extradition country in your new name as a ‘division’ of the company that the real person runs, but whose ownership is not the originating company but the ‘new’ you.
‘Your’ new company does business buying and selling on the credit or at least the good name of both the original person and their original company. Everyone thinks that you’re them. You have credit, you have clout, you have power. And when it all goes away, you even have a scapegoat. You walk away with the assets and profits, and they’re left with insurmountable losses and fraud and perhaps even criminal records in a variety of countries established in absentia.
If you think this could not happen, think again. Even without the benefit of legal documents from SSN generated false identity documents, NEC as a corporation was taken for billions over a period of 5 years on a very similar trick. Now we’re going to see it happen with legal documentation supplied by the government to make it harder to fight.
Good competitive intelligence is the tool that gives you access to where your risk factors stand at any given time. It helps you to track transactions, suppliers, competitors, customers, and most importantly irregularities in other companies’ cash flows and investment/revenue patterns.
BI, or business intelligence tends to rely primarily on customer tracking – monitoring what customer purchasing trends are telling you only tells you so much. Hoovers, Dun and Bradstreet and the other notable credit and corporate analytics firms only are able to offer you high-end overviews, not detailed data that comes from long term relationships in the marketplace for companies that aren’t yours and aren’t doing business with you, but are doing business with your competition for the first time in a country or region or product line you’re not keeping your eye on.
With international credit reporting rules that will prevent/impede distribution of this kind of data, your good name and your company’s good name are on the one hand protected, but on the other hand grievously exposed to abuse by those who aim to circumvent the right and honourable ways to do things.
This is why BI alone is not enough to capitalize and defend market trends – competitive intelligence is a required asset, not just a piece of suggested reading material for those long hotel nights on business trips when you wanted something to read to put you to sleep.
And last but not least – about that peace dividend? More and more evidence is coming to light that whereas the good guys ramped down their intelligence infrastructure, the bad guys ramped theirs up and unleashed it on the global marketplace. There is mounting evidence to suggest that the biggest players in the oil speculation market that affects everything from the price of gas to air travel to basic groceries and heating and cooling utilities costs are not the middle eastern oil countries but the oil speculators who get their information from ‘ex-intelligence services’ personnel connected to organized crime and national energy supply firms in various countries.
The beneficiaries of this data have made huge gains over the decades by using progressive political gains to open up new markets for speculative investments and playing those gains against structured speculation in the oil and gas markets and consumer goods markets. Once those markets reached saturation of demand, the speculators yanked their investments out at a tremendous gain and put their money in currency plays to devalue national currency markets simultaneously generating windfall profits and ungluing whole national economies. This encourages world leaders to listen to their political views more seriously or face massive economic consequences.
Evidence of this kind of predatory economic attack has been mounting for years and the economies of Great Britain, Italy, the US, France and others have each been systematically targeted and attacked by these speculative investors, and evidence of their information sources has until recently been merely a matter of surmise. Under the Peace Dividend it clearly could not have been an intentional attempt to undermine national economies or security, right?
As new evidence is coming to light in the wake of the current global economic downturn, we’re starting to see patterns of behaviour, information pathways, human linkages, and human intelligence networks emerging as the bases of these problems. And none of them are people working for the good guys.
The question you have to ask yourself now is this: Are you prepared to enter the global business marketplace blind, uninformed and handcuffed by lack of critical data, or are you keen to find profit-making opportunities by undermining global networks of crooks, bad guys and globally savvy competitors?
The question is… ‘Do I feel lucky?’
Well….. Do you?
(A Competitive Intelligence Blog.)
Over the last 7 days several news stories have emerged about key breakthroughs in deciphering major encryption patterns – one was a cypher system developed at the founding of our nation that had not been broken until now, and the other popularly reported story was the fact that with at least a 44% accuracy rate that the Social Security system of assigning numbers to applicants can be deciphered with extraordinarily minute amounts of personal data (all of which is freely and publicly available).
In most respects this news doesn’t have the slightest impact on the day to day lives of the average American, and no one is really paying a whole lot of attention to it.
As far as competitive intelligence goes, most American corporations aren’t paying any attention to it either.
As I delve into the subject more and more as a way to teach, explain and identify tools, opportunities, and risks from competitive intelligence research and analysis, I keep tripping over elementary steps that I haven’t had to carry out for years that are now ever more important than before.
Here’s one of them…
Much has been made of the ending of the Cold War as the basis for substantially reduced need for human intelligence activities and substantially reduced pre-employment screening and interviewing. This in turn has led to substantial reductions in the kinds and quantities of in-house mentoring and supervision that used to take place to both develop talent in-house and to protect individuals and companies from potentially disastrous hires.
Since we’re no longer looking for ‘Reds under the Beds’ or any of those traditional misnomers for those relatively harsh hiring restrictions in place during the peak of the Cold War, theoretically this should have saved us millions, even billions of dollars nation-wide, creating immense prosperity, and in some ways it did. It can be argued that the 80’s and 90’s represented periods of unprecedented growth as a result of the freeing of the employment restrictions and the reduced costs of hiring and monitoring and supervision.
That argument, though, falls flat very quickly when you also include the point that was predominant with every insurance salesperson and presentation that has ever been made in the last 25 years – the baby boomers’ retirement savings plans were the primary source of that economic boom, not the ‘peace dividend.’
Now how does this tie in to the news stories about breaking cyphers and encryption systems?
One of the key things that happens to be in the news today is the requirement of employers to do adequate background checks to make sure that employees, new and long-term are all legally allowed to work here. This is to help minimize risks involved in hiring illegal immigrants and undesirables like terrorists and criminals on the run.
To facilitate this activity employers have been given access to double blind systems that the government offers to submit SSNs to that the government can then read in order to determine a worker’s authorization to be here.
Now that the SSN encryption system is broken, even partially (and 44% odds are pretty darned good ones for gambling with) any organized crime syndicate can replicate with substantial ease the SSN’s of citizens from across the country, living, dead, missing, or adjusted so as to pass this inspection methodology in spite of itself by taking publicly available data and using it to generate false identities and documents.
It also means that corporate id theft is liable to explode in the coming months and years.
Imagine if you will that you’re a crook out to make a big heist and make it look legitimate.
You take the name of a corporate executive from the articles of the Wall Street Journal. You look online for that executive’s biography and become familiar with the details of their career and their personal background from freely available public sources. You even get your hands on the last 4 digits of their social security number from a number of sources as organizations, companies, and government agencies often use them as usernames or identifiers for their employees and customers.
You feed any of this information into the algorithm that spits out the rest of the individual’s SSN. Once you have this information, you generate the relevant correspondence trail that creates new legal documentation of the identity and get yourself a new SSN card, a new driver’s license out of state, new unused credit cards, a new passport even.
You then set up a business in a non-extradition country in your new name as a ‘division’ of the company that the real person runs, but whose ownership is not the originating company but the ‘new’ you.
‘Your’ new company does business buying and selling on the credit or at least the good name of both the original person and their original company. Everyone thinks that you’re them. You have credit, you have clout, you have power. And when it all goes away, you even have a scapegoat. You walk away with the assets and profits, and they’re left with insurmountable losses and fraud and perhaps even criminal records in a variety of countries established in absentia.
If you think this could not happen, think again. Even without the benefit of legal documents from SSN generated false identity documents, NEC as a corporation was taken for billions over a period of 5 years on a very similar trick. Now we’re going to see it happen with legal documentation supplied by the government to make it harder to fight.
Good competitive intelligence is the tool that gives you access to where your risk factors stand at any given time. It helps you to track transactions, suppliers, competitors, customers, and most importantly irregularities in other companies’ cash flows and investment/revenue patterns.
BI, or business intelligence tends to rely primarily on customer tracking – monitoring what customer purchasing trends are telling you only tells you so much. Hoovers, Dun and Bradstreet and the other notable credit and corporate analytics firms only are able to offer you high-end overviews, not detailed data that comes from long term relationships in the marketplace for companies that aren’t yours and aren’t doing business with you, but are doing business with your competition for the first time in a country or region or product line you’re not keeping your eye on.
With international credit reporting rules that will prevent/impede distribution of this kind of data, your good name and your company’s good name are on the one hand protected, but on the other hand grievously exposed to abuse by those who aim to circumvent the right and honourable ways to do things.
This is why BI alone is not enough to capitalize and defend market trends – competitive intelligence is a required asset, not just a piece of suggested reading material for those long hotel nights on business trips when you wanted something to read to put you to sleep.
And last but not least – about that peace dividend? More and more evidence is coming to light that whereas the good guys ramped down their intelligence infrastructure, the bad guys ramped theirs up and unleashed it on the global marketplace. There is mounting evidence to suggest that the biggest players in the oil speculation market that affects everything from the price of gas to air travel to basic groceries and heating and cooling utilities costs are not the middle eastern oil countries but the oil speculators who get their information from ‘ex-intelligence services’ personnel connected to organized crime and national energy supply firms in various countries.
The beneficiaries of this data have made huge gains over the decades by using progressive political gains to open up new markets for speculative investments and playing those gains against structured speculation in the oil and gas markets and consumer goods markets. Once those markets reached saturation of demand, the speculators yanked their investments out at a tremendous gain and put their money in currency plays to devalue national currency markets simultaneously generating windfall profits and ungluing whole national economies. This encourages world leaders to listen to their political views more seriously or face massive economic consequences.
Evidence of this kind of predatory economic attack has been mounting for years and the economies of Great Britain, Italy, the US, France and others have each been systematically targeted and attacked by these speculative investors, and evidence of their information sources has until recently been merely a matter of surmise. Under the Peace Dividend it clearly could not have been an intentional attempt to undermine national economies or security, right?
As new evidence is coming to light in the wake of the current global economic downturn, we’re starting to see patterns of behaviour, information pathways, human linkages, and human intelligence networks emerging as the bases of these problems. And none of them are people working for the good guys.
The question you have to ask yourself now is this: Are you prepared to enter the global business marketplace blind, uninformed and handcuffed by lack of critical data, or are you keen to find profit-making opportunities by undermining global networks of crooks, bad guys and globally savvy competitors?
The question is… ‘Do I feel lucky?’
Well….. Do you?
09 July, 2009
Welcome Notes:
Welcome Notes:
This particular note is for my new readers. Even if you are not one of my new readers, but one of my returning friends and guests, I still think it’s worth reading, so I beg your patience as I introduce what the objective of this outlet is all about.
Obviously it’s about whatever crosses my mind as important, but I’m sparing the world at large the need to weed through *everything* I’m thinking about to get to certain specific topics.
This blog routinely deals with several key subjects that cross my brain and my research on a daily or almost daily basis – Competitive Intelligence, Business News, Risk Management, Marketing, Personal Achievement, and yes, Art. And most of those subjects have found a focus in one of my projects, The Millionaires’ Race to 2010, which you will hear about a lot if you become a regular reader, which of course I hope you do.
First a quick word about the Race, why it’s important and why it belongs here as a regular topic:
The Race, or The Millionaires’ Race to 2010, is a social marketing project designed to be a proactive step we can all take to both turn the national economies around and provide individual success and financial security in this era of economic turmoil.
The idea is to help people connect with each other in ways that stimulate action in developing new ideas, new businesses, new revenue streams, and new relationships to help solve the hurdles that impede success.
Those of you who know me, know me well enough to know that I categorically *hate* phrases like the one above because they usually mean these kinds of empty promises of hope and miraculous successes that you see and hear in late night TV sales pitches.
The truth is that there is a reason why this particular phrase is so positive – the reason is that it’s actually happening. It’s working. A little more each day as people hear about it and start thinking about it and getting more comfortable with it, and finally start getting into it and getting their hands dirty making it happen. There is real momentum starting to percolate with it.
This brings us back to why this project belongs here in this blog about business subjects, personal achievement and art. It belongs here because it is designed to further all of those subjects together by uniting them in a common focus.
It’s a story about each of us growing and achieving important things personally and together. It’s about the trials and tribulations of growing new businesses. It’s about art, graphic design, events, community, entertainment, haute couture and bas couture; it’s about t-shirts and about advertising. It’s about making all of these subject ingredients into a single gourmet meal of rich tastes, flavours, and experiences, all of which I devoutly encourage you to share with us.
But for all of the Race’s good points and contributions, it does not represent everything that’s happening on these subjects, nor does it show you everything I’m thinking about or encountering on these subjects. There are many serious, important stories and ideas that I will be raising to your attention here. Some you will see are derived from my analysis of mainstream news, some will be based on my independent research, and some will have distinctly *other* sources and provocations.
And then, every so often, I’ll talk about art – whether it’s art I’ve encountered, the art of great friends, or my own art projects and experiments.
At the end of the conversation, these three main foci of discussion, business, achievement, and art, all do have three things in common – me, and the power to inspire, and you. I just get to relay the info and the goodies. The inspiration is the end result. The glue that holds it all together and makes it work? That part is you.
This whole experience or experiment depends entirely on you. If you aren’t reading, participating, enjoying, becoming energized by and discussing this stuff then the momentum stops with you. The entire momentum to evolve, achieve and inspire positive change grows and stops with you.
With great inspiration comes great responsibility – to judiciously act so as to achieve and inspire further achievement in turn. Sounds a little bit like ‘Pay It Forward’, doesn’t it?
So this is it – this is your opportunity to bare witness and be a part of the great things of our era. And when the next era gets their kick at the can, let’s leave them whistling and applauding in appreciation and awe at what we achieved independently and together. There may be 7 World Wonders, but nothing says we can’t make it more and leave our mark on history too.
So new readers or returning, I welcome you alike to join the cause, build the momentum, and create the wonder with me.
They say the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step – but I have a car and work for an airline. I can be there in a couple of hours, plus or minus the security lines at the TSA and finding a decent parking spot at the airport. With the technology of today the milestones are closer, faster, and more attainable then ever before.
We don’t need a race of presumptively nomadic traveling aliens to build our pyramids, we don’t need a millennia of communal effort to carve the titanic statues of our time, and we don’t need to find a group of medicinally inclined heavily medicated people moving obnoxiously large rocks into circular formations without any explanation for it at all in order to leave a legacy of achievement for future generations to oooh and aaah over.
We do need a common purpose, a goal, a focal point of common understanding and agreement to leave a lasting monument to the world for inspiration and motivation for generations to come.
But great things need a great foundation too. To build that foundation we need to start with our own achievements, our own successes, both individually and collectively and then build on those together.
Which brings us back to this outlet, this blog and this community of friends, readers, colleagues, and contributors. It all starts here. With you.
This particular note is for my new readers. Even if you are not one of my new readers, but one of my returning friends and guests, I still think it’s worth reading, so I beg your patience as I introduce what the objective of this outlet is all about.
Obviously it’s about whatever crosses my mind as important, but I’m sparing the world at large the need to weed through *everything* I’m thinking about to get to certain specific topics.
This blog routinely deals with several key subjects that cross my brain and my research on a daily or almost daily basis – Competitive Intelligence, Business News, Risk Management, Marketing, Personal Achievement, and yes, Art. And most of those subjects have found a focus in one of my projects, The Millionaires’ Race to 2010, which you will hear about a lot if you become a regular reader, which of course I hope you do.
First a quick word about the Race, why it’s important and why it belongs here as a regular topic:
The Race, or The Millionaires’ Race to 2010, is a social marketing project designed to be a proactive step we can all take to both turn the national economies around and provide individual success and financial security in this era of economic turmoil.
The idea is to help people connect with each other in ways that stimulate action in developing new ideas, new businesses, new revenue streams, and new relationships to help solve the hurdles that impede success.
Those of you who know me, know me well enough to know that I categorically *hate* phrases like the one above because they usually mean these kinds of empty promises of hope and miraculous successes that you see and hear in late night TV sales pitches.
The truth is that there is a reason why this particular phrase is so positive – the reason is that it’s actually happening. It’s working. A little more each day as people hear about it and start thinking about it and getting more comfortable with it, and finally start getting into it and getting their hands dirty making it happen. There is real momentum starting to percolate with it.
This brings us back to why this project belongs here in this blog about business subjects, personal achievement and art. It belongs here because it is designed to further all of those subjects together by uniting them in a common focus.
It’s a story about each of us growing and achieving important things personally and together. It’s about the trials and tribulations of growing new businesses. It’s about art, graphic design, events, community, entertainment, haute couture and bas couture; it’s about t-shirts and about advertising. It’s about making all of these subject ingredients into a single gourmet meal of rich tastes, flavours, and experiences, all of which I devoutly encourage you to share with us.
But for all of the Race’s good points and contributions, it does not represent everything that’s happening on these subjects, nor does it show you everything I’m thinking about or encountering on these subjects. There are many serious, important stories and ideas that I will be raising to your attention here. Some you will see are derived from my analysis of mainstream news, some will be based on my independent research, and some will have distinctly *other* sources and provocations.
And then, every so often, I’ll talk about art – whether it’s art I’ve encountered, the art of great friends, or my own art projects and experiments.
At the end of the conversation, these three main foci of discussion, business, achievement, and art, all do have three things in common – me, and the power to inspire, and you. I just get to relay the info and the goodies. The inspiration is the end result. The glue that holds it all together and makes it work? That part is you.
This whole experience or experiment depends entirely on you. If you aren’t reading, participating, enjoying, becoming energized by and discussing this stuff then the momentum stops with you. The entire momentum to evolve, achieve and inspire positive change grows and stops with you.
With great inspiration comes great responsibility – to judiciously act so as to achieve and inspire further achievement in turn. Sounds a little bit like ‘Pay It Forward’, doesn’t it?
So this is it – this is your opportunity to bare witness and be a part of the great things of our era. And when the next era gets their kick at the can, let’s leave them whistling and applauding in appreciation and awe at what we achieved independently and together. There may be 7 World Wonders, but nothing says we can’t make it more and leave our mark on history too.
So new readers or returning, I welcome you alike to join the cause, build the momentum, and create the wonder with me.
They say the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step – but I have a car and work for an airline. I can be there in a couple of hours, plus or minus the security lines at the TSA and finding a decent parking spot at the airport. With the technology of today the milestones are closer, faster, and more attainable then ever before.
We don’t need a race of presumptively nomadic traveling aliens to build our pyramids, we don’t need a millennia of communal effort to carve the titanic statues of our time, and we don’t need to find a group of medicinally inclined heavily medicated people moving obnoxiously large rocks into circular formations without any explanation for it at all in order to leave a legacy of achievement for future generations to oooh and aaah over.
We do need a common purpose, a goal, a focal point of common understanding and agreement to leave a lasting monument to the world for inspiration and motivation for generations to come.
But great things need a great foundation too. To build that foundation we need to start with our own achievements, our own successes, both individually and collectively and then build on those together.
Which brings us back to this outlet, this blog and this community of friends, readers, colleagues, and contributors. It all starts here. With you.
Personal Baseline
Personal Baseline:
Now that we’ve gone through and assessed what your financial baselines are, we’re going to delve a little bit into your personal baseline for a while.
So what is a Personal Baseline anyway?
This is what you bring to the table in terms of your personal strengths and weaknesses. Are you healthy? Are you strong? Are you happy? Are you crazy?
Go ahead and seriously think about how healthy or strong you are in each of the following areas of your life and what you bring to a new business venture. Be brutally honest here, as if you aren’t this will come back to haunt you. It *always* does. And then have 2-4 of your best friends do the same critical analysis of you and see what their responses are and how they relate to yours. Again, a score of 1 represents a critical weakness needing immediate corrective action and possible deal-breaker, and a score of 100 represents in the top percentile of the world or better.
Physical Strength
Physical Health
Physical Stamina/Endurance
Mental Health
Personal Energy Levels
Happiness
Risk Affinity
Family Relationships
Personal Relationships
Pet Relationships
Education
Primary Life Experiences
Secondary Life Experiences
Primary Career Experiences
Secondary Career Experiences
Where are your weak points here? Is your marriage or relationship a little shaky? Would it survive you working a lot of overtime hours over the next year to accomplish your dreams?
Do you have young children at home? Will they be a distraction or an asset?
Are you currently happy and full of energy or somewhat depressed and nervous, shy of taking on any kind of risk at all?
Do you have a friend who needs you to help them through a rough patch? Do you have friends who want to help you succeed?
Do you have the will and endurance to go the distance in a time-sensitive environment? Do you need a more quiet and contemplative environment and pace in order to be productive?
Do you have an academic expertise in your chosen subject matter? Do you have extensive practical experience? Is this something so new that no one else has any more expertise on the subject than you do?
Do you have the physical strength to do the job? Some jobs/projects require physical strength and stamina – firemen, acrobats, landscaping, construction, etc.
Did you learn what you know of this business at work or through life experiences? Was it hands on learning, or academic? Do you have all three that apply, giving you an extra advantage by being so well rounded?
Are you currently suffering any health factors that could become a serious problem? How are you treating them or preparing to minimize their impact? Do you have adequate insurance? Is there someone who can step in for you if you became ill at a time critical point?
What are your Personal strengths and weaknesses? Because these also play a huge role in whatever you decide to do to chase your dreams. They impact the how, the when, and the why of each of your decisions both for your business and for your life, so they are critical not just in the decision of what to do, but what tools you need to do them, or do them better.
Having huge areas of strength here will be of unmistakable value to anyone who possesses them, and any weak points here will need to be addressed and covered off before you get too far down the road or any one of them could conceivably lead to serious, even critical problems.
I’ve raised the subject, now you need to delve into your reality and really hammer out some serious answers here. Then take this Baseline and compare it to your other baselines again. What synergies do you see? What elements from one baseline complement elements from the others? And what about your weaknesses? How do they fit into the picture? Do you see any patterns emerging? Any ideas fomenting?
Dig deep, compare and contrast, and at the end of the day realize that these baselines don’t judge you, they offer you insights and are some of the best self-help tools money can buy without having had to spend a dime.
So get cracking, figure things out and check back with me and the Race to 2010.
Play with what your strengths are and smile at all the ‘wicked-cool’ things you can do with them now that you see them in black and white (or multi-colour if you’re filling this out in crayon.)
Y’all come back now, ya hear?
Now that we’ve gone through and assessed what your financial baselines are, we’re going to delve a little bit into your personal baseline for a while.
So what is a Personal Baseline anyway?
This is what you bring to the table in terms of your personal strengths and weaknesses. Are you healthy? Are you strong? Are you happy? Are you crazy?
Go ahead and seriously think about how healthy or strong you are in each of the following areas of your life and what you bring to a new business venture. Be brutally honest here, as if you aren’t this will come back to haunt you. It *always* does. And then have 2-4 of your best friends do the same critical analysis of you and see what their responses are and how they relate to yours. Again, a score of 1 represents a critical weakness needing immediate corrective action and possible deal-breaker, and a score of 100 represents in the top percentile of the world or better.
Physical Strength
Physical Health
Physical Stamina/Endurance
Mental Health
Personal Energy Levels
Happiness
Risk Affinity
Family Relationships
Personal Relationships
Pet Relationships
Education
Primary Life Experiences
Secondary Life Experiences
Primary Career Experiences
Secondary Career Experiences
Where are your weak points here? Is your marriage or relationship a little shaky? Would it survive you working a lot of overtime hours over the next year to accomplish your dreams?
Do you have young children at home? Will they be a distraction or an asset?
Are you currently happy and full of energy or somewhat depressed and nervous, shy of taking on any kind of risk at all?
Do you have a friend who needs you to help them through a rough patch? Do you have friends who want to help you succeed?
Do you have the will and endurance to go the distance in a time-sensitive environment? Do you need a more quiet and contemplative environment and pace in order to be productive?
Do you have an academic expertise in your chosen subject matter? Do you have extensive practical experience? Is this something so new that no one else has any more expertise on the subject than you do?
Do you have the physical strength to do the job? Some jobs/projects require physical strength and stamina – firemen, acrobats, landscaping, construction, etc.
Did you learn what you know of this business at work or through life experiences? Was it hands on learning, or academic? Do you have all three that apply, giving you an extra advantage by being so well rounded?
Are you currently suffering any health factors that could become a serious problem? How are you treating them or preparing to minimize their impact? Do you have adequate insurance? Is there someone who can step in for you if you became ill at a time critical point?
What are your Personal strengths and weaknesses? Because these also play a huge role in whatever you decide to do to chase your dreams. They impact the how, the when, and the why of each of your decisions both for your business and for your life, so they are critical not just in the decision of what to do, but what tools you need to do them, or do them better.
Having huge areas of strength here will be of unmistakable value to anyone who possesses them, and any weak points here will need to be addressed and covered off before you get too far down the road or any one of them could conceivably lead to serious, even critical problems.
I’ve raised the subject, now you need to delve into your reality and really hammer out some serious answers here. Then take this Baseline and compare it to your other baselines again. What synergies do you see? What elements from one baseline complement elements from the others? And what about your weaknesses? How do they fit into the picture? Do you see any patterns emerging? Any ideas fomenting?
Dig deep, compare and contrast, and at the end of the day realize that these baselines don’t judge you, they offer you insights and are some of the best self-help tools money can buy without having had to spend a dime.
So get cracking, figure things out and check back with me and the Race to 2010.
Play with what your strengths are and smile at all the ‘wicked-cool’ things you can do with them now that you see them in black and white (or multi-colour if you’re filling this out in crayon.)
Y’all come back now, ya hear?
Available Credit Baseline
Available Credit Baseline:
Ok – so we’ve talked about what you owe, now we’re going to spend a little time discussing what you could owe.
Optimally we’re hoping that you won’t need or want to owe anything to get whatever project you want to start off the ground. It would not be realistic or comprehensive enough for me to address everything else in terms of what your strengths and weaknesses are if I didn’t also address this subject too.
You will probably need some kind of credit at some point in this process. Whether it is to facilitate cash flow, or to qualify for transaction processing services, or to rent facilities and offices, or for any other relevant business purposes, you’ll probably need some kind of credit.
Some people have unique access to large pools of credit regardless of their personal credit rating. Whether through family or social sources, this access to extraordinary credit is a resource that is available to some, and perhaps to you, and should not be discounted out of hand. Credit can be a very powerful resource if used correctly, so it deserves a lot of respect.
Others are in a credit trap where their personal credit sources are as dry as the desert or as maxed out as a Michael Bay movie is with big bangs.
Then there is the subject of having access to investors, the sale of shares, bonds, or other investment plans to address. The opportunity to raise funds from sources other than your personal bank account would give you access to resources beyond your current means, and allow you to reach ever higher for the brass ring.
The resource of personal credit sources and business investment sources all come with fundamentally the same problems – nothing is free.
By that I mean so much more than just whatever the credit terms are. Sure I believe banks and credit card companies deserve their profits, but that’s not what I mean.
Credit is a slippery slope. It is entirely too easy to have a level of credit debt that you can handle under normal circumstances but that suddenly and completely wipes you out when emergency or unusual circumstances strike.
More emphatically, these days it is becoming more and more regular for those circumstances to have nothing to do with you or your credit worthiness but on the lending institution to be able to stay in business themselves.
In an environment where banks and lending institutions are failing or receiving bailouts to cover off for appalling unparalleled mismanagement and extraordinarily poor risk management, basic credit can be a very dangerous thing as it can be recalled at any time should your institution sell off your account to another institution, be purchased by another bank, or go bankrupt, or in some cases, simply change policies.
Where even applying for credit can have an impact on your insurance rates, it’s critical to make sure that whatever credit you have you treat with unusual care and discretion.
Pay extraordinary attention to the fine print. Whatever it says will be used against you in the future, and you can count on that.
In reality, this particular piece isn’t going to tell you *how* to get credit or *what* to do with it, but it’s here to make you account for the total amount of credit you can reasonably call on if you need it.
Here are some of the areas of credit you can look at if needed. I am *absolutely NOT* recommending you to use any of them, but you should be aware of them and how to access them if needed.
In this baseline the rule of thumb will be like this: Rate how much money or purchasing power you believe you would be able raise from each source of credit on a rating of 1-100 where 1 represents the idea that just asking the question will result in a Bernie Madoff-like audit and investigation and a rating of 100 means you can get credit to purchase major brand name retail chains with a low down payment just on your good name.
Ready? Here we go:
Pay Day Loans:
Credit Cards:
Personal Loans:
Personal Line of Credit:
Business line of Credit:
Mortgages:
Home Equity Loans:
Car Title Loans:
Construction Loans:
Small Business Loans:
Regional Business Start-Up Loans:
Government Loans/Grants:
Other Business Grants:
Private Investment:
Public Investment:
Bonds:
Private Stock Sale:
Financial Advances:
Supplier Advances (Suppliers may be willing to let you have product on spec.):
Insurance Loans (Many insurance policies allow you to borrow against the policy):
Retirement Savings Loans (same as insurance loans):
Industry Specific Loans:
Family Loans:
Ability to get Co-Signed Loans:
Other Loans:
Total Credit Capacity:
Obviously that’s not an all-inclusive list, but it should remind you of a variety of credit and investment options that you can use to raise funding for your venture.
Again, I’m positively *not* recommending any of them – buying on credit is what we’re trying to get successful enough to avoid having to do, but you may encounter a need for it at some point on this project.
Sometimes credit offers you an opportunity to leverage a number of other bonuses if used correctly. Frequent flier miles, cash rebates, interest free periods, tax rebates/deductions, and numerous other incentives exist for various credit options. All of those bonuses exist on the statistical likelihood that you will sooner or later slip up and get charged an additional fee for something or to reward referral business. In other words, the credit companies are betting against you making your payments on time, and statistically they are proven right far more often than not. Just something to keep in mind.
I’ll get into credit strategies some other time, for now it’s just worth seeing what your credit strength is today and to compare it against your credit strength a year from now.
So take a good look at what your credit options are – see what the clauses are on your credit cards, what your interest rates are, what your service fees are, what your credit rating is, see copies of your credit reports from all of the major reporting agencies. Basically, get familiar with what your real ability to get credit is.
It also helps to know what’s on your credit file with the reporting agencies because this information is often looked up by prospective employers when you’re applying for a new job as part of a comprehensive background check. Take the time to fix any errors that you see, and keep an eye out for suspicious transactions that could be telltale signs of identity theft or erroneous reporting.
And when you’ve done all of that you’ll know exactly where you stand on your credit, and that’s a pretty good thing to know.
Until next time,
C./
Ok – so we’ve talked about what you owe, now we’re going to spend a little time discussing what you could owe.
Optimally we’re hoping that you won’t need or want to owe anything to get whatever project you want to start off the ground. It would not be realistic or comprehensive enough for me to address everything else in terms of what your strengths and weaknesses are if I didn’t also address this subject too.
You will probably need some kind of credit at some point in this process. Whether it is to facilitate cash flow, or to qualify for transaction processing services, or to rent facilities and offices, or for any other relevant business purposes, you’ll probably need some kind of credit.
Some people have unique access to large pools of credit regardless of their personal credit rating. Whether through family or social sources, this access to extraordinary credit is a resource that is available to some, and perhaps to you, and should not be discounted out of hand. Credit can be a very powerful resource if used correctly, so it deserves a lot of respect.
Others are in a credit trap where their personal credit sources are as dry as the desert or as maxed out as a Michael Bay movie is with big bangs.
Then there is the subject of having access to investors, the sale of shares, bonds, or other investment plans to address. The opportunity to raise funds from sources other than your personal bank account would give you access to resources beyond your current means, and allow you to reach ever higher for the brass ring.
The resource of personal credit sources and business investment sources all come with fundamentally the same problems – nothing is free.
By that I mean so much more than just whatever the credit terms are. Sure I believe banks and credit card companies deserve their profits, but that’s not what I mean.
Credit is a slippery slope. It is entirely too easy to have a level of credit debt that you can handle under normal circumstances but that suddenly and completely wipes you out when emergency or unusual circumstances strike.
More emphatically, these days it is becoming more and more regular for those circumstances to have nothing to do with you or your credit worthiness but on the lending institution to be able to stay in business themselves.
In an environment where banks and lending institutions are failing or receiving bailouts to cover off for appalling unparalleled mismanagement and extraordinarily poor risk management, basic credit can be a very dangerous thing as it can be recalled at any time should your institution sell off your account to another institution, be purchased by another bank, or go bankrupt, or in some cases, simply change policies.
Where even applying for credit can have an impact on your insurance rates, it’s critical to make sure that whatever credit you have you treat with unusual care and discretion.
Pay extraordinary attention to the fine print. Whatever it says will be used against you in the future, and you can count on that.
In reality, this particular piece isn’t going to tell you *how* to get credit or *what* to do with it, but it’s here to make you account for the total amount of credit you can reasonably call on if you need it.
Here are some of the areas of credit you can look at if needed. I am *absolutely NOT* recommending you to use any of them, but you should be aware of them and how to access them if needed.
In this baseline the rule of thumb will be like this: Rate how much money or purchasing power you believe you would be able raise from each source of credit on a rating of 1-100 where 1 represents the idea that just asking the question will result in a Bernie Madoff-like audit and investigation and a rating of 100 means you can get credit to purchase major brand name retail chains with a low down payment just on your good name.
Ready? Here we go:
Pay Day Loans:
Credit Cards:
Personal Loans:
Personal Line of Credit:
Business line of Credit:
Mortgages:
Home Equity Loans:
Car Title Loans:
Construction Loans:
Small Business Loans:
Regional Business Start-Up Loans:
Government Loans/Grants:
Other Business Grants:
Private Investment:
Public Investment:
Bonds:
Private Stock Sale:
Financial Advances:
Supplier Advances (Suppliers may be willing to let you have product on spec.):
Insurance Loans (Many insurance policies allow you to borrow against the policy):
Retirement Savings Loans (same as insurance loans):
Industry Specific Loans:
Family Loans:
Ability to get Co-Signed Loans:
Other Loans:
Total Credit Capacity:
Obviously that’s not an all-inclusive list, but it should remind you of a variety of credit and investment options that you can use to raise funding for your venture.
Again, I’m positively *not* recommending any of them – buying on credit is what we’re trying to get successful enough to avoid having to do, but you may encounter a need for it at some point on this project.
Sometimes credit offers you an opportunity to leverage a number of other bonuses if used correctly. Frequent flier miles, cash rebates, interest free periods, tax rebates/deductions, and numerous other incentives exist for various credit options. All of those bonuses exist on the statistical likelihood that you will sooner or later slip up and get charged an additional fee for something or to reward referral business. In other words, the credit companies are betting against you making your payments on time, and statistically they are proven right far more often than not. Just something to keep in mind.
I’ll get into credit strategies some other time, for now it’s just worth seeing what your credit strength is today and to compare it against your credit strength a year from now.
So take a good look at what your credit options are – see what the clauses are on your credit cards, what your interest rates are, what your service fees are, what your credit rating is, see copies of your credit reports from all of the major reporting agencies. Basically, get familiar with what your real ability to get credit is.
It also helps to know what’s on your credit file with the reporting agencies because this information is often looked up by prospective employers when you’re applying for a new job as part of a comprehensive background check. Take the time to fix any errors that you see, and keep an eye out for suspicious transactions that could be telltale signs of identity theft or erroneous reporting.
And when you’ve done all of that you’ll know exactly where you stand on your credit, and that’s a pretty good thing to know.
Until next time,
C./
07 July, 2009
The Power of People - People I'm Proud to Know.
The big trick to making a success is always reliant on three key questions: who, how, and when. In almost all instances I can document, and as explained repeatedly by key success figures of our era like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, it tends very much to happen most successfully when it all comes together at once – the perfect triumvirate.
That’s why this Race is getting to be so exciting for me. I’m already seeing how individually so many of us can be successful by helping each other be successful. Here’s a quick example of how the light bulbs are going off in my head and the ‘Eureka!’ is erupting from my lips:
This weekend I ran into a young lady that I’ve met several times in the last 5 years. She works as a server at a local watering hole I visit with friends and family every so often. The place has a very special musical vibe and history that goes with it, and the staff treats us very much like family – and we truly appreciate it. Who.
So Saturday night, Independence Day, the bar owner didn’t know whether it was going to be a big turnout or a small one, so she kept a full staff for the bulk of the night, and our poor server really had no one but us to wait on the whole night long.
Before long we asked her to join us, and had a number of long chats, during which time I mentioned to her a little bit about my Race – the Millionaires’ Race to 2010, and how I’m trying to help as many people as possible acquire their piece of the economic security and prosperity pie.
As I explained how others are working on bringing people together along political bases in order to fix political problems from the ground up, I pointed out that I’m trying to bring people together to fix economic problems from the ground up. I don’t care what someone’s political beliefs are, what their religious outlook is, what their social status is, what kind of car they drive – none of that.
Ok, I do care – if you’re raising money for Osama Bin Laden then you’re not welcome, to put it mildly. But whether I agree with you politically or not has no bearing on whether or not I want to see you lose your job, become unable to look after your families, lose your retirement income or lose your health insurance. Same goes for religion and any of those other silly social delineations that become hot button issues in political fora. I want the nation (in this case both the US and Canada) to be successful, and I want us all to be proud of how we achieved it.
Kristen, our server, seemed to really like the idea, and shared with me that she has her own custom T-shirt design business that she operates as a sideline. How.
Already the light bulbs are starting to go off. Just this past week I was discussing with another Racer the idea that as our individual businesses start to take off, and we start our speaking tours, we were going to need some custom T-shirts and golf shirts for sale at our events. Both Tracey and I are writing books and going on a series of speaking tours in the coming year and will be looking at having a variety of branded products to sell at the engagements. But so will another dozen or so of our Racers.
So I’m having lunch today at a restaurant near my office and my waiter has a very professional, calm, attentive, and active personality. He’s in great shape, tall, and exhibits strong leadership qualities with both customers and other waitstaff. His carriage indicates strongly that he’s someone who is always on the go with another project so I stopped him at one point and asked him flat out – was he doing other projects than this particular gig?
Surprise, surprise, usually the answer is yes. This summer he took time off those other projects and was only working the one job as a kind of vacation, wind down time, but yes, normally he was on the go, working another job and playing in a band. A band that needs T-shirts but has venues. When.
Kristen came to mind instantly as a great match – the band could give her a place that she could sell her shirts, and the band could have some custom shirts designed to sell for the band too. And those who are doing advertising for their businesses or events could have the band write or perform the music for any of their advertising.
Then I remembered that I have a couple of Racers who are Life Coaches, whose role and sole purpose is to help you accomplish what you set out to do. They prod you when you need it, suggest alternative strategies when you hit the wall, and help you organize and prioritize your life so that you have a balanced approach to get the most out of life, among many other aspects of their expertise, these people are your mentors in a life where real mentors are hard to find.
The thought of structuring an event hosted by our Life Coaches to inspire you, teach you, engage you, energize you, organize you, and unleash you on the world – that sounded like a fantastic idea! Especially if you add in some live music, meaningful guest speakers, powerful new books, and a host of specialty products and shirts that help to carry the feeling and spirit on in the days and weeks to come as your efforts at achieving success unfurl. Add in ongoing life coaching to help make sure you get to your goals and the package sounds better and better.
Each participant made stronger by the event, each participant made stronger through the networking at the event, each participant made stronger with follow through after the event and each participant contributing to the success of those involved in hosting the event. Each of us spreading the word about the opportunities discovered at the most positive experience of the year. Each of us there to boost each other up, helping each other grow, build, succeed.
Extraordinary individual success fueled by extraordinary team success. The universal answer for win-win.
Then there’s the web designer who is looking to go out on their own who could help to build e-commerce sites and promotional sites for other Racers and the events where the authors who use print-on-demand self publishing houses to get great low-cost options for getting their products out there. There are the artists who are looking for an opportunity to get their work shown or to find suppliers who can get them different, unique or less expensive supplies.
Extraordinary individual success fueled by extraordinary team success. The universal answer for win-win.
And if you’re reading this, you too can be a part of it. Jump in – the water’s great. And the party’s getting better by the minute!
That’s why this Race is getting to be so exciting for me. I’m already seeing how individually so many of us can be successful by helping each other be successful. Here’s a quick example of how the light bulbs are going off in my head and the ‘Eureka!’ is erupting from my lips:
This weekend I ran into a young lady that I’ve met several times in the last 5 years. She works as a server at a local watering hole I visit with friends and family every so often. The place has a very special musical vibe and history that goes with it, and the staff treats us very much like family – and we truly appreciate it. Who.
So Saturday night, Independence Day, the bar owner didn’t know whether it was going to be a big turnout or a small one, so she kept a full staff for the bulk of the night, and our poor server really had no one but us to wait on the whole night long.
Before long we asked her to join us, and had a number of long chats, during which time I mentioned to her a little bit about my Race – the Millionaires’ Race to 2010, and how I’m trying to help as many people as possible acquire their piece of the economic security and prosperity pie.
As I explained how others are working on bringing people together along political bases in order to fix political problems from the ground up, I pointed out that I’m trying to bring people together to fix economic problems from the ground up. I don’t care what someone’s political beliefs are, what their religious outlook is, what their social status is, what kind of car they drive – none of that.
Ok, I do care – if you’re raising money for Osama Bin Laden then you’re not welcome, to put it mildly. But whether I agree with you politically or not has no bearing on whether or not I want to see you lose your job, become unable to look after your families, lose your retirement income or lose your health insurance. Same goes for religion and any of those other silly social delineations that become hot button issues in political fora. I want the nation (in this case both the US and Canada) to be successful, and I want us all to be proud of how we achieved it.
Kristen, our server, seemed to really like the idea, and shared with me that she has her own custom T-shirt design business that she operates as a sideline. How.
Already the light bulbs are starting to go off. Just this past week I was discussing with another Racer the idea that as our individual businesses start to take off, and we start our speaking tours, we were going to need some custom T-shirts and golf shirts for sale at our events. Both Tracey and I are writing books and going on a series of speaking tours in the coming year and will be looking at having a variety of branded products to sell at the engagements. But so will another dozen or so of our Racers.
So I’m having lunch today at a restaurant near my office and my waiter has a very professional, calm, attentive, and active personality. He’s in great shape, tall, and exhibits strong leadership qualities with both customers and other waitstaff. His carriage indicates strongly that he’s someone who is always on the go with another project so I stopped him at one point and asked him flat out – was he doing other projects than this particular gig?
Surprise, surprise, usually the answer is yes. This summer he took time off those other projects and was only working the one job as a kind of vacation, wind down time, but yes, normally he was on the go, working another job and playing in a band. A band that needs T-shirts but has venues. When.
Kristen came to mind instantly as a great match – the band could give her a place that she could sell her shirts, and the band could have some custom shirts designed to sell for the band too. And those who are doing advertising for their businesses or events could have the band write or perform the music for any of their advertising.
Then I remembered that I have a couple of Racers who are Life Coaches, whose role and sole purpose is to help you accomplish what you set out to do. They prod you when you need it, suggest alternative strategies when you hit the wall, and help you organize and prioritize your life so that you have a balanced approach to get the most out of life, among many other aspects of their expertise, these people are your mentors in a life where real mentors are hard to find.
The thought of structuring an event hosted by our Life Coaches to inspire you, teach you, engage you, energize you, organize you, and unleash you on the world – that sounded like a fantastic idea! Especially if you add in some live music, meaningful guest speakers, powerful new books, and a host of specialty products and shirts that help to carry the feeling and spirit on in the days and weeks to come as your efforts at achieving success unfurl. Add in ongoing life coaching to help make sure you get to your goals and the package sounds better and better.
Each participant made stronger by the event, each participant made stronger through the networking at the event, each participant made stronger with follow through after the event and each participant contributing to the success of those involved in hosting the event. Each of us spreading the word about the opportunities discovered at the most positive experience of the year. Each of us there to boost each other up, helping each other grow, build, succeed.
Extraordinary individual success fueled by extraordinary team success. The universal answer for win-win.
Then there’s the web designer who is looking to go out on their own who could help to build e-commerce sites and promotional sites for other Racers and the events where the authors who use print-on-demand self publishing houses to get great low-cost options for getting their products out there. There are the artists who are looking for an opportunity to get their work shown or to find suppliers who can get them different, unique or less expensive supplies.
Extraordinary individual success fueled by extraordinary team success. The universal answer for win-win.
And if you’re reading this, you too can be a part of it. Jump in – the water’s great. And the party’s getting better by the minute!
What Does Hope Mean To You?
Today is a unique day. It’s my first day of blogging after the whole Canada Day/Independence Day celebration week. It’s also a day when I’ve started to do a lot of work on getting some of my projects completed and ready for publishing. It’s also a day when I have accumulated a lot of work for a series of blogs that will be coming to you over the next few days. It’s also a day when I am starting to seriously promote this blog site and the Millionaires’ Race to 2010 that’s starting this September.
But it’s more than that, really.
I mentioned that Glenn Beck has been working on his 9/12 Project with the idea of bringing together people from all political perspectives to work together to find consensus and solutions to our biggest social and political challenges. Regardless of your personal politics, the idea that we can work together from a grass roots basis to do what we know the current slate of politicians of all parties won’t offers me real hope on the political and social side of things.
As I have started to introduce the Race to people I meet I am getting a lot more hope as well because I am finding a lot of fellow citizens who want to work together to build economic hope in spite of what the bureaucrats and politicians are throwing at us and telling us to swallow.
And what is so important to me is that this hope is being fueled not by nice words, friendly faces, and idealistic speeches, but by people making real connections to do real things in the real world with real consequences and real impacts.
The more I am working on getting this Race underweigh, the more I am convinced that everyday people can overcome the worst economic challenges our countries have seen in 100 years, and that we can do it individually and collectively all at the same time. It just needs a spark.
Like the way we came together after the global famine in the 80’s, the farm disaster of the 80’s, 9/11, Katrina, the Tsunami, and other disasters, we can come together now and make a significant, lasting impact on the economies of our continent and, in turn, the world.
It may sound trite, but the world is a mess. We are a mess. And, yes, We Are the World. One by one we make a difference. One by one we join together to solve these problems, but we don’t stand alone. We stand united.
We stand united against tyranny. We stand united against injustice. And we stand united against suffering. But we also stand for something too.
We stand for Democracy. We stand for fairness and equal opportunity. We stand for the right to do the best we can with what we have. We stand for ethics in business. We stand for personal and corporate responsibility.
We stand for something.
Whether social, political, economic, or any other issues are the ones that drive you, I diffidently suggest that the best way to address them is to find one of these social projects, like The Millionaires’ Race to 2010 or the 9/12 Project, or any other opportunity out there, and help your fellow citizens bring your country back from the brink of disaster and raise it up in the kind of hope that can be quantified, measured, and finally believed in.
But it’s more than that, really.
I mentioned that Glenn Beck has been working on his 9/12 Project with the idea of bringing together people from all political perspectives to work together to find consensus and solutions to our biggest social and political challenges. Regardless of your personal politics, the idea that we can work together from a grass roots basis to do what we know the current slate of politicians of all parties won’t offers me real hope on the political and social side of things.
As I have started to introduce the Race to people I meet I am getting a lot more hope as well because I am finding a lot of fellow citizens who want to work together to build economic hope in spite of what the bureaucrats and politicians are throwing at us and telling us to swallow.
And what is so important to me is that this hope is being fueled not by nice words, friendly faces, and idealistic speeches, but by people making real connections to do real things in the real world with real consequences and real impacts.
The more I am working on getting this Race underweigh, the more I am convinced that everyday people can overcome the worst economic challenges our countries have seen in 100 years, and that we can do it individually and collectively all at the same time. It just needs a spark.
Like the way we came together after the global famine in the 80’s, the farm disaster of the 80’s, 9/11, Katrina, the Tsunami, and other disasters, we can come together now and make a significant, lasting impact on the economies of our continent and, in turn, the world.
It may sound trite, but the world is a mess. We are a mess. And, yes, We Are the World. One by one we make a difference. One by one we join together to solve these problems, but we don’t stand alone. We stand united.
We stand united against tyranny. We stand united against injustice. And we stand united against suffering. But we also stand for something too.
We stand for Democracy. We stand for fairness and equal opportunity. We stand for the right to do the best we can with what we have. We stand for ethics in business. We stand for personal and corporate responsibility.
We stand for something.
Whether social, political, economic, or any other issues are the ones that drive you, I diffidently suggest that the best way to address them is to find one of these social projects, like The Millionaires’ Race to 2010 or the 9/12 Project, or any other opportunity out there, and help your fellow citizens bring your country back from the brink of disaster and raise it up in the kind of hope that can be quantified, measured, and finally believed in.
30 June, 2009
Financial Baseline, Part Deux!!!
Financial Baseline, Part Deux!!!
Credit – what you owe, and what you can get your hands on will often determine a lot of very valuable pieces of information for you in coming up with the right idea for your plan to achieve success over the next year in the Millionaires’ Race to 2010.
First, let’s work with the baseline components of what you owe. Now take a deep breath….let it out slowly. Wash, rinse, repeat. Deep breath…. You’ve got the idea.
See just about everyone gets stressed out to one degree or another when you start to talk to them about their bills. I do, I’m sure you do, so as soon as we can take the stress out of the equation we can get down to business and get your debts taken off the list of stresses driving your life.
Some of you will be in debt positions that, quite frankly, would scare Freddy and Jason into permanent retirement. Others will only have more nominal debts, but perhaps have insufficient income to meet those and your basic needs. Others still may have no real debts to worry about, but no credit to speak of either. No matter what your circumstances, we’ll walk you through this part and at least get some clarity on your options and see if there isn’t a good idea on how to get out of the credit trap.
Once more, we can look at specific numbers here if you’d like, or we can go back to that 1-100 scale we were working with where a ‘1’ would indicate that you’ll be bank rolling Trump in his next major project and probably don’t qualify for the Race, and ‘100’ where whole continents fear economic disaster with the sheer mention of your credit/debt load. Notice, it’s good to score low here.
Current Liabilities:
----------------------------
Credit Card Debt:
Payday Loans:
Short Term Personal Loans (due in 3 months or less):
Utility Bills:
Telecommunications Bills (Cell, land lines, cable, internet, etc.):
Insurance Bills:
Medical Debts:
Current Car Payment:
Child Care:
Rent/Mortgage Payment:
Installment Loans (student/personal/other):
-----------------------------------------------------------
Where you feel your Current Liabilities rank today:
----------------------------------------------------------
These are all the bills that you have facing you with a payment due in the next 3 months. If you have to face it now, that’s a current liability in my books. Notice I didn’t add things like gambling debts. That’s your own dumb fault.
Long Term Liabilities:
---------------------------
Remaining Mortgage Balance:
Remaining Car Loan Balance:
Remaining Installment Loan Balance:
Anything else that takes longer than 3 months to pay back:
Annual Land Taxes Due:
------------------------------------------------------------------
Where you feel your Long Term Liabilities rank today:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
If you could knock off any 3 bills permanently without having to replace them, which ones would they be? Why those particular bills? What about those ones specifically brings you stress? And how much money would it realistically take to make sure you basically never had to worry about those bills again? Really? Is that all it would take to solve those stress factors? Really?
So as we go through this project, the Millionaires Race to 2010, you really don’t even need to reach that much just to make your quality of life measurably better. And sure, we’re in this Race to win long term financial security, but in reality what we’re after is the ability to not have to worry so much about the necessities of life.
If we can solve those problems, we can reach our ultimate goal of financial freedom too.
So think about your liabilities not just as problems you face every day, but as measuring points against which you will be working to succeed and fix in such a way as you will never have to worry or face again the rest of your lives. Imagine a life without your biggest three financial stresses – and realize that it can be just a few months away.
I’ll get into the issue of available credit another night this week and how to benefit/maximize that as well, but for now see your liabilities for what they are – the stepping stones to your life without them a year from now or less.
Goodnight, God bless.
Credit – what you owe, and what you can get your hands on will often determine a lot of very valuable pieces of information for you in coming up with the right idea for your plan to achieve success over the next year in the Millionaires’ Race to 2010.
First, let’s work with the baseline components of what you owe. Now take a deep breath….let it out slowly. Wash, rinse, repeat. Deep breath…. You’ve got the idea.
See just about everyone gets stressed out to one degree or another when you start to talk to them about their bills. I do, I’m sure you do, so as soon as we can take the stress out of the equation we can get down to business and get your debts taken off the list of stresses driving your life.
Some of you will be in debt positions that, quite frankly, would scare Freddy and Jason into permanent retirement. Others will only have more nominal debts, but perhaps have insufficient income to meet those and your basic needs. Others still may have no real debts to worry about, but no credit to speak of either. No matter what your circumstances, we’ll walk you through this part and at least get some clarity on your options and see if there isn’t a good idea on how to get out of the credit trap.
Once more, we can look at specific numbers here if you’d like, or we can go back to that 1-100 scale we were working with where a ‘1’ would indicate that you’ll be bank rolling Trump in his next major project and probably don’t qualify for the Race, and ‘100’ where whole continents fear economic disaster with the sheer mention of your credit/debt load. Notice, it’s good to score low here.
Current Liabilities:
----------------------------
Credit Card Debt:
Payday Loans:
Short Term Personal Loans (due in 3 months or less):
Utility Bills:
Telecommunications Bills (Cell, land lines, cable, internet, etc.):
Insurance Bills:
Medical Debts:
Current Car Payment:
Child Care:
Rent/Mortgage Payment:
Installment Loans (student/personal/other):
-----------------------------------------------------------
Where you feel your Current Liabilities rank today:
----------------------------------------------------------
These are all the bills that you have facing you with a payment due in the next 3 months. If you have to face it now, that’s a current liability in my books. Notice I didn’t add things like gambling debts. That’s your own dumb fault.
Long Term Liabilities:
---------------------------
Remaining Mortgage Balance:
Remaining Car Loan Balance:
Remaining Installment Loan Balance:
Anything else that takes longer than 3 months to pay back:
Annual Land Taxes Due:
------------------------------------------------------------------
Where you feel your Long Term Liabilities rank today:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
If you could knock off any 3 bills permanently without having to replace them, which ones would they be? Why those particular bills? What about those ones specifically brings you stress? And how much money would it realistically take to make sure you basically never had to worry about those bills again? Really? Is that all it would take to solve those stress factors? Really?
So as we go through this project, the Millionaires Race to 2010, you really don’t even need to reach that much just to make your quality of life measurably better. And sure, we’re in this Race to win long term financial security, but in reality what we’re after is the ability to not have to worry so much about the necessities of life.
If we can solve those problems, we can reach our ultimate goal of financial freedom too.
So think about your liabilities not just as problems you face every day, but as measuring points against which you will be working to succeed and fix in such a way as you will never have to worry or face again the rest of your lives. Imagine a life without your biggest three financial stresses – and realize that it can be just a few months away.
I’ll get into the issue of available credit another night this week and how to benefit/maximize that as well, but for now see your liabilities for what they are – the stepping stones to your life without them a year from now or less.
Goodnight, God bless.
Business Risk Management Lessons Post Katrina.
Business Risk Management Lessons Post Katrina.
Katrina was an expensive mess of a natural disaster compounded by human negligence, inexperience, greed, and political bungling, but from it we’ve obviously learned a number of things because the next few natural disasters we’ve faced as a nation have been handled much more responsibly.
But from all the lessons we’ve learned from Katrina, personal, governmental, and corporate risk mitigation has universally taken a back seat in all of the policy and budget discussions to date. It’s almost to the point where no one wants to believe that it could happen again, or that it could even be worse.
And yet…
Researchers from LSU have discovered that the coastline of Louisiana, which has been noticeably shrinking for the last decade is on an almost unalterable course to lose as much as 4-5,000 square miles of coastline by the end of the current century, or an area about the size of Connecticut. Their research, according to the paper published in the Nature Geoscience magazine, shows that not enough sediment is being deposited by the Mississippi and the Atchfalaya rivers to replenish the sediment being eroded from the coastline by the ocean. Combined with rising oceanic water levels, much of the Louisiana coastline will be flooded over the course of this century, they claim.
This research largely echoes a number of other risk assessments for Louisiana and parts of Texas that the Army Corps of Engineers and various independent research groups have concluded. Since this seems to be a general consensus, one key logical question is therefore presented: what are we doing about the implied risk to life, economy, and environment?
If you know that the incidents of hurricanes has been steadily increasing in recent years, ocean levels have been rising, according to people who claim to know and measure such things, and that we cannot prevent catastrophe from striking again this century using our current strategy of rebuilding in low-lying coastal areas – if you know all of this is going to be punctuated with a wall of water over 20 feet high serving up wanton destruction just like it did with Katrina, what, precisely, are YOU going to do about it?
Yes, I said ‘YOU.’ As in you, my reader. As in you, the tax payer whose tax moneys went to the rebuilding efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi whose complete investments will be destroyed sometime in the next 90 years, if any of our researchers’ work is validated. As in you, whose friends, family, neighbours, and businesses will feel a financial and personal impact when those investments are needed again and again because our business and government leaders refuse to take action to mitigate the future risks.
What actions can they take? Should they take?
It’s a very long list, but the start of it is to recognize the real and present danger and long term risk that that and other regions of the country currently face of catastrophic disaster and start seriously thinking about it.
But to keep things clear and concise here, let’s limit this down to an individual example. Let’s suppose that you own a small petrochemical refining plant near the Louisiana coastline that has somehow managed to survive the various hurricanes thus far. Fair enough?
So you have about 300 employees who will, on average, live within 20-60 miles of your facility. Your contribution to the GNP is probably somewhere in the range of $12-15 million annually, and your company would be responsible for local and state taxes in the neighbourhood of $250,000 annually.
Your company would probably be one of only a handful of suppliers in your market space, so your contribution to your customers is significant, but not completely irreplaceable.
Now imagine a 20 foot wall of water hitting every building within 20 miles of your facility. At least 40% of your workforce would be homeless or worse. Your facility would be flooded, causing serious potential of a critical leak into the local water system – an environmental hazard whose cleanup costs would be directly attributed to you.
You would not be able to meet your current contract requirements for months to come and any inventories would be unsalvageable.
Your workforce would be strenuously depleted as they sought higher ground out of the devastation, and you would not have access to reliable power or communications networks like phone or internet for days or weeks to come.
Suppliers would not be able to deliver your next batch of supplies, and even if they could, you’d have nowhere to put them.
Your landlord or bank loans, however, would still require payment at the end of the month. Your utilities may not accrue more debts, but they’ll sure charge for everything they think they can get away with. With the emergency run on cash at any operating local banks, you will have access to virtually no credit to manage cash flow, and basic resources will be rationed in small quantities.
Your costs continue to mount, but your revenues become nigh on impossible to achieve.
You are headed straight for bankruptcy along with your 300 employees whose lives have just been dealt a truly appalling blow.
Or… you could look at the option behind door number 2.
Suppose you recognize that your facility in Louisiana is at a certain degree of risk. Sure it’s an ideal location for the refining of chemicals based on the supplies pouring in from the Gulf, but as we mentioned above, it’s subject to some pretty serious risks too. So you want to find a way to minimize your risks without dramatically increasing your costs. What do you do?
For starters, you need to know where else you can develop your products in the case of a natural or other disaster. Is there a suitable site you could buy 200-300 miles inland? Could you rough in the guts of the facility over time, maybe run a smaller scale operation there as a secondary output facility?
Is there another area altogether different that you could set up a secondary facility in a lower risk environment, again, running it in small scale, or simply establishing it over time so the cost impact would be minimal to any one year?
Could you contract the facility out for a few years to pay for it while the imminent risk is a little lower so that it is paid for and available when you need it down the road?
Do you have a financial planning instrument that will help you to set aside a war chest or emergency safety valve for the very rainy and windy day when you desperately need it, and is it ironclad secure?
Do you have an insurance contract to cover emergency environmental cleanup costs in the event of a natural or other catastrophic disaster? Can you count on that insurer to make good on their coverage?
Do you have an evacuation and relocation plan for your company and your employees to get everyone out safely and maintain your company as best as possible for the duration of the disaster?
Do you have an ironclad communications plan in case of catastrophic utility failure?
Do you have suppliers who could handle a drastic change in your supply contracts in the event of a disaster or are they also subject to the same disaster’s whims? Do they have a disaster recovery plan?
In reality, is it necessary and cost-beneficial to be located where you are to begin with, or could you gain tax and other advantages of equal or greater measure by relocating your company out of harm’s way?
I know full-well these questions lead directly to the inescapable conclusion that a costly backup plan is necessary to keep your company, family, and employees happy, safe, and profitable during disasters, but since the cost is so much higher when disaster strikes and you are unprepared, it only begs logic that some basic preparations are necessary so you can roll with the punches under the worst circumstances we can honestly prepare for.
Which leads me back to Louisiana, post-Katrina. This is not the approach being taken in Louisiana today. Oblivious to the facts surrounding the expected loss of land mass in the state over the next 100 years, ignorant of the warnings that the revised levies are not strong enough to handle another very serious weather-maker, ignorant of the flooding impact from hurricanes of recent memory, Louisiana’s businesses are relying fully on the State and the federal government to make all preparations and take all necessary precautions.
Just like those brave if completely ignorant souls who live in Tornado Alley in trailers who refuse to adapt to the eternal reality that their trailer homes will inevitably feel the wrath of a tornado leaving them destitute once more, businesses and citizens of New Orleans and Louisiana as a whole are ignoring reality and are not taking those steps needed to ensure their long term survival and prosperity. The billions of dollars going into the local economy there have gone to rebuild, but not to rebuild better, smarter, and with an eye to surviving and withstanding the future. And that cost, as inevitably as a tornado will strike Tornado Alley, will be resurrected as a new cost once more in the event of the next weather-maker to hammer the Gulf states.
The lesson, though, is not just for the poor citizens and residents of Louisiana, but for the world – prepare. Save yourselves the worry, the hurt, the lost lives and lost fortunes by preparing, each according to the risk you reasonably face. If you live in a desert, prepare for power outages and drought. If you live in the north, prepare for blizzards and power outages. If you live in the Pacific Ring, prepare for earthquakes and volcanic activity. If you live in the flood plains, surprisingly enough, prepare for floods.
Either way, prepare.
Katrina was an expensive mess of a natural disaster compounded by human negligence, inexperience, greed, and political bungling, but from it we’ve obviously learned a number of things because the next few natural disasters we’ve faced as a nation have been handled much more responsibly.
But from all the lessons we’ve learned from Katrina, personal, governmental, and corporate risk mitigation has universally taken a back seat in all of the policy and budget discussions to date. It’s almost to the point where no one wants to believe that it could happen again, or that it could even be worse.
And yet…
Researchers from LSU have discovered that the coastline of Louisiana, which has been noticeably shrinking for the last decade is on an almost unalterable course to lose as much as 4-5,000 square miles of coastline by the end of the current century, or an area about the size of Connecticut. Their research, according to the paper published in the Nature Geoscience magazine, shows that not enough sediment is being deposited by the Mississippi and the Atchfalaya rivers to replenish the sediment being eroded from the coastline by the ocean. Combined with rising oceanic water levels, much of the Louisiana coastline will be flooded over the course of this century, they claim.
This research largely echoes a number of other risk assessments for Louisiana and parts of Texas that the Army Corps of Engineers and various independent research groups have concluded. Since this seems to be a general consensus, one key logical question is therefore presented: what are we doing about the implied risk to life, economy, and environment?
If you know that the incidents of hurricanes has been steadily increasing in recent years, ocean levels have been rising, according to people who claim to know and measure such things, and that we cannot prevent catastrophe from striking again this century using our current strategy of rebuilding in low-lying coastal areas – if you know all of this is going to be punctuated with a wall of water over 20 feet high serving up wanton destruction just like it did with Katrina, what, precisely, are YOU going to do about it?
Yes, I said ‘YOU.’ As in you, my reader. As in you, the tax payer whose tax moneys went to the rebuilding efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi whose complete investments will be destroyed sometime in the next 90 years, if any of our researchers’ work is validated. As in you, whose friends, family, neighbours, and businesses will feel a financial and personal impact when those investments are needed again and again because our business and government leaders refuse to take action to mitigate the future risks.
What actions can they take? Should they take?
It’s a very long list, but the start of it is to recognize the real and present danger and long term risk that that and other regions of the country currently face of catastrophic disaster and start seriously thinking about it.
But to keep things clear and concise here, let’s limit this down to an individual example. Let’s suppose that you own a small petrochemical refining plant near the Louisiana coastline that has somehow managed to survive the various hurricanes thus far. Fair enough?
So you have about 300 employees who will, on average, live within 20-60 miles of your facility. Your contribution to the GNP is probably somewhere in the range of $12-15 million annually, and your company would be responsible for local and state taxes in the neighbourhood of $250,000 annually.
Your company would probably be one of only a handful of suppliers in your market space, so your contribution to your customers is significant, but not completely irreplaceable.
Now imagine a 20 foot wall of water hitting every building within 20 miles of your facility. At least 40% of your workforce would be homeless or worse. Your facility would be flooded, causing serious potential of a critical leak into the local water system – an environmental hazard whose cleanup costs would be directly attributed to you.
You would not be able to meet your current contract requirements for months to come and any inventories would be unsalvageable.
Your workforce would be strenuously depleted as they sought higher ground out of the devastation, and you would not have access to reliable power or communications networks like phone or internet for days or weeks to come.
Suppliers would not be able to deliver your next batch of supplies, and even if they could, you’d have nowhere to put them.
Your landlord or bank loans, however, would still require payment at the end of the month. Your utilities may not accrue more debts, but they’ll sure charge for everything they think they can get away with. With the emergency run on cash at any operating local banks, you will have access to virtually no credit to manage cash flow, and basic resources will be rationed in small quantities.
Your costs continue to mount, but your revenues become nigh on impossible to achieve.
You are headed straight for bankruptcy along with your 300 employees whose lives have just been dealt a truly appalling blow.
Or… you could look at the option behind door number 2.
Suppose you recognize that your facility in Louisiana is at a certain degree of risk. Sure it’s an ideal location for the refining of chemicals based on the supplies pouring in from the Gulf, but as we mentioned above, it’s subject to some pretty serious risks too. So you want to find a way to minimize your risks without dramatically increasing your costs. What do you do?
For starters, you need to know where else you can develop your products in the case of a natural or other disaster. Is there a suitable site you could buy 200-300 miles inland? Could you rough in the guts of the facility over time, maybe run a smaller scale operation there as a secondary output facility?
Is there another area altogether different that you could set up a secondary facility in a lower risk environment, again, running it in small scale, or simply establishing it over time so the cost impact would be minimal to any one year?
Could you contract the facility out for a few years to pay for it while the imminent risk is a little lower so that it is paid for and available when you need it down the road?
Do you have a financial planning instrument that will help you to set aside a war chest or emergency safety valve for the very rainy and windy day when you desperately need it, and is it ironclad secure?
Do you have an insurance contract to cover emergency environmental cleanup costs in the event of a natural or other catastrophic disaster? Can you count on that insurer to make good on their coverage?
Do you have an evacuation and relocation plan for your company and your employees to get everyone out safely and maintain your company as best as possible for the duration of the disaster?
Do you have an ironclad communications plan in case of catastrophic utility failure?
Do you have suppliers who could handle a drastic change in your supply contracts in the event of a disaster or are they also subject to the same disaster’s whims? Do they have a disaster recovery plan?
In reality, is it necessary and cost-beneficial to be located where you are to begin with, or could you gain tax and other advantages of equal or greater measure by relocating your company out of harm’s way?
I know full-well these questions lead directly to the inescapable conclusion that a costly backup plan is necessary to keep your company, family, and employees happy, safe, and profitable during disasters, but since the cost is so much higher when disaster strikes and you are unprepared, it only begs logic that some basic preparations are necessary so you can roll with the punches under the worst circumstances we can honestly prepare for.
Which leads me back to Louisiana, post-Katrina. This is not the approach being taken in Louisiana today. Oblivious to the facts surrounding the expected loss of land mass in the state over the next 100 years, ignorant of the warnings that the revised levies are not strong enough to handle another very serious weather-maker, ignorant of the flooding impact from hurricanes of recent memory, Louisiana’s businesses are relying fully on the State and the federal government to make all preparations and take all necessary precautions.
Just like those brave if completely ignorant souls who live in Tornado Alley in trailers who refuse to adapt to the eternal reality that their trailer homes will inevitably feel the wrath of a tornado leaving them destitute once more, businesses and citizens of New Orleans and Louisiana as a whole are ignoring reality and are not taking those steps needed to ensure their long term survival and prosperity. The billions of dollars going into the local economy there have gone to rebuild, but not to rebuild better, smarter, and with an eye to surviving and withstanding the future. And that cost, as inevitably as a tornado will strike Tornado Alley, will be resurrected as a new cost once more in the event of the next weather-maker to hammer the Gulf states.
The lesson, though, is not just for the poor citizens and residents of Louisiana, but for the world – prepare. Save yourselves the worry, the hurt, the lost lives and lost fortunes by preparing, each according to the risk you reasonably face. If you live in a desert, prepare for power outages and drought. If you live in the north, prepare for blizzards and power outages. If you live in the Pacific Ring, prepare for earthquakes and volcanic activity. If you live in the flood plains, surprisingly enough, prepare for floods.
Either way, prepare.
29 June, 2009
Financial Baseline:
The Race to 2010 is closing in a bit as we now are down to the dying days of June, and so the next phase in terms of building your new revenue stream or business is becoming more relevant and significant.
Now the point of the Race is to take people from any walk of life that isn’t a millionaire and help them to reach millionaire status by September 1st, 2010. That’s the whole point of the exercise, and of course helping you to make that leap in fully legal, responsible and realistic ways.
So last time out I had you look at your skills baseline – this was to help you identify and start ruminating about some of the things you’re best at, and where you might need a little extra help to reach your goals.
This time out I’m doing the same thing, but from a financial point of view. Today we’re going to take a look at your Financial Baseline and see what your starting point is. Taking a recap of this a year from now should make a big difference in your life and the lives of your family and friends as well, not just because we certainly hope you’ll be in a much better financial situation, but because you will be able to clearly see how your step by step growth has progressed and brought you the success you’ve always wanted. The feeling of accomplishment when you reach your goal will be worth every ounce of sweat.
But for all of that to be relevant, we need to have a really honest look at what your financial baseline is *today.*
Today we’re only looking at what your real, usable resources are on relatively short notice. Sure, if you really wanted to you could try and yard sale or E-Bay the entire contents of your home, but it’s not a reasonable proposition, and you’d probably end up losing too much value on your possessions because of your need to sell exceeding your customers’ need to buy.
So financially here we’re looking for different things. One thing that may surprise you is how much you can actually accomplish with only a few bucks. To give you some inspiration, here are a few things you can do that will provide you with your own product to sell for less than $200.00 (I’m assuming here you have access to a fairly current computer and basic transportation of some kind at least. If not, that may add a bit to your cost out the door.):
a) Publish a book through a print-on-demand publisher for $50 and have your book sold on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and half-a-dozen other key book-sellers’ sites. It can even be someone else’s book that you have the license to publish and you just publish it and promote it, taking a share of the royalties.
b) Build an online radio station. Some legitimate licenses for prerecorded music can be as little as $75 a year and a lot of the software you might need is available legally for free online as shareware. As you sell advertising and gain listeners you can afford to upgrade later. But product out the door is available pretty darn cheap, especially for talk radio.
c) Design How-To-DVDs and CD-ROMs and sell them through your own website.
d) Start an electronic magazine.
e) Do event photography at clubs and social events, posting the pictures in low-res online and offering to sell the good quality photo prints to the people in the picture for $5-$10 each by promotion at the venues to your website the way they do on cruise ships.
f) Start a residential cleaning company. Sounds odd, right? I have a friend who built her home cleaning business into a multi-million dollar business in a little over a year and a half. It made so much money she closed her primary (profitable) business of fashion design in order to focus strictly on the cleaning business.
There are literally hundreds of ideas to fit low budget start ups like these, and the only primary advantage that higher amounts of financial resources offer you is the advantage of greater flexibility or choice.
In the final analysis, does it really matter as long as you are doing something you love and are getting richly rewarded for it?
Now your financial resources do give you options and choices, so there is a very real, and very good reason to take a look at what your resources are before you get going, and more than just to set a baseline for future comparison.
It also should help to make you honestly aware of whatever liabilities you currently face and probably will face over the coming year. Being aware of the liabilities is important because it gives you the heads up you need to be able to plan on how to deal with them, but plans are only good if you get a chance to implement them. If you don’t do anything with plans, all you have is a wasted sheet of paper.
Let’s get started shall we?
Ok so I’m going to break this next part up in sections to make it easier to put them together and get some indicators out of it. For the purposes of the baseline I’m going to put things in a range of 1-100, with 1 being ‘awe-inspiringly bad’ and 100 being ‘so good you shouldn’t be on this list.’ Once you’ve done all this in subjective numbers, I’d really very strongly recommend that sooner or later you go back through and do this with live dollars-and-cents amounts. It’s very telling to see the difference between where we think we are, and where we *really* are in real dollars.
Current Assets:
Cash:
Savings:
Convertible Bonds:
Accounts Receivable (people who owe YOU money):
Saleable Inventory (Stuff you already have that you could sell quickly):
Bonds:
Stocks (share certificates):
Mutual Fund Investment Assets (Not your retirement savings plan version – just straight investment stuff here.):
Other Soft Assets (easily sellable):
*Total Current Assets*:
Current assets are all those things that you can very quickly turn into cash (without owing anybody anything afterwards). Hopefully this is the pool of assets that you’re working with for the Race.
Capital Assets:
Vehicles:
Your Home:
Major Tools:
Other Hard Assets (harder/longer to sell):
*Total Capital Assets*:
Now lawyers are going to complain and whine that my distribution of current assets and capital assets doesn’t meet their definition, and probably not the definitions of the tax code, and you know what? That’s fine by me. What we’re looking for here is what you can reasonably get in straight cash value when you sell whatever you have. Notice I did not include household goods, your family jewels, whatever you can sell in a family bake sale, and definitely not whatever’s stuffed away in your garage. Later when we get really technical we can use the specific language that the beagles and the bean counters worry about instead.
So if you take a look at those ratings you gave yourself for the total current assets and total capital assets then you should have a reasonably good idea of what you actually own and can get your hands on if you needed to.
Next up we’re going to take a look at what you owe – your liabilities, and your available credit.
But that’s for tomorrow’s blog.
For tonight your homework is this – you’ve seen what your skills baseline told you about what you’re good at, what you know, and what you have talents for. Tonight you’ve seen your resources at hand, and tasted a couple of nibbles about the kinds of things you can do to earn a million dollars with them. Do you see an opportunity yet? Do you have the creative juices starting to flow? Are you mixing these into an interesting cocktail yet? Take a single sheet of paper and fill both sides of it with combinations of your skills and your financial resources in terms of ways that you could earn more money with them. Think about how to mix and match them together and tomorrow we’ll continue and finish off your financial baseline so you have a little better picture going forward.
The other thing to keep in mind is that I am going to start trying to post as often as I can from now until September 1st, both about the Race to get you ready and energized, but also with those informative pieces that I want you to think about in terms of business, and society in general.
I will be adding in a variety of other things to the conversation as well. In the next week or two I plan to finish a specific art project I’ve been working on called The Heart Stone. Once you see it, you’ll know why.
In the mean time, before I bid you good night good friends, a favour, if you please. Hug an icon. They seem to need a little extra support these days.
The Race to 2010 is closing in a bit as we now are down to the dying days of June, and so the next phase in terms of building your new revenue stream or business is becoming more relevant and significant.
Now the point of the Race is to take people from any walk of life that isn’t a millionaire and help them to reach millionaire status by September 1st, 2010. That’s the whole point of the exercise, and of course helping you to make that leap in fully legal, responsible and realistic ways.
So last time out I had you look at your skills baseline – this was to help you identify and start ruminating about some of the things you’re best at, and where you might need a little extra help to reach your goals.
This time out I’m doing the same thing, but from a financial point of view. Today we’re going to take a look at your Financial Baseline and see what your starting point is. Taking a recap of this a year from now should make a big difference in your life and the lives of your family and friends as well, not just because we certainly hope you’ll be in a much better financial situation, but because you will be able to clearly see how your step by step growth has progressed and brought you the success you’ve always wanted. The feeling of accomplishment when you reach your goal will be worth every ounce of sweat.
But for all of that to be relevant, we need to have a really honest look at what your financial baseline is *today.*
Today we’re only looking at what your real, usable resources are on relatively short notice. Sure, if you really wanted to you could try and yard sale or E-Bay the entire contents of your home, but it’s not a reasonable proposition, and you’d probably end up losing too much value on your possessions because of your need to sell exceeding your customers’ need to buy.
So financially here we’re looking for different things. One thing that may surprise you is how much you can actually accomplish with only a few bucks. To give you some inspiration, here are a few things you can do that will provide you with your own product to sell for less than $200.00 (I’m assuming here you have access to a fairly current computer and basic transportation of some kind at least. If not, that may add a bit to your cost out the door.):
a) Publish a book through a print-on-demand publisher for $50 and have your book sold on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and half-a-dozen other key book-sellers’ sites. It can even be someone else’s book that you have the license to publish and you just publish it and promote it, taking a share of the royalties.
b) Build an online radio station. Some legitimate licenses for prerecorded music can be as little as $75 a year and a lot of the software you might need is available legally for free online as shareware. As you sell advertising and gain listeners you can afford to upgrade later. But product out the door is available pretty darn cheap, especially for talk radio.
c) Design How-To-DVDs and CD-ROMs and sell them through your own website.
d) Start an electronic magazine.
e) Do event photography at clubs and social events, posting the pictures in low-res online and offering to sell the good quality photo prints to the people in the picture for $5-$10 each by promotion at the venues to your website the way they do on cruise ships.
f) Start a residential cleaning company. Sounds odd, right? I have a friend who built her home cleaning business into a multi-million dollar business in a little over a year and a half. It made so much money she closed her primary (profitable) business of fashion design in order to focus strictly on the cleaning business.
There are literally hundreds of ideas to fit low budget start ups like these, and the only primary advantage that higher amounts of financial resources offer you is the advantage of greater flexibility or choice.
In the final analysis, does it really matter as long as you are doing something you love and are getting richly rewarded for it?
Now your financial resources do give you options and choices, so there is a very real, and very good reason to take a look at what your resources are before you get going, and more than just to set a baseline for future comparison.
It also should help to make you honestly aware of whatever liabilities you currently face and probably will face over the coming year. Being aware of the liabilities is important because it gives you the heads up you need to be able to plan on how to deal with them, but plans are only good if you get a chance to implement them. If you don’t do anything with plans, all you have is a wasted sheet of paper.
Let’s get started shall we?
Ok so I’m going to break this next part up in sections to make it easier to put them together and get some indicators out of it. For the purposes of the baseline I’m going to put things in a range of 1-100, with 1 being ‘awe-inspiringly bad’ and 100 being ‘so good you shouldn’t be on this list.’ Once you’ve done all this in subjective numbers, I’d really very strongly recommend that sooner or later you go back through and do this with live dollars-and-cents amounts. It’s very telling to see the difference between where we think we are, and where we *really* are in real dollars.
Current Assets:
Cash:
Savings:
Convertible Bonds:
Accounts Receivable (people who owe YOU money):
Saleable Inventory (Stuff you already have that you could sell quickly):
Bonds:
Stocks (share certificates):
Mutual Fund Investment Assets (Not your retirement savings plan version – just straight investment stuff here.):
Other Soft Assets (easily sellable):
*Total Current Assets*:
Current assets are all those things that you can very quickly turn into cash (without owing anybody anything afterwards). Hopefully this is the pool of assets that you’re working with for the Race.
Capital Assets:
Vehicles:
Your Home:
Major Tools:
Other Hard Assets (harder/longer to sell):
*Total Capital Assets*:
Now lawyers are going to complain and whine that my distribution of current assets and capital assets doesn’t meet their definition, and probably not the definitions of the tax code, and you know what? That’s fine by me. What we’re looking for here is what you can reasonably get in straight cash value when you sell whatever you have. Notice I did not include household goods, your family jewels, whatever you can sell in a family bake sale, and definitely not whatever’s stuffed away in your garage. Later when we get really technical we can use the specific language that the beagles and the bean counters worry about instead.
So if you take a look at those ratings you gave yourself for the total current assets and total capital assets then you should have a reasonably good idea of what you actually own and can get your hands on if you needed to.
Next up we’re going to take a look at what you owe – your liabilities, and your available credit.
But that’s for tomorrow’s blog.
For tonight your homework is this – you’ve seen what your skills baseline told you about what you’re good at, what you know, and what you have talents for. Tonight you’ve seen your resources at hand, and tasted a couple of nibbles about the kinds of things you can do to earn a million dollars with them. Do you see an opportunity yet? Do you have the creative juices starting to flow? Are you mixing these into an interesting cocktail yet? Take a single sheet of paper and fill both sides of it with combinations of your skills and your financial resources in terms of ways that you could earn more money with them. Think about how to mix and match them together and tomorrow we’ll continue and finish off your financial baseline so you have a little better picture going forward.
The other thing to keep in mind is that I am going to start trying to post as often as I can from now until September 1st, both about the Race to get you ready and energized, but also with those informative pieces that I want you to think about in terms of business, and society in general.
I will be adding in a variety of other things to the conversation as well. In the next week or two I plan to finish a specific art project I’ve been working on called The Heart Stone. Once you see it, you’ll know why.
In the mean time, before I bid you good night good friends, a favour, if you please. Hug an icon. They seem to need a little extra support these days.
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