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):
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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:
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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.

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.

24 June, 2009

Super Blog: The True Cost of Doing Bad Business

The True Cost of Doing Bad Business.


I have spent some time showing you some of the perils that the business world faces knowingly, or as I advocate, mostly in a state of abject negligence.

Today is a different day.

Today I am going to give you a blog that will identify 3 of the many areas of loss and cost that stem directly from doing Bad Business. Whether from negligent mismanagement or direct intent to make money from less than respect-worthy methods, the costs of Bad Business can be calculated, and have an impact on everyone – taxpayers, employees and consumers alike.

Already as I write this blog, I know that this issue alone merits its’ own treatise, one that I will pursue in the moderately near future. Already I can hear the thousands of managers’ screams as they realize that I do indeed call their decision-making into question. And already I can hear a percentage of those screams die on the lips of those same managers as they also realize why their decisions were wrong, and what can be done to fix them today, and going forward.


Prior to the election in November, 2008, several key business leaders were interviewed on TV and the general consensus was that a percentage, to the minds of the interviewees, substantially less than 9% of managers were competent at their jobs.

That statistic made some headlines and was duly forgotten in the following weeks’ news.

Here’s what it told me: somebody HIRED 91% of their managers as bad managers and has yet to fix that problem. Actually, the vast majority of companies hired 91% of their managers poorly and that majority of business leaders have never addressed their hiring problem.

Why would most companies be satisfied having sub-par management? Sub-par *anything*???

The answer is that they believe that the cost of doing *better* is too high and that consumers will not tolerate the price increase.

How often have we heard that line? The line that “margins are low, so we can’t afford to bump the price up in order to cover massive cost increases for new projects” is always used when it is convenient for someone’s purpose to not have to do something, but it never seems to come out the next week when the same executive announces their forward thinking project that might just get the company to the forefront of ideas that they happen to like.

In reality, the line has nothing to do with the facts in hand. Bad business decisions cost companies far more than all the deliberate damage inflicted on them by competition and criminals combined. Fixing the bad business decisions actually saves you money – it doesn’t cost more. It is faulty logic to argue against fixing bad business decisions because it *costs too much* to do it right.

And because you’re fixing a bad decision in no way necessitates any relationship to pricing. If the cost of fixing a bad decision is $1,000,000 but the savings from doing it right will be $6,500,000, where is the price increase needed? It is inherently flawed logic, and a fallacious argument.

Don’t listen to the line any more. Listen to facts and you make up your mind as to what the right steps are to get your company back on the pathway to success.

So here are just a handful of examples of situations you have probably heard of where bad business takes place. See what the true costs are, and see if your company suffers from any of these bad business decisions:

1) Employee Turnover/Talent Management.

There is an old adage in recruiting circles and HR departments that goes something like this – There are no bad jobs, only bad bosses. The number one reason people choose to look for other work is because they work for a boss that they do not get along with or do not respect. If you see an employee turnover every once in a while, that would not be a problem – sure there are bound to be some personalities and work habits that just don’t mesh. But when you see high employee turnover rates like 30%, 40%, 50%, 80%, you know that there is a real problem with the manager(s) in question and with the company as a whole.
But how does that cost a company money? Isn’t it keeping the cost of employee salaries low? Doesn’t that keep a minimized employee benefit payment, a more flexible workforce, and sometimes generate government retraining subsidies as cost off-sets? Isn’t a high turn-over rate sometimes a good thing?

Yes, it does all of those things, but it comes with a monstrously high price tag hidden in the weeds. And no, high-employee turnover rates are not good things. Here’s why:

Recruitment costs. Let’s say that you have a fairly low employee turnover rate, all new employees are successful hires, and all of them are quick learners, getting to full productivity in a little over 4 months. Let’s also say that you have a turnover of about 30 employees per year, with an average salary of only $20,000 per employee.

It usually takes a good month of training for employees to get up to speed, and that training involves their supervisor’s time, trainers’ time, administrations’ time, and so on. A variety of national estimates have indicated that the average cost to recruit an employee from opening the position to making the hire costs on average between $2,400 and $7,000 per employee, so we’ll take that on as well.

If you screen 100 candidates to fill each position, and it takes on average 6 weeks for the position to get filled then the cost of the presumably bad employees that were let go, combined with the learning curve costs of the new employees, recruiting costs, candidate interview and screening costs, and everything else rolled in, it’s costing you more than $1,000,000 each year to maintain that, according to Gevity, a company in the recruiting costs management field. And that’s estimating under optimal circumstances.

Gevity then goes on to estimate that if you improve your employee retention rate by just 40% then you can save between $400,000 and $665,000 per year, based on that limited example above.

Now let’s take a more representative sample of the worst case offenders. These are companies that each year turn over 500-1000 employees a year or more. The costs multiply very rapidly, and using the same principle the average costs to the offending company climb to a massive amount. In this example, Gevity’s calculator estimates that improving their employee retention by 40% could save that offending company more than $325 million dollars a year.

If the government retraining subsidies don’t at least pay you that much money, and you don’t save enough money to make up the difference, then you’ve made a pretty bad business decision.

If you would like to see how your company’s employee turnover rate is affecting your business, drop on by their website calculator at http://www.gevity.com/tools/recruiting_cost_calculator.html


Not to mention that you’re burning your bridges with your local community. You can’t measure the impact of negativity created by that volume of negative experiences as former employees are unleashed on your local marketplace. The challenges in recruiting new talent or top level talent only multiply when you’ve created a bad reputation as an employer. The old adage of ‘watch your step on the way up the ladder – you never know when one day the person you stepped on may become your boss’ applies surprisingly often.

These ex-employees may use your product or service – they may in fact be your customers as well as your former employees. Would you react happily to the company that just terminated you? Probably not. Nor would your family. Nor your friends. Word of mouth advertising works both for and against you, so as an additional incalculable cost of bad management on an HR side, you also have a cost in terms of sales and marketing that has just become tougher because of the initial bad HR strategy.

The next related cost-point comes when we start to talk about networks. There are some advantages to having experienced, career-loyal employees in your company. One of them is the size of the network they develop within your company, your client base, and your suppliers. They know how to find solutions when other, newer faces can only throw up their hands in defeat. They know how your company works when it’s at its best, and how it collapses when it fails. They know what needs reinforcing, and what can be exploited for more success. If you keep flipping employees, you don’t have those networks at your disposal. Because that corporate memory just walked out your door on the last firing spree or because of their own dissatisfaction with the workplace environment.


2) Innovation.

I cannot count the number of companies I have worked for, done business with, or encountered who have done ‘the corporate line’ of putting up motivational posters to encourage employees to submit ‘great ideas’ to save or make the company more money. Each year, almost as a token measure, the company takes one or more of these ideas and implements them, makes or saves a few extra bucks and declares this their spirit and corporate culture of innovation. In reality it is a spirit of condescension almost like none other. Here’s why:

The company has no more value for the employee than the 15 minutes of fame that it took to select an idea in the first place. Sure, there may be a token bonus, but in reality the modern corporation doesn’t truly reward innovation. The number of promotions or long term contracts signed as a reward or incentive that I have heard of could be counted on the opposable thumbs of one elephant.

It doesn’t happen, even if it means the company is now able to make millions in additional revenue. To put it in context – if one of your sales people increased their sales volumes by $1,000,000 a year or more, they’d be getting one heck of a commission cheque and a pretty sizeable bonus.

If one of your employees comes up with a $1,000,000 idea and you’re giving them a $100 bonus, you’re not rewarding innovation, you’re encouraging people to take their ideas outside the company where it’ll do them more good.

Innovation is more than just good ideas…it’s the building of an ongoing iterative process. The evolution of a corporate memory is what helps the evolution of small ideas to grow into game-changing ideas. It’s also what keeps you from paying for the cost of bad ideas tried over and over again.

So how does this apply? Here’s one solid example out of literally hundreds I can offer you that far too many companies are ignoring to their own cost:

In House Software Development.

So many major corporations and smaller firms contract others to supply the tailored software they depend on for their mission-critical operations these days. For years now I have been able to call company after company and, while on hold, discover that their applications were unavailable and they were waiting for some other company to fix them. Downtime, non-productive, profitless,wasted time.

Or that their latest, brand new software actually didn’t do what they needed – they couldn’t fix errors on an account, didn’t have the functionality to do obvious job-related tasks, did not have a tool to get information that they had access to previously under their older, manual system, and so on. You know exactly the kinds of problems I’m referring to if you’ve ever had a question about a bill, needed to make a payment to a supplier, tried to find out if a Christmas gift was available at your local store, or wanted to get some obvious help about assembling or using or troubleshooting a product you’d just purchased.

This answer never seems to make sense, which ironically does make sense because the software they are using to do their jobs was built for something else and only highly tweaked for their use. And when it breaks, they have to go back to the original company to get it fixed at usually higher than desired rates.

The original design team has usually moved on to other projects by this point and is no longer available to build a tailored solution so new faces and players come to the table to reinvent the solution (wheel) at the last minute. The cost usually is prohibitive so updates and upgrades are delayed until they absolutely must be incurred. Once those updates, upgrades, and the ever infamous ‘patches’ are installed, there is inevitably a period of costly disaster while the bugs are worked out. And when it’s all done, it still falls far short of what is truly needed to do the work at hand. The company just couldn’t afford all the bells and whistles.

The productivity losses are astronomical, overtime always soars, and customer dissatisfaction…don’t get me started.

And yet…. No one company I have ever spoken to about this has ever realistically considered that the millions that they pay to outsourced coders and software architects could instead be paid to IN-HOUSE staff instead.

*WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! Radical Thought Ahead!*

Have you ever costed out what it would take to build your key applications in-house instead of contracting it out? You wouldn’t have to pay consultancy rates, for starters, or pay for someone else’s development costs and overhead – these would all be costs you would control.

You wouldn’t have a budgetary constraint based on another firm’s timelines and productivity cycles, either.

Oh, but what would you do with all those staffers once the project was finished? You would have to let them go, right? And what about our overhead and development costs? Won’t those be much higher?

WRONG.

That’s where every single bad management decision on the subject starts. The truth is that the same staff would be needed to start right away designing the next iteration of the software, or a new application to innovate a new solution, or design your new online purchasing security features, your new building access controls, your new viral marketing campaign, your new HR database, your new management application tools, your new office automation software, your new organizational management products, or any of hundreds of other projects. You’re not building a team to build a singular product – they’re building an infrastructure for you going forward with an array of corollary products you will benefit from for years and years to come.

Think about it. How many different computer software applications are you forever negotiating new contracts with day, after day, after day?

Sure, they’re on a variety of subjects, platforms, etc. but aren’t your project managers for these projects and in-house interfacing employees often the same people?

When you’re facing needs from a variety of different departments simultaneously, it’s easy to say that your answers always have to lie outside your company, but if you incrementally build an in-house development department you can cut the extra costs and increase your resulting productivity and satisfaction with the tools you end up with and build your capacity to plan, design, and implement software and technology development as you go. You can even design the CBT (Computer Based Training) modules in-house with the people who built the real thing and know best what it is designed to do and what it cannot do.

What you end up with is a unique advantage that your suppliers can’t offer – you own all the rights to your technology projects, and you can resell them to others if you feel like it. Either way, you don’t have to pay anyone else any licensing fees of any kind. You have no availability issues in terms of mission-critical timelines, as you already have the staff on hand, so your downtime, lost sales and overtime costs are much more controllable.

And if ever there comes a day when you feel that you will not need to develop new technologies for your own purposes, you now have a widely experienced and potent team that can design software solutions for others as an additional revenue stream for your company, while simultaneously subsidizing the costs of your development teams for any future in-house requirements you may have. This one idea alone can actually end up not just saving you millions, but making you millions.

In many ways it’s like renting or paying a mortgage. Hiring consultants is ‘renting.’ Developing in-house would be ‘having a mortgage.’ When you’re done with the rental, all you have are expenses. When you’re done with the mortgage you have assets you can sell, and your on-going costs drop dramatically.

As with a mortgage, this only works as a long-term plan – it can’t suddenly crop up overnight and solve your financial woes, but down the road it pays off over and over again.

3) The Company War Chest.


Every famous personal finance advisor is spreading the word about how much money it takes to keep you afloat during the current financial hard times, and their advice ranges from suggesting you have 8 months of income set aside as liquid assets to 2 years, depending on how long they feel it will take to out last the market and regain your earning level in the event of an involuntary loss of employment.

They also suggest you keep your credit purchases to a relative minimum, and keep them paid off and current, while negotiating any liabilities into long term loans at historically low interest rates.

They suggest you purchase long term value capital assets like a home that will provide value for a long time and will also force savings and investment in tangible hard real-property.

In other words, save your money, spend within your means, set aside for big purchases, save for rainy days and emergencies.

And corporate entities should not be following this same mantra…….why?

If companies used the same basis that people should for building a safety-valve war chest, then 10% of their annual revenues would be set aside as an investment, and after 6 or 7 years (with compound interest/investment income) they would have an account that had a whole year’s worth of revenues as investments producing additional income as a *just-in-case* fund.

They would never again have a financial crisis they couldn’t reposition through. They would never again have to rely on a government bailout.
They would never again have to rely on the exorbitant cost of revolving credit for their routine operations and purchases.
They would never again be vulnerable to catastrophic organizational failure.
They would never have to worry about chasing down investors to fund ventures – they could make that decision for themselves based on having the war chest on hand to do the job.
And their financially weaker competitors would be far less likely to want to engage in anti-competitive behaviours knowing that them can out last them and survive anything they can throw at them.

Also…by that point, if the company decided that their primary market had run its course or become too competitive to be profitable, they could liquidate all of their assets and still be profitable doing nothing more than managing their investments. The worst case scenario is the company is in a position to always be profitable from that day forward.

And corporate leaders don’t like this level of security and profitability because …. they prefer reporting periodic losses and lower than necessary profits? They prefer having to beg banks and investors to buy their big capital investments for them and get charged more for the privilege instead of being able to pay for them in cash? They prefer being at catastrophic risk of failure when the supply of credit dries up and interest rates skyrocket like they did in the late 70’s?

Really. Hmmm.

It’s not like the money isn’t being used to generate profit – that’s its’ primary purpose in a savings plan.

I’m still waiting for an honest answer as to why this would be a bad idea.

The reason everyone gives is that they don’t have the money to go around to be able to save 10% of revenues, especially when profits are less in than 10% margins.

So….the difference between that answer for companies, and the same answer from people is….precisely….what?

If it is not acceptable for a person to not get on top of their financial security planning, then why is it any more acceptable for a company who has employees and suppliers dependent on their financial stability and liquidity to shirk their fiduciary duties?

Good financial management is one of the cornerstones of running a successful business. Savings needs to be factored in to cost structures for companies just as much as it does for people. This just isn’t something that’s negotiable. How much to save, when to save, how to save…all are negotiable and discussable. Not saving at all isn’t.

For long term success we invest in retirement savings so that when we get to a point where our earnings from active employment tail off we don’t lose one thin dime from the quality of life we aim to live. Companies need the same kind of foresight, because as sure as the sun will come up tomorrow, there will always be ups and downs in the business world, and no company should be left holding an empty bag in front of the nation begging for alms as a result of challenges they could have foreseen and protected against.

People, companies, and governments have a lot to learn, remember, and respect about the value of having a full treasury when you happen to need it.

Bad Business decisions make companies pay for the same mistakes over and over again, and usually are the first things defended as budgetary line items. Bad managers will often find hundreds of excuses to defend bad decisions, even to the point of making them sound perfectly logical by using theoretically opposite options; e.g. “Either we hire those consultants at that rate or it’ll cost us so much more to do it in-house.” Where superior managers thrive is in their ability to see past those tricks and teach their employees to think about those decisions in ways that actually make sense; e.g. “If we build an in-house department for that we can not only have them here for this project, but we’ll also have them available to work on these 6 other things we’ve wanted to do but never had the budget for before. Amortized over seven projects it’ll save us millions over hiring it done by outsiders.”

See beyond today and the decisions that take the responsibility off your shoulders the fastest, and start seeing the decisions you will genuinely be proud of and heralded for 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now. Start the Smart Business Revolution at your office and earn your company the strength it needs to not only be the best at what it does, but to be the best for a long, long, long time to come.

If you only take information in condensed volumes like soup, try these snippets on for size:

Hire people who are better than you at their jobs, not people you can replace in a pinch.

If you have a disposable workforce, you have a disposable company.

The wheel’s already been invented. Is that good enough for you, or is that just the starting point for your innovation going forward?

Stop paying for the same mistakes over and over again. Fix the bad decisions and move forward.

Are you allergic to new ways to make money? If not, consider how each decision you make is a potential opportunity to make more money today, tomorrow, and down the road.

Invest in making your company good for more than just today. Invest in being the best for years to come.

Save, for crying out loud, save!

And if you only follow one recommendation from this issue, please let it be this one: if you don’t have the money to do something right, where are you going to get the money to do it over? And over? And over?

Promise me you’ll think about these every time you see someone exercising their right to make Bad Business decisions, and feel free to send me some examples, even examples of your own. We’ve all made them. The only question is have we learned from them?

16 June, 2009

Race to 2010 - What's in it for You.

Race to 2010 – The Upside.

So you want to be a millionaire, right? And that’s not enough upside for you? Ok, ok, ok, I get it. Why, if you’re going to do all the work in the first place, do you need to register for the Millionaires Race to 2010? What do you get out of joining the Race?

Quite a bit, actually.

See, one of the things that is going to really benefit you is the fact that this Race is going to be promoted across all the web networking sites I think will be helpful, drawing thousands of readers to hear about the competition, the participants, how we’re doing, the progress we’re making, our trials and foibles, what’s working for us, and what’s holding us back. Your stories will be motivational for many, humorous to some, and saddening to others, but at the end of the day you will be presented to thousands of loyal interested readers day after day for an entire year. Some of our participants will be part of our periodic video blogs and webcasts, many others will be interviewed on air for our podcasts, and as attention is raised for this, we’re going to gain exposure on TV and radio stations across the continent, and perhaps even around the world.

And unlike normal media, this one is talking to only those interested enough to keep tabs on a purely voluntary basis – the readers choose to be a part of your adventures. They’ll choose to talk about you with their friends. They’ll choose to follow your successes for years to come. They’ll choose to support you to reaching your goal.

What you’re gaining by being a part of this project, then, is to be part of a Power of Choice project.

You are choosing to work towards your successes in life. They are choosing to support you to achieve your goals. And in the process many, many others benefit by new products, services, and jobs generated throughout the entire economy. This is all about the power of your choice to join the Millionaires’ Race to 2010.

Another thing that’s going to benefit you is the participants-only sites where you will get direct access to helpful resources, tips, other participants’ stories, information and tools from industry and financial management insiders, special research reports on various industries, and much more. Not bad for free, hmm?

And over the next year I and my team, and your fellow registrants will be working at a furious pace to help each other achieve our goals, including finding more things to make this a richer, more fun, more exciting, and more rewarding experience. There may even be some special tools and resources offered by sponsors that become available in the future.

But most importantly this experience is going to build you a network of other successful and talented individuals in a way like no other can. This isn’t reality TV – this is reality unleashed.

Have you ever seen the interviews of those competitors from those reality TV shows who all say they love their fellow competitors and will always keep in touch, friends for life, etc., yadda, yadda, yadda? Compared to being in the crucible of a real make it or break it financial environment for an entire year, these reality TV stars haven’t even tasted the kind of loyalty that’s generated in what we’re doing.

We’re building a stronger generation of financially secure, fiscally savvy, highly networked, employment generating, socially responsible, extraordinarily talented and experienced people from across the continent.

Or you could stand alone and do it your way. Your choice.
The Latest in Credit Card Hacks.

Corporate Identity fraud has been exposed once more in the scale in which it exists: 1 in 7 companies currently meets the most minimalistic of processing security standards that the major credit cards arbitrarily came up with to avoid government regulation, or so says Jordan Robertson of the Associated Press. The rest don’t even come close.

For his whole article feel free to wander over here: http://ca.lifestyle.yahoo.com/family-relationships/articles/archive/cp/home_family-weak_security_opens_door_to_credit_card_hacks.

Here’s the problem – the North American market has tried desperately to use the excuse that the consumer is willing to pay for the titanic cost of global business fraud and money laundering in exchange for ‘low-cost,’ ‘speedy’ transactions.

The reality is that this not only exposes us to vast amounts of personal, corporate, and governmental risk, it funds exactly those criminals that we have whole departments desperately trying to forestall, not the least of which is the Department of Homeland Security.

The reality is that when 911 happened it didn’t take long before Osama Bin Laden’s net worth was estimated to be about $300 million USD. The reality is that our federal and local law enforcement officers discovered that local groups were using credit card frauds, identity theft and other scams in order to raise funds for overseas terror groups to continue to fight against us by raising the money right here in the US through these kinds of crimes. The reality is that the technology involved in the encryption used by those that are PCI compliant is so weak that it is broken daily by professionals hired by organized crime to pilfer the resources of anyone using the banking and credit system. The reality is that we are allowing our financial system to pay the bad guys to inflict damage to us.

CNN has reported that since they started tracking it in 2008, the US economy alone has lost over 3 million jobs, a large number of those in the financial services field. The reality is that the same people who thought extending their investments into risky derivatives, NINJA loans, Ponzi-schemes, and so on, were and are the same people telling you that you don’t need to worry about the level of security on your transaction processing.

The reality is that this is the same level of encryption planned for your health records when they become electronically filed as explained by our President and the new Secretary of Health.

The reality is that companies are being taken out of business entirely because fraud is perpetrated against them and their clients, often in their own names, by these kinds of hacks and other identifiable and preventable causes, and that the jobs that these companies would otherwise be offering in a fair and reputable marketplace would be in companies that were experiencing growth, that would not have needed to be lost, that were not lost by the general economic downturn.

It is identical to walking to the center of a major business center or shopping mall, putting a blindfold on, spinning around and around, and wherever you stop, pointing a finger at whatever store is in front of you and saying that’s the store that’s closing today because of unrestrained fraud perpetrated against them, and that we’re ‘ok with that.’

And here’s the next line of logic I want to leave you with: if you’re at all listening to the news these days, you have had to have heard about the increasingly strained relations with North Korea. You may or may not have heard or remember that part of the concern about their situation is that they are the world’s number one source of fake US currency, which they use to float their country’s finances. As most major global banks will not have anything to do with them, they spend this money through shadier institutions with much shadier contacts and clients than we’d like to know about. They also produce fake credit cards by the score for exactly the same purpose. They also have nuclear weapons and are currently threatening us with them. So…..where’s the money coming from for this threat?

This begs the question, then, which is more important to you? The lies of the (same) bankers and financiers who tell you it’s too expensive and time consuming to fix (that are also responsible for our current financial mess), or the cost of a prospective nuclear winter caused by a regime we know has the weapons and the ‘crazy’ genes to do it?

And the follow up question, of course, is what do we plan to do to fix it? And are we ready to let them put our health records and biometric data (used in secure documents like passports and social security cards) in the same hands?

Are we really ready to finally admit that, yes, Virginia, there really is a Bad Guy?

15 June, 2009

Race to 2010- Building an Idea

Race to 2010 – Building An Idea, Part 1.

For those of you who haven’t heard, I’m launching a race to prosperity for anyone in Canada or the US who wants to join in- this will be the evolution of the biggest number of new millionaires in either country, all from normal, honest, responsible, and profitably managed revenues.

No MLMs, scams, Ponzi-schemes or other things that avoid reality – we’re going to make money the old fashioned way. By earning it.

Now everyone I know is happy enough to hear that, but the ultimate question is *how*? If it was so easy, everyone would be rich, right?

Actually it is reasonably easy, but it does take a few things to accomplish, and we’re going to deal with those over the next few blogs, but we’re starting today with the first thing that makes or breaks the whole deal – and that’s matching the right opportunity with the right person.

Think of it this way: you’ve seen American Idol, right? How many perfectly good singers have been ousted from that competition because they picked the wrong song for their voice and talent level? I mean you like their singing and all, but seriously, the wrong song can make almost any singer sound like William Hung on a bad day.

The same identical thing applies to revenues and business opportunities. If it isn’t the right market, or the right timing, or the right thing for you then it would be a lousy match destined for failure. So Key #1 is to select your condiments wisely.

Some people have an absolute knack for picking the right things for them. Others just stumble into the right opportunity at the right time. But for those of us involved in this project we need to get it right the first time so we can get the best head-start we can.

So how do we do it? How do we figure out which opportunity is right for each of us? How do we find opportunities to select from at all?

Good questions. Here are some of the answers…

First off you need to decide a few things like are you comfortable being your own boss? Do you work better alone or in groups/teams? What are your most marketable skills or talents? And most importantly, what are you NOT good at or most want to NOT want to do yourself.

If looking after taxes is not your forte, for example, and you are petrified of doing them and can’t look a solid number in the punctuation marks then you need to recruit some talent that can help. These can be paid staffers, they can be companies you hire to look after the details, they can be involved via a variety of other arrangements too but at the end of the day you do need to keep an eye on whatever they produce to make sure you’re neither being ripped off nor paying for inferior quality work. The quality of the work and its’ value to you are the things you need to weigh in determining which talents and expertise you need to support you on this journey.

Now obviously we’re not yet at the point of picking out employees or companies or partners to help us as we haven’t figured out the products or projects involved yet either, but you do need to start thinking about it because this kind of thing will help you to focus on the kind of project that best suits your work/lifestyle by helping you find compatibilities between what you want to do, and what’s available in your pool of opportunities.

So let’s say you’re doing this seriously and you get out a sheet of paper, a pen, and maybe a few hi-lighters or coloured pens to underline things as we get to them. I’ll suggest some skills and you see if they are things you think you’re reasonably good at. Go ahead and give yourself a rating from 1-100 for each one. If you think you’re particularly good, swing that number closer to the 100 range. If you think that this is something that only with divine assistance could you master at all, then you might aim closer to the 1 range. If you know nothing about it at all, feel free to give yourself a ‘0’ or a N/A (Not Applicable) if you have a skin sensitivity to low numbers. (It also wouldn’t hurt to have 3 or more of your friends rate what they believe your abilities or skill levels are at these things to give yourself an idea of whether your perception of your abilities is justified or how well your friends know about your talents):

Writing:
Researching:
Math:
Science:
Acrobatics:
Mechanics:
Carpentry:
Plumbing:
Electrical Work:
Carving:
Drawing:
Drafting:
Painting:
Landscaping:
Gardening:
Cooking:
Mixology:
Sewing:
Shopping:
Cleaning:
Organizing:
Typing:
Graphic Design:
Interior Decorating:
Comedy:
Poetry:
Sports:
Philosophy:
History:
Acting:
Video Editing:
Animation:
Accounting:
Tax Planning
Photography:
Economics:
Audio Editing/Recording:
DJ-ing:
Computer Programming:
Electronics Assembly/Repair:
Training/Education (of others):
Public Speaking:
Motivating Others:
Event/Party Planning:
Crafting:
Identifying and Coordinating Colours:
Performing Music:
Writing Music:
Journalism:
Politics:
Media Analysis:
Foreign Languages:
Engineering:
Physical Therapy:
Nutrition:
Travel:
Animal Training:
Animal Riding:
Juggling:
Escapology:
Magic Tricks:
Massage:
Group Coordination:
Project Management:
Money Management:
Sales:
Psychology:
Trivia:
Security:
Locksmithing:
Martial Arts:
Yoga:
Coaching:
Game Design:
Animal Training:
Industrial Design:
Architecture:
Masonry:
Chemistry:
Astronomy:
Brewing (Wine, beer, sodas, spirits, etc.):
Transcription:
Travel Planning:
Marketing:
Physics:
Personal Beautification (cosmetics/hair care, etc.):
Product Development:
Professional Networking:
Negotiation:
Law:
Charm:
Wisdom:
Common Sense:



Take a few minutes to review the results and see how those skills and talents you have the highest scores in fit together. Think about it over the next few days and let your mind wander about how to combine each of your skills to do different things. Any surprising results? Can you see any patterns? See anything that jumps out at you as a potential idea? Anything come to mind from one of your friends’ suggestions? Are there any skills you think you can improve on quickly that would combine well with other skills you already score highly at?

This is your first Baseline, your Skills Baseline. Keep this page handy for the next year or so – I assure you that you’ll want to see how this changes over the next year. In fact, if you stick with us over the coming year, I pretty much guarantee you’ll see big changes on that sheet when you take it again next year.

We’re going to do a few other Baselines over the next few weeks or so to round out the picture of total resources you have at your disposal to start this Race to financial independence. We’re going to look at your Resources Baseline, your Professional Network Baseline, your Personal Network Baseline, your Financial Liabilities Baseline, your Personal Liabilities Baseline, your Risk Tolerance Baseline, your Health Baseline, your Time Management Baseline, your Creativity Baseline, your Problem Solving Baseline, and anything else that occurs to me that might help you to get a solid foundation for making this the most successful year of your life…so far.

And if you want to, feel free to send me a copy of your results at theciguy@ymail.com. Whatever insights I have at this point I’ll be happy to share, and that’s true for all registered participants going forward. Again, this thing doesn’t officially start until September 1st, but you, my wonderful devoted readers, are getting a head start, so sign up, send in, and get cracking.

But for now I leave you tonight to finish working on your Skills Baseline. We both have some homework to do and some dreams to fulfill.

11 June, 2009

T-Mobil’s Latest Competitive Intelligence Failures.

T-Mobil’s Latest Competitive Intelligence Failures.

June 6th stands out as an important date on the calendar now. That’s the date that, verified by T-Mobil and reported by the IDG News Service, ( Source: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/166348/tmobile_confirms_stolen_data_is_genuine.html ) hackers posted elements of information on the Full Disclosure message board that came from larger files and confidential documents they had copied from T-Mobil’s databases and financial files. No, according to T-Mobil, nothing stolen directly impacts customer privacy or financial security, but for those who study and work in the competitive intelligence field, this breach offers dark insights into how T-Mobil handles both its’ security and its’ public profile.

Turns out, the hackers have had no takers for the information so far, leading me to believe that the hackers in question were relatively new to the business of black-hat corporate/industrial espionage, otherwise one would have presumed that they’d have had a client *before* hacking T-Mobil. These were simply perpetrators of a crime of opportunity, and mercifully that’s all it appears to be. Because despite T-Mobil’s claims that the information, while confidential, poses no risk of loss to them or their customers, I can assure you that this is far from the truth.

Inside corporate information is the backplate of verification that someone is an insider with the company – it’s how you test the bonafides of other employees. You can only test them with those things that other employees would know but no one else would. The fact that rogue newbies can hack your financial files and databases means that just as easily those in the business of organized crime and corporate identity theft can similarly penetrate your defenses and cause much greater harm because they know what they’re looking for and how to get it. And worse still, what to do with it afterwards to cause the greatest amount of harm.

T-Mobil’s response has been predictable – repair the security breach so that door cannot open that way again and minimize the public concern about the impact on personal privacy and financial issues. But that doesn’t go nearly far enough to protect them from future attacks or to protect the country’s telephony infrastructure from attacks by the real professionals who are actively attacking and creating vulnerabilities to exploit later at their whim.

Now I could be simply fear mongering here, but let me give you an example of what I’m referring to that occurred in the same time-frame so you can appreciate why what I’m saying is *not* fear mongering:
( Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/08/webhost_attack/ )

On June 7th an attack on one of the larger web hosts in Europe resulted in the total destruction of over 100,000 websites, including thousands of small businesses, many of whom rely on those sites for nearly 100% of their revenues. If one of our major utility providers suffers catastrophic loss of revenue or electronic infrastructure damage, or other major financial damage, the ripples will affect the nation as a whole in the same way that the AIG and bank losses did in 2008/2009.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that T-Mobil’s financial files and databases had not just been copied, but had been destroyed. In a worst case scenario this could lead directly to requiring T-Mobil to have their books audited in order to verify the missing data. Their financial plans and any projects dependent on them would also be jeopardized and contracts might not be able to be let on key acquisitions and expenditures until the data was reconstructed from scratch. This would undoubtedly cost the company several million dollars just for the audit, and then potentially several million more for the project cost overruns and delays.

The data involving key personnel could also have been stolen allowing a NEC-like corporate identity fraud (see prior post in the article from 2008) case potentially costing T-Mobil billions of dollars.

Or the data could have been quietly corrupted causing unknown reporting errors which could influence share pricing and credit and bond ratings.

The scope of potential damage is staggering. And the minimized response that T-Mobil has offered subsequently shows a tremendous lack of expertise and experience and delineates them as a potential target for ever more strenuous attacks.

Worse still, T-Mobil has not taken the situation seriously enough to turn this attack into an opportunity to show off their thorough security responses and their strength at proactively handling threats to not only limit loss of investor and consumer confidence but to actually improve and increase it and thereby strengthen brand loyalty. They also have the opportunity to take the decision to launch a division that will actively target electronic threats, block their attacks, and bring them to justice by partnering with local and global law-enforcement on a proactive basis instead of purely responding to the damage inflicted by hackers who could be operating outside of US legal jurisdiction.

A competitive intelligence expert already working for T-Mobil would have the connections with the other players in their industry and law-enforcement as well and would be able to build consensus among the whole industry to fund a neutral task force or entity whose sole mission is to catch the black-hats and put them out of business.

And this example would be all the information they’d need to be able to make that happen and give the industry and T-Mobil in particular, some bright, shiny gold stars with the public and investors for making their world a better and safer place.

News Junkie News

I think it would be safe to say that I am a bonafide news junkie, and it would also be safe to say that I used to sit, glued to my chair staring without blinking at CNN whenever something momentous was happening. Now that TV news has uniformly transformed into this stew of talking heads, I sit, pained, through each agonizing hour hoping to catch a single news story worthy of the name from any source that I may trip over. The complete dissolution of the CNN news service on a journalistic basis causes me personal anguish each time I so much as pass by the channel while browsing for something worth watching.

So I bring to you, with constrained enthusiasm, a link to a news source of at least moderate value as an amalgam of stories from around the world that seem to be mostly devoid of talking heads:

http://www.dhs.gov/xinfoshare/programs/editorial_0542.shtm

This is a site provided by the Department of Homeland Security that directly references the source of each article it summarizes, so you can both get more details on a story you’re interested in and also validate where the information comes from.

The articles are updated daily and there is a 10-day archive that you can browse through so you don’t miss anything important.

And most importantly of all, there are no talking heads to assault your senses and insult your intelligence.

09 June, 2009

The New Rush to Outsource.

The New Rush to Outsource.

Companies are scaling back their workforces in a drastic effort to cut costs in a market with exceptionally weak demand. In order to accomplish that result while maintaining the flexibility to handle orders as they come in, companies are returning to outsourced workforces and temporary/term staffing sources.

With the available talent pool of recently unemployed specialists filling the ranks of the companies in this space, the opportunity to pay for executive or specialty talent that ordinarily wouldn’t be available is a temptation most managers are far from trying to resist.

But this process has not had a great history of working as a general rule for a variety of reasons. For starters, although costs associated with specific production or customer call volumes seem to be substantially reduced, substantial information is available that demonstrates the phenomenal impact on customer dissatisfaction and drastic changes in consumer spending trends that result from this kind of management decision.

In fact it can fairly easily be demonstrated that the outsource model usually has a value in a fairly short term to help balance some crisis financials, but its’ long term damage usually far outstrips the short term gains if this decision extends beyond a few months to a year.

The costs of hiring, training, supervising and developing human resources in your company almost always far outstrips the costs of outsourced employees but the loss of internal experience is a cost that can be measured in terms of crucified morale, high employee turnover rates, low customer satisfaction, high complaint ratios, lower profit margins, lower productivity, lower quality services and products, less innovation, lower consumer and employee loyalty, and in many other areas as well, basically leading to reduced capacity to compete and survive.

Now I can already hear my phone ringing with the calls from the executives at outsource call centers saying my article is flawed or unfair – hang on. I’m not done yet.

Outsourcing is a great opportunity to bridge dynamic growth and contraction in industries that either have highly seasonal or strongly periodic workflows, and also works extraordinarily well when used in layered productivity organizations where between each layer of outsourced experts is another layer of internal players who mesh the parts together and can maintain the quality control equation necessary for success. One example is using creative outsource teams in different time zones to have continuous creative flow on time-sensitive projects.

Where this differs from what is being done today is that today’s drive to outsource is coming not from routine cyclical expansion or contraction within a specific industrial or sales cycle, but from response global economic contraction as a silver bullet to cut costs. The consequences and differences in application should be obvious. Should be, but companies haven’t slowed down the rush to outsource, and the future financial impact extends our projected recession ever further into the future.

Outsource, by all means. But do it for the right reasons in the right way or suffer the consequences.

The Corporate Security Myth (Article from 2008)

The Corporate Security Myth.

Ed. Note: This article was released last year to highlight and re-introduce the concept of corporate vulnerabilities to the kind and scope of threats that are currently out there in the business world. I thought that if I am going to begin a thread on this blog about corporate security then where better to start than to give it the kind of introduction this article provides. I hope this article gives you the inspiration to stay tuned for the subsequent articles on this subject, and to invest in the time it takes to give your company an honest analysis to see how vulnerable it is to this kind of threat.



The Corporate Security Myth.
October 26, 2008.


Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, in many cases millions of dollars, investing in corporate security in the interest of preventing both internal and external causes of business losses and critical business process interruptions. Generally speaking, they do offer businesses some very basic infrastructure and legal protection, but in real terms the vulnerabilities most companies have far outweigh the minimalist standards of security that those same companies have employed in recent years.

In many respects the decline of effective corporate security has dovetailed remarkably closely with the West’s decline in national security standards post-Cold War. The Peace Dividend was spent not just by governments, it seems, but by business entities as well. Unfortunately, just because the old Soviet Union ceased to exist does not mean that there are no bad guys left in the world, and individual criminals and organized crime have leapt into fields of criminality far more profitable than drugs, prostitution, smuggling, or simple theft. Stealing from businesses is now the number one crime in the world by dollar value according to interviews I have had with law enforcement and intelligence officials over the last few years. And the number one thing being stolen from companies is…. their identity.

Identity theft is not just a crime against average Americans or the general public – it is the thin end of the business wedge being used today by organized crime, disgruntled ex-employees, and it is also a very real vulnerability for national security from threats from terrorists and foreign powers, and it is being applied in ever more comprehensive strokes against businesses worldwide.

Consider the example of NEC of Japan. This past winter a handful of executives of a particular company were charged with a variety of crimes stemming from their theft of the identity of NEC Corporation – with a global impact of more than $5 billion. By pretending to be NEC Corp., they foisted massive costs of returned defective products to NEC on the real company while retaining the profits garnered for selling it in their name, all with NEC being none the wiser. They entered into massive amounts of debt on NEC’s behalf to finance their unauthorized plans, and left NEC holding the bag for it. They ruined NEC’s reputation for quality around the world by selling bad, cheap, knock-off products and leaving the real NEC to clean up the mess. And it went on for several years before anyone even had their first hint that something was wrong. NEC’s credit rating was affected, its’ public image was tarnished, it’s relationships with retailers around the world was damaged – a truly unexpected calamity caused by an otherwise unrelated external threat.

Consider the case of CardService International, a leading credit card transaction processing firm, who a few years ago was the target of very serious identity theft. Rogue invalid companies were started as executive search firms who would place ads on major employment search sites like Monster, CareerBuilder, Workopolis, HotJobs, etc. They would advertise positions for companies, in this case CardService International, and collect resumes from prospective applicants for those positions. Only after a few weeks, applicants would begin to call after not hearing back about their applications. The phone number in the ad was for the HR department at CSI, but CSI had never heard of the position, let alone any of the CV’s that the applicants had sent. By the time CardService International had discovered the scam, it was too late. Tens of thousands of prospective employees had sent private information in response to the recruiter’s requests including things like phone numbers, addresses, social security numbers, and all other data needed for a ‘pre-screening employment verification/background check.’ The staff hours needed and legal costs involved in trying to solve or minimize the damage from this scam for CSI’s purposes alone were astronomical. Consider, then, that this was not just happening to CSI at that time, but to dozens, perhaps hundreds of other companies simultaneously. And just as someone started to figure out the scam, the recruiting company would ‘go bankrupt’ and all trace of the ownership and staff would disappear, only to reappear with completely different and new recruiters under different names in different cities, repeating the scam from scratch over, and over again.

As a side note, the media have only just recognized this threat to personal identity theft this past weekend with a number of articles based on a theoretical test performed by a research group in the UK. They still have yet to seriously report on the actual accounts of this kind of fraud already reported to law enforcement around the country and around the world.

Neither of these scams, in fact, had anything to do with the companies in question. NEC could not have known what was happening purely through internal or external penetration threat security measures. No one went to CSI to hold them up at their building. These identity theft scams happened in virtually complete isolation from the companies whose names were used to commit major fraud. Current business security methodology has no viable means of protecting companies from this kind of security risk, and it is far too rampant and widespread for companies to ignore. One unofficial estimate of the losses/costs sustained by CSI for that particular example included more than a dozen professional staff deployed for more than 6 months with extensive over-time and almost a year and a half of fruitless legal costs trying to serve papers on the defunct and disappeared perpetrators. Assume that each of those professionals were paid at least $40,000 per year. That amounts to more than $250,000 in costs alone, plus the legal fees, court costs, and public relations mess. Interviews with staff also indicated that a number of applicants for those positions were purchasing reps in charge of their firms’ credit processing service purchasing decisions, and many of those had immediately put a replacement contract up for tender in order to drop CSI as they no longer felt that CSI was a safe service provider for financial transactions, even though no transactions had in fact been involved and CSI was not responsible for any wrong-doing. The impression left with applicants was that CSI was not serious about protecting its’ business reputation for security, and therefore would not be serious about any of its’ other security measures. The impact on sales, customer confidence, employee confidence, and potential real recruiting efforts is virtually incalculable.

These two examples only serve to illustrate that every company is just as vulnerable to the same kinds of dirty tricks, scams, and frauds and a host of other threats of varying scales, none of which are corporate leaders ready to deal with yet. And when the day arrives that the company hit by these scams is yours, will you have enough spare resources left to handle the impact? What happens if it hits you at the same time as:
- A major audit?
- A manufacturing strike?
- A critical supplier drastically limits your credit?
- You are in the middle of negotiating with a major new client or a new round of financing?
- A major company executive passes away?
- A major network virus destroys your company’s ability to respond?

Can you be sure your firm will survive it? Is your corporate security effective against these kinds of frauds and criminal threats, or is it still only part of the corporate security myth?

The Millionaires' Race to 2010- A Starting Point.

The Millionaires’ Race to 2010 – A Starting Point.

Last week I told you why you want to be a part of this economic revolution. Now I’m going to give you a starting point to get ready to participate in it.

This whole effort is to build virtually indestructible legs of economic prosperity in our two countries, and to provide personal economic security through initiatives designed to teach us all how to build wealth responsibly while building new jobs and prosperity for our communities too.

Clearly we can’t just wait for governments to make the world a more prosperous place for us. It isn’t going to happen that way. Our neighbours and families are hurting, divorces are at highs we’ve not ever contemplated before, our employers are on shaky ground, consumer spending is down, consumer savings are only starting to make a moderate comeback, but the average household has a long way to go to be safe in the event of an economic disaster. We don’t need to let this happen, and we sure don’t need to let it continue.

That’s the motivation behind the Millionaires’ Race to 2010.

Now we’re getting into the details of how to make this happen. We’re going to have people from all walks of life and all kinds of interests. What subjects and approaches interest one person, will be of zero interest to someone else, so to make this successful, concentrating on only one kind of business or methodology as a means for generating a million dollars in a year is dumb. What’s going to happen instead is that I’ll put a bunch of ideas out there, but I’ll also give regular advice, inspirational stories, and most importantly I’m going to use my competitive intelligence background and expertise to show you how to find and generate opportunities in the kinds of things *you* most get a kick out of or are best at.

I’ll share those management insights I have about what makes a great company or a great manager, and I’ll share stories of where those techniques have worked for others. I’ll also point out some of the worst pitfalls to avoid and where you can find resources to help you figure out how to advance your own projects.

And here’s your first installment…

A million dollars is an amount of money. I could have picked an amount of $10, 1 billion dollars, or anything in between. But no matter how much or how little money we’re talking about, the money itself doesn’t define how it gets made or spent.

For those of you who don’t want the stress and strain of building a traditional business, you don’t have to. I can show you how to take knowledge you already possess and turn it into massive income. Or you can take your talent at crafts and art and, placed in the right environment, and on the right products, you can achieve successes you’ve never imagined. I can list dozens of things here, but that’s the littlest part of the equation. *What* you do matters, but not nearly as much as how and when and where. But very clearly, building a traditional business is *not* necessary.

For those of you who thrive on the idea of building your own businesses, boy will you be in for a treat. The opportunities you’ll see will make the difference between going to one of the shows on buying your own franchise and having the success of your life doing something you want to do instead.

Start setting aside some ‘what’ ideas if you’d like – it’s usually what gets us all inspired in the first place. At the end of the day, though, be ready to see opportunities as they arise. And I assure you, if you’re reading this blog, you’ll see a number of them.

And that’s your first secret to making bucket-loads of money – it isn’t only about having a great idea, it’s about acting on an opportunity in a timely manner. INC Magazine, for instance, profiled Paul Graham as their idea of a start-up guru because he’s started more than 145 companies, each targeting solutions to opportunities that the new company addresses.

What opportunities do you see today? And what opportunities will I show you in the coming tomorrows?

About A Competitive Intelligence Report

About A Competitive Intelligence Report – June 9, 2009.

The current business environment underlines the penultimate need for the best, most accurate, and compellingly useful information that business leaders can get. The modern business relies on information in the exact same way that our political and military leaders depend on information – it helps them to make the best decisions they can to protect their companies, minimize their competitors’ advantages, and to help them maximize the opportunities available to them.

As this need for cutting edge information has been paired with technologically advanced solutions for developing, acquiring, exchanging, and analyzing information, companies have concentrated their resources on maximizing their ROIs from these sources. This pattern matches exactly the pattern ascribed to our national defense and intelligence spending where our efforts concentrated ever more on technologically acquired intelligence support from satellite feeds, internet scanning, communications intercepts, and so on.

But the comparison doesn’t actually stop there, unfortunately. Because our military, business and political leaders also cut back on those professionals in their companies and in their consultancy ranks whose sole purpose was to validate, verify, network, and develop human intelligence to protect and advance the needs and goals of their respective organizations, there now no longer exists a safeguard against false information, missing information, or faulty analysis.

Militarily and geopolitically I give you the result as 911 and the subsequent global conflicts arising from that dreadful event.

Economically I give you the ascendancy of corporate identity theft as the #1 crime in terms of global financial value, and I also give you the lack of safeguards protecting us against the kind of collapse more than adequately demonstrated by the current recession.

Companies who do not have the kind of access needed to validate their electronically garnered information through established human intelligence sources are destined to suffer overwhelmingly caustic failures in terms of competitive disadvantage and lack of preparation for sudden and dramatic fiscally punishing project failures.

Over the coming weeks I will begin to show my readers what kinds of information companies are missing with some concrete examples. This kind of information is critical to companies, and those companies that will be referenced in the articles would stand to benefit greatly by having the information before it is released to the general public through my report or suffer potentially costly consequences from ignoring the threats raised. To be fair, I will start by showing opportunities being missed by companies within specific industries. I will show telltale signs that competitive intelligence analysts actively research to determine the validity, nature, magnitude, and scope of the opportunities I raise as conversation pieces. After that, the kid gloves come off. World….you’ve been warned.

Business is a single foundation block for all of those things that spark public debate. It is no more and no less important than the other founding stones of countries, nations, communities. It is the basic unit of a nation’s economic engine, the basic unit in career identity, the basic unit in personal financial status, the basis of the tax revenue system, and therefore the financial engine of the government. It provides the necessities and luxuries of society with unparalleled risks, and unimaginable rewards. Our job, our responsibility is to minimize those risks where possible and maximize the benefits and rewards not just today but for the long term benefits imbued in personal, community, regional, and national senses.

Without a balance between the progress of technology and the ever-relevant human contribution then inevitably disaster will only accelerate and broaden in its’ scope, frequency, and potency, testing to our limits as a society to adjust and recover.

Special Treat...

Tonight was an inspired night. You're getting not one but 5 blogs tonight, with more bonus blogs coming later this week. So much for the 2 blog a week limit, eh? Maybe I'll need to go on a 12 step blog program....

The next four blogs all deal with a variety of business issues, and included in that is the latest one on The Millionaires' Race for 2010, which I highly suggest you sign up for so you can join those of us who are trying to build a brand new pillar of economic security and stability by building wealth and jobs from the ground up.

But as I get the photography done I'll also be adding a blog on art projects i'm working on later this week or early next, and I'll also be adding some blogs on some other issues you may find interesting.

But in almost all cases, this week's blogs are all done on a forward looking basis. It's about what you can expect from this blog going forward - the kind of detailed, analytical information and projects I'm working on every day.

You will also be getting some other perks soon. I'm working on adding periodic podcasts and interviews as I get them in audio and perhaps even video formats, so look forward to hearing my pesky voice and seeing my mobile mug on your computers some time soon.

Ok... so enough of the addendums for now....here come the blogs.

C./

(P.S. - Please make sure you sign up for any updates on the blog and for the Millionaires Race to 2010. Tell your friends and colleagues - we want this to be big enough to change the fortunes of nations - get on board now!)

07 June, 2009

The Millionaires' Race to 2010...

The Millionaires Race to 2010!


Ok… So rather than have it buried under the main story, this week this IS the main story. I’m getting so excited about this; I could just about explode into cascading fireworks all on my own.

Ok…for those of you who missed it, last week I announced the Millionaires Race to 2010. This is a project I’m starting to be able to help as many people in the US and Canada become millionaires as possible by September 1st, 2010.

This isn’t just an exercise in mass greed and depravity – it’s an effort to generate prosperity across both countries in a time when prosperity seems out of reach, debts seem insurmountable, national and business policies seem hell-bent to bankrupt us all of every generation, and foreign players are gaining ground on being purveyors of the true American Dream. This is to generate hundreds, maybe thousands of new businesses and jobs around the continent in some of the toughest economic times this country and the global economy have faced in the last hundred years.

So how exactly is this going to take place? That’s the point of tonight’s blog.

Each week I’m going to blog at least once about the Race, giving you updates about how it’s going, how far the participants are getting, what the resources we’re discovering are, new business models and plans that you can use to get started to fuel your own ideas, and so on.

This Race is going to be a whole toolkit on how to really, really, make honest money doing something worthwhile. I’m not making any recommendations to join any multi-level marketing groups, buying into franchises, investing in Madoff-like Ponzi schemes, investing in tax avoidance scams, or any of the other drivel and nonsense you find percolating over every website.

What you are going to find here will be real, honest to goodness business plans submitted by me or to me for your benefit. No one from the Chris George report is going to be making any money from anything you do by joining the Race (unless we partner with you on some specific project, of course)

As everyone gets on board and encounters some great resources for building revenues or cutting costs, we’re going to add those resources to our discussion.

As time goes by and those involved get further into the project, we’ll try and get some key experts to write in guest blogs on things like practical tips for keeping more of the money you make, debt management, charitable contributions, etc.

We’ll also get some blogs and comments from key suppliers you may want to chat with who can help you get certain parts of your ideas off the ground. No these won’t be endorsements, per se, but often times one of the hardest things for people trying to make money is to find those resources in terms of suppliers or coaches who can help them make things happen.

Successful people are never islands unto themselves. They are all capable of certain amounts and qualities of individual accomplishment, but in order to get and stay competitive they all rely on teams of experts, specialists, and helpers to get them ready for the fight. I’m going to try and bring you the best people, companies, organizations, and coaches out there to try and get you the best team of supporters I can find to help make what you’re doing as successful as I can.

This blog will be your coordination center for all those who want to help you be successful, and in turn we hope that you will be as free with any resources and help you encounter on your path to success that your fellow participants could benefit from by letting us know. Tell us what wonderful news you get; tell us when someone does you a favour that really saves the day and what led up to it. Tell us where you had your challenges and your victories, so others can avoid the pitfalls easier and help you with the challenges you’ll be facing down the road as well.

Getting started is easy – post a comment, send me an email, let me know you want to be a part of this great revolution in the North American economy and then stay tuned, because as the days and weeks go by you will see more and more concrete things you can do to get ready to start taking your own fortunes into your hands and making the world a more prosperous place.

And the grand prize? You may just be one of the continent’s newest self-made millionaires this time next year.

03 June, 2009

A Few Words of Advice to The New Cyber Security Czar…And the Race to 2010!

A Few Words of Advice to The New Cyber Security Czar…And the Race to 2010!

"Every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tried to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it was for creating the illusion of progress whilst producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization." Petronius (AD 166)

The quote above was the preface to an open letter you can see at any time on the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) website. The letter was written by former Under Secretary National Protection & Programs, Robert D. Jamison. Jamison has since been replaced in the new hierarchy by Deputy Under Secretary Philip Reitinger. This is the governmental division established in January of 2008 by President Bush to coordinate national defense and protection of our technological infrastructure, in particular the .gov domain and just about anything the government handles in the public domain.

A year later we hear numerous reports about the creation of yet another government cyber security infrastructure and the appointment of yet another cyber security Chief. This follows, according to numerous reports, more than 20 previous efforts by the government over the last few years to reorganize, reshuffle, and recreate the government body with responsibility for keeping our electronically run world safe.

The truth is, the scale of the problem is, not as former Under Secretary Jamison put it, ‘monumental’, but more accurately securing our technological resources under a single authority is nigh on organizationally impossible.

I relate this experiment to the example of the amalgamation of the small, localized advertising agencies into the monoliths of teetering global consultancies that, while dominating the global ad market, are forever on the verge of financial rack and ruin. In the nineties a select few ad agencies started buying and merging with every agency they could find. If you really want an erudite and comprehensive, if long winded, dissertation on the subject then go read Goldman’s book, “Saatchi and Saatchi.”

The result is that the monoliths can always produce volumes of work, but they’ve more or less lost the creative competition that their clients made extraordinary efforts to acquire in the first place. In advertising agencies that creative competition is their only raison d’etre. Similarly, by amalgamating all of the cyber security personnel into one organization you accomplish the goal of saving duplication of resources and provide singular levels of matching security across all applications, but you sacrifice the ability to respond to and prepare for threats flexibly and you also lose the competition between colleagues to find better and better ways to enhance security. You also lose the advantage of having multiple systems of defense by restricting implementation to only those that suit the purposes of the monolith – the one-size fits all approach.

This means that all they have to do is beat your one standard and they can replicate their success across any barriers you’ve erected because they know how you think.

So my first piece of advice to the new Czar? Delegate. Delegate back down the chain to establish functional zones of protection that share techniques and technologies with each other but that have a certain autonomy so that they can achieve successes independently and hold each group accountable independently.

My second piece of advice is to minimize the number of government organizations that have been replicated already to do the same thing a dozen different ways.

Ok, so that sounds like contrarian advice but hang with me for a moment; my intent is to develop mid-level authorities and capacities coordinated by a singular, central authority. The reiteration of competing authorities all imbued with presidential authorities to rule the roost is quite a different thing altogether. Negotiate, coordinate, and delineate responsibilities with and between your corollary agencies sensibly. It is not the time for a power grab and to establish political empires – this is far too serious a time for that.

And now, dear readers, how this applies to you… I bet you’ve been waiting for this since the beginning of the blog, right?

One of the biggest challenges that will face the new administration is their promise to make all medical records electronic within the next few years so as to create financial efficiencies and improve medical responses by offering consolidation and coordination of medical records in a single government authority.

In plain English, to crooks, terrorists, and wrong-doers, it means that they (the government) are creating one of the biggest targets for personal and government data theft in the world. The ability to steal, hack, adjust or delete electronic profiles of biometric data (the same thing used to make sure your passport says you’re you) will be the primary target of some of the most unsavoury individuals in the world. And the data they’ll be stealing or attempting to steal will be yours.

The good news as that there are thousands of trained professionals working on solving the problem of cyber security worldwide. The bad news is they need millions of people working on it 24 hours a day, 365 days a year because the size of the problem is that immense.

The action you need to take, therefore, is this – until we can solve the problems with the security of the data and facilities we have today, we really shouldn’t be creating yet another oversized, value-rich target for our enemies to attack. We need our government to stop and think about the impact of dumping all of our records into one big box, wrapped up with a bow sitting on the window ledge with a sign on it saying “Steal Me.”

Even if the best result should happen, suppose errors *might* be made. Just…suppose…. Have you ever had to try and get an error off your credit report? Just how easy do you think it’ll be to get an error off your government run medical records?

Call, write, email, send smoke signals, light the Bat-light – but let your government know how important it is that they develop a real plan for the security of our national electronic resources, and then, and only then, can they begin the next monolithic task of exploring a national health records project.

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Race to 2010...
I promised that each blog I write I’ll try and include a good news story to go with the more demanding articles. Today is perhaps a more personal story on that front, but it remains, nonetheless a substantive one.

See I have a plan. I have a plan to bring success and resources to as many people as I can. Ok…we can exclude the crooks, phonies, lazy useless jerks, et al, but for moment, the rest of us know who I’m talking about.

One of the key things about building a successful business is building on a strong product or service with a variety of corollary revenue streams. For lack of a better description, building a diversified portfolio of revenue streams that reflexively also encourage the sales of the business’ primary products and services.

This is not the same thing as simply adding more fees to what you already do without changing or improving the offering to your customer. For all intents and purposes, that’s just playing with the price, and in every case I’ve ever analyzed it always comes back to bite you. A*L*W*A*Y*S.

No what I’m referring to are those services or products that make your customers want to come back to buy from you again, even when your main product or service isn’t quite what they’re looking for.

But suppose you’re not a business owner… what good does that do you? Maybe you never wanted to run your own business, maybe it’s the last thing on your mind. Fair enough. Relate it to whatever income you have. The theory applies equally.

Suppose you work at a job with an hourly rate. You can work overtime or pick up shifts from a colleague to make a little extra for a while. You can have a bake sale, you can sell some crafts, have a yard sale, do some handywork for a neighbour, or pick up a second job. Maybe you could have your car wrapped with advertising or rent out a room or your family cottage. You could invest in property or something else. But the more often your corollary income reflects a way for you to increase your rate of pay from your main revenue source, the better the results will be.

NOW WAIT ONE COTTON_PICKIN’ MINUTE!!!!!

This is NOT an endorsement of conflict of interest. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The objective *must* be a situation that is a win-win with all the appropriate ethics, morals, etc at play. Otherwise, again, you’ll just be asking for trouble.

So those of you who are business pros, that whole batch above means absolutely squat – you’ve seen it a million times before, right?

Wrong. The point here is that I am working on the final details of a plan to help several thousand people do just that – build new, strong, stable primary and corollary incomes (and no, I don’t mean MLM marketing!!!!!)

I’m looking for a “few good men and women” who want to see a concrete, tangible, verifiable plan to build wealth at a pace and volume that *they* dictate (within reason). I’m hoping to have a few thousand registered by the end of the summer, and by the end of the fall we should see some stunning results already, if I’m right.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. I’m not promising anything that doesn’t involve hard work, some extra hours, and a little getting outside of your comfort zone. I’m not promising a plan that’s entirely free – you *can* sink as much money as you want into it, but I won’t get a dime for whatever you’re doing as a result.

But what I am promising is that I will make my best effort to show you how to make money like you’ve never seen, in legal, honest, traditional business models – no fly-by-night crap, no “you must by 27 videos just to join, no scams, no BS.”

And better yet, I’m going to post the guts and details of the plan on the blog over the coming posts in between other good news stories. Free.

Now Glenn Beck has the 912 project, which is a marvelous effort to bring Americans of every political stripe together to achieve political community and shared discourse in this country.

My goal is to help Americans of every political and financial stripe to achieve financial success through positive shared discourse in this country. I was thinking of calling it the 913 project as a result but then thought better of it. Sorry Glenn, I tried.
Then I thought of the way Americans and the west pulled together to win the race to the moon. The technologies and prosperity that resulted from those efforts has its fingers and feelers right through today. Your microwave popcorn, GPS navigators, satellite radio, and so on, all have their origins in that monumental social push behind NASA.

So here is what I think my goal should be. I want to raise as many millionaires as possible (legally, taxes paid, all the good stuff) within a 1-year window. So, starting September 1st, I will launch the new race to financial success and see how effective it was by the following September 1st. And if it works out like I hope, then we’ll try and top it each and every year after that until Americans and Canadians alike have achieved financial success individually, collectively, and nationally. By which point, hopefully, I’ll have written myself out of a job.

So get ready, world! We’re laying the ground work for the Race to 2010!

Chris George.