I get asked by businesses how they can add revenues and 'pick up business.' I'm always amazed that the answers aren't obvious - offer something new that will attract customers or that will get your current customers to buy more often from you.
Ok, smartie pants. I know, "That and a buck will maybe get you a cup of cheap coffee."
No, really. Here's an example.
Suppose you own a restaurant. Most restaurants have a certain seasonality to their customer base. If you run a restaurant near a university or college, then your season depends on when the students are in town. If you operate near a major employer, then your traffic is going to depend on their financial health and their work schedules. If you work out doors, you are dependent on the weather. in other words, you have high and low periods, and you want to find a way to generate more sales in the low periods too.
Fair enough.
I can't count the number of times I've seen this stat, but I know it to be true: The cost of getting a sale from 1 new customer is 7 times as much as getting a sale from a retourning customer.
What that means is that you must advertise, discount, promote, introduce, etc. in order to get a new customer. A returning customer already knows about you and knows what they are most likely to want to buy from you before they start.
So if you want to grow your customer base, it only makes sense to encourage your existing customers to bring new customers with them, thereby doubling your sales and introducing new customers to your business. It's far cheaper and faster than trying to go get new customers from scratch. Honest.
So how do you do *that*, then?
Simple - give them something new when they bring a new customer on board and give them the best experience they've had with you and your sales will go up.
And yes, 2-for-1's do work to a degree, but that doesn't create buzz or lasting interest. It only creates a temporary boost at a dramatic cost.
No, I mean come up with a new product that your existing customers will go nuts for and encourage them to bring in new customers to buy them too.
For restaurants you could try a new cocktail of the week special and a course on making cocktails and a recipe book to sell with it.
For clothing stores, have a retro fashion show and sell a book on your store's history of fashion, along with a whole rack of retro clothes for sale. It'll clear out old inventory, and bring a feeling of belonging to the store to its customers.
For electronics stores sell an E-book on how to wire electronics gizmos when you get them home. We all know those stupid instructions booklets are utterly useless!
The list is endless - really.
The question isn't can you get more sales, the question is what are you prepared to offer to get them? Are you simply going to do a couponing, or are you going to give the customer something they'll remember, talk about and come back with friends to buy something else from you next time?
30 July, 2009
How to make a Million Dollars.
So you've been patiently reading along, waiting for the day when I tell you step by step how you make a lot of money in less than a year, preferably more than a million dollars, right?
Ok, I will. First, know that this is not the only way to do it, and I have about a hundred other ideas that are every bit as likely to make a lot of money on any given day. This is just ONE way to do it so you know I'm not full of crap.
If you've read any of my prior blogs in preparation for the Race to 2010 and you actually filled out any of the Baselines then you should already have a good idea or two of what skills or knowledge base you may have that others might find interesting. That's your starting point, right there.
The trick is to find a way to share that knowledge or skill with others, this way you can share it over and over again, getting paid each time for the benefit of your talents or expertise.
You can give courses, you can make a DVD/CD-ROM, write a book, develop a website - whatever fits your personality, skills and budget. Then you sell that product to the people who'll use it (and pay for it!)
Simple, right? So why isn't everyone who does that kind of thing filthy rich?
Usually it's a combination of not knowing how to sell their product, where to sell it, or what kind of product is needed by the consumer. Basically it's inexperience in running a business, not in your product itself.
Here's one example:
A carpenter who lost his job building houses in the current economy could write up a book full of step by step instructions on how to make things - bird houses, composters, shelves, armoires, furniture, dining room tables, cabinetry - whatever floats your boat. Then have them published by an on-demand publisher who will charge by the book. You find them online and go for one that gives you the most tools and lowest priced copies for the most minimal investment on your part. You should be able to find it for $50 or less.
Set up a demonstration booth just about anywhere the public passes by that you can legally set one up. Hopefully where you think a lot of potential customers would be likely to be. Have copies of your books and sign up sheets for your courses available for sale and start raking in the dough. You should be able to sell 10-50 copies a day in a reasonable location while demonstrating, plus sell the demo products and sell another 5-20 training class fees per day as well.
If you make $25 profit per book and another $25 per class and another $200 in demo product sales, then you're looking at approx $1450 per day, $7250 per week, $350k per year. Or better.
If your book sells well online or you get a sponsorship to do your demos in home reno stores across the country then you can expect that number to climb quickly.
If you can put together a second book you could add another $700-$1250 per day right there, and you'd be heading up closer to the $700k mark very quickly.
See where I'm going here?
Virtually any area of knowledge or talent or skill can be reproduced and sold. It's how you manage the selling and the quality and value of the product that makes you the money.
I can help you figure out your product, help you design a serious marketing and sales strategy to make it profitable, and help get you launched on your way to making some serious cash - but you have to take the first few steps.
Ok, I will. First, know that this is not the only way to do it, and I have about a hundred other ideas that are every bit as likely to make a lot of money on any given day. This is just ONE way to do it so you know I'm not full of crap.
If you've read any of my prior blogs in preparation for the Race to 2010 and you actually filled out any of the Baselines then you should already have a good idea or two of what skills or knowledge base you may have that others might find interesting. That's your starting point, right there.
The trick is to find a way to share that knowledge or skill with others, this way you can share it over and over again, getting paid each time for the benefit of your talents or expertise.
You can give courses, you can make a DVD/CD-ROM, write a book, develop a website - whatever fits your personality, skills and budget. Then you sell that product to the people who'll use it (and pay for it!)
Simple, right? So why isn't everyone who does that kind of thing filthy rich?
Usually it's a combination of not knowing how to sell their product, where to sell it, or what kind of product is needed by the consumer. Basically it's inexperience in running a business, not in your product itself.
Here's one example:
A carpenter who lost his job building houses in the current economy could write up a book full of step by step instructions on how to make things - bird houses, composters, shelves, armoires, furniture, dining room tables, cabinetry - whatever floats your boat. Then have them published by an on-demand publisher who will charge by the book. You find them online and go for one that gives you the most tools and lowest priced copies for the most minimal investment on your part. You should be able to find it for $50 or less.
Set up a demonstration booth just about anywhere the public passes by that you can legally set one up. Hopefully where you think a lot of potential customers would be likely to be. Have copies of your books and sign up sheets for your courses available for sale and start raking in the dough. You should be able to sell 10-50 copies a day in a reasonable location while demonstrating, plus sell the demo products and sell another 5-20 training class fees per day as well.
If you make $25 profit per book and another $25 per class and another $200 in demo product sales, then you're looking at approx $1450 per day, $7250 per week, $350k per year. Or better.
If your book sells well online or you get a sponsorship to do your demos in home reno stores across the country then you can expect that number to climb quickly.
If you can put together a second book you could add another $700-$1250 per day right there, and you'd be heading up closer to the $700k mark very quickly.
See where I'm going here?
Virtually any area of knowledge or talent or skill can be reproduced and sold. It's how you manage the selling and the quality and value of the product that makes you the money.
I can help you figure out your product, help you design a serious marketing and sales strategy to make it profitable, and help get you launched on your way to making some serious cash - but you have to take the first few steps.
12 July, 2009
My plan for saving Education.
This is my plan for saving the education system. It's doable, implementable, and financially attainable all on its own and it will save the US education system more than $13.5 Billion each and every year.
Whether at the state, province, regional or national levels, the outcry for finding a way to cut the cost and improve the quality of education in North America has never been more vocal and more profound than it is during the current economic crisis.
As always, bureaucrats threaten to cut back on teachers and textbooks instead of looking serious cost factors in the eye or to address key areas of mismanagement in the schools, boards, and education departments.
Sure it’s easy for me to be an armchair quarterback – anyone could challenge my credentials to jump into this debate. I have no kids, I’m not in school, I’m an adjunct professor but not currently teaching any classes – frankly, what could I contribute to the discussion?
The answer is “Quite a lot, really.”
One of the biggest complaints that schools have is the complaint of not having enough textbooks. California looked at having everything go electronic before remembering that one poorly timed rainstorm could destroy not only a laptop computer but a region’s ability to learn.
The reality is that textbooks today seem to cost a lot of money as they are selectively applied to different districts, so no savings seem to be generated by the scale of the markets involved. Plus, different schools have different wear/use/purchase cycles, so buying en masse doesn’t seem to work too well.
But wait a minute… is that really the problem?
No, it isn’t. The problem is that textbooks often cost over a hundred dollars per student per course and the material included does not necessarily address everything covered in that particular course. Often it does not even cover all of the core elements as outlined in the course curricula.
So if the textbooks don’t quite match exactly what we’re looking for, and they’re very expensive, it begs the question, “Can we handle this a better way?”
Suppose that we have staff in each of these boards and departments of education whose sole purpose is to develop and test curricula and teaching tools throughout the year. I know, crazy thought, but suppose that that was something that happened in these boards and departments of education – that we have qualified training and educational experts designing training and educational curricula and training materials; hey, it could happen.
So supposing this were true… Wouldn’t they have to know enough about the material they were working with to be fairly thoroughly knowledgeable about the subjects?
Would it be possible…I mean, just throwing it out there… possible, that *they* could be writing the textbooks? I mean, since they are also writing the curricula and training materials, is it really that big a leap to add in a few salaries for people to actually *write* the textbooks in-house so they include the material covered by the curricula and the curricula covers what’s actually in the textbooks?
OK, ok, I know. Radical thinking here. But how does that save us any money at all, you could ask?
Good question! I’m so glad you did! Now here comes the exciting part! We can have the textbooks printed through a print on demand publisher for $3-10 a book instead of the hundred+ dollars a book that most textbooks cost today. And! Get this… other education departments that want to cut some costs can literally eliminate hundreds of unnecessary curriculum developers and board/department staff by simply buying the materials (at a small surplus for the benefit of the department doing the work) and save both the cost of the textbook mark-ups AND the staffing costs!
But wait! There’s more! Oh, is this plan good or what???
20/20, various news shows, and numerous other witness anecdotal evidence sources have demonstrated that a large number (700 in one NY district alone) of staffers in some of these boards and departments are employees who have been removed from the classroom or other positions for, diplomatically speaking, a number of darned good reasons. And yet the boards and departments are legally unable to fire them and do not want them in the classrooms either, so they are paid full salaries to either not work or to make work.
Why not *put them* to work? Supervise their research and writing of curricula, textbooks, training materials, or other productive elements of the training and educational lifecycle and either they will save you money and do something useful or they will demonstrate their incompetence for the job, insubordination to authority, or other actually fireable offences.
Either way you win. You either stop paying for people who shouldn’t be in the industry or you get some work out of them before they drive us all bankrupt. The key is to supervise them thoroughly, but if you do that one thing, the rest of it actually works.
You save on unnecessary salaries. You save on the purchase price of textbooks. You gain productivity and save on salaries for people who shouldn’t be in the system to begin with…
If a state has 1 million students in it and they have even 3 courses a year for which we can save $90 each on textbooks per course then we can save each state in the Union an average of $270,000,000, or nationally that works out to more than $13.5 Billion (with a B), just in textbooks alone. *Guess at what the salary savings would be on top of that.* Go on, guess.
Suppose that over time we were able to convert upto 7 courses per student per year that way to print on demand published books designed, written and published by the board or the department of each state? We could save $30 Billion or more, right?
How many more teachers could we afford to put into classrooms? How many teachers’ aides? How much better will the quality of education be if it actually covers what the curriculum says it should in the first place? How much more, better, more useful material can be included for the price than we get out of traditional textbooks?
How easy is it to update it and come out with a new edition when it’s print on demand technology?
How easy is it to resolve the tricky classroom issues of copyrights of existing textbooks by having textbooks whose copyrights belonged to the board or the state?
How much more directly can the training materials reflect the needs of the classroom when they work directly with the teachers teaching from the work of their colleagues in the boards?
How great is it that we can finally find a way to either get rid of administrative deadwood or put it to work doing something useful for a change under direct active supervision?
My textbook plan isn’t a cure for all of the ills in the education system to be sure, but does it make any sense to look a gift horse in the mouth?
Whether at the state, province, regional or national levels, the outcry for finding a way to cut the cost and improve the quality of education in North America has never been more vocal and more profound than it is during the current economic crisis.
As always, bureaucrats threaten to cut back on teachers and textbooks instead of looking serious cost factors in the eye or to address key areas of mismanagement in the schools, boards, and education departments.
Sure it’s easy for me to be an armchair quarterback – anyone could challenge my credentials to jump into this debate. I have no kids, I’m not in school, I’m an adjunct professor but not currently teaching any classes – frankly, what could I contribute to the discussion?
The answer is “Quite a lot, really.”
One of the biggest complaints that schools have is the complaint of not having enough textbooks. California looked at having everything go electronic before remembering that one poorly timed rainstorm could destroy not only a laptop computer but a region’s ability to learn.
The reality is that textbooks today seem to cost a lot of money as they are selectively applied to different districts, so no savings seem to be generated by the scale of the markets involved. Plus, different schools have different wear/use/purchase cycles, so buying en masse doesn’t seem to work too well.
But wait a minute… is that really the problem?
No, it isn’t. The problem is that textbooks often cost over a hundred dollars per student per course and the material included does not necessarily address everything covered in that particular course. Often it does not even cover all of the core elements as outlined in the course curricula.
So if the textbooks don’t quite match exactly what we’re looking for, and they’re very expensive, it begs the question, “Can we handle this a better way?”
Suppose that we have staff in each of these boards and departments of education whose sole purpose is to develop and test curricula and teaching tools throughout the year. I know, crazy thought, but suppose that that was something that happened in these boards and departments of education – that we have qualified training and educational experts designing training and educational curricula and training materials; hey, it could happen.
So supposing this were true… Wouldn’t they have to know enough about the material they were working with to be fairly thoroughly knowledgeable about the subjects?
Would it be possible…I mean, just throwing it out there… possible, that *they* could be writing the textbooks? I mean, since they are also writing the curricula and training materials, is it really that big a leap to add in a few salaries for people to actually *write* the textbooks in-house so they include the material covered by the curricula and the curricula covers what’s actually in the textbooks?
OK, ok, I know. Radical thinking here. But how does that save us any money at all, you could ask?
Good question! I’m so glad you did! Now here comes the exciting part! We can have the textbooks printed through a print on demand publisher for $3-10 a book instead of the hundred+ dollars a book that most textbooks cost today. And! Get this… other education departments that want to cut some costs can literally eliminate hundreds of unnecessary curriculum developers and board/department staff by simply buying the materials (at a small surplus for the benefit of the department doing the work) and save both the cost of the textbook mark-ups AND the staffing costs!
But wait! There’s more! Oh, is this plan good or what???
20/20, various news shows, and numerous other witness anecdotal evidence sources have demonstrated that a large number (700 in one NY district alone) of staffers in some of these boards and departments are employees who have been removed from the classroom or other positions for, diplomatically speaking, a number of darned good reasons. And yet the boards and departments are legally unable to fire them and do not want them in the classrooms either, so they are paid full salaries to either not work or to make work.
Why not *put them* to work? Supervise their research and writing of curricula, textbooks, training materials, or other productive elements of the training and educational lifecycle and either they will save you money and do something useful or they will demonstrate their incompetence for the job, insubordination to authority, or other actually fireable offences.
Either way you win. You either stop paying for people who shouldn’t be in the industry or you get some work out of them before they drive us all bankrupt. The key is to supervise them thoroughly, but if you do that one thing, the rest of it actually works.
You save on unnecessary salaries. You save on the purchase price of textbooks. You gain productivity and save on salaries for people who shouldn’t be in the system to begin with…
If a state has 1 million students in it and they have even 3 courses a year for which we can save $90 each on textbooks per course then we can save each state in the Union an average of $270,000,000, or nationally that works out to more than $13.5 Billion (with a B), just in textbooks alone. *Guess at what the salary savings would be on top of that.* Go on, guess.
Suppose that over time we were able to convert upto 7 courses per student per year that way to print on demand published books designed, written and published by the board or the department of each state? We could save $30 Billion or more, right?
How many more teachers could we afford to put into classrooms? How many teachers’ aides? How much better will the quality of education be if it actually covers what the curriculum says it should in the first place? How much more, better, more useful material can be included for the price than we get out of traditional textbooks?
How easy is it to update it and come out with a new edition when it’s print on demand technology?
How easy is it to resolve the tricky classroom issues of copyrights of existing textbooks by having textbooks whose copyrights belonged to the board or the state?
How much more directly can the training materials reflect the needs of the classroom when they work directly with the teachers teaching from the work of their colleagues in the boards?
How great is it that we can finally find a way to either get rid of administrative deadwood or put it to work doing something useful for a change under direct active supervision?
My textbook plan isn’t a cure for all of the ills in the education system to be sure, but does it make any sense to look a gift horse in the mouth?
11 July, 2009
Do I Feel Lucky?
Do I Feel Lucky?
(A Competitive Intelligence Blog.)
Over the last 7 days several news stories have emerged about key breakthroughs in deciphering major encryption patterns – one was a cypher system developed at the founding of our nation that had not been broken until now, and the other popularly reported story was the fact that with at least a 44% accuracy rate that the Social Security system of assigning numbers to applicants can be deciphered with extraordinarily minute amounts of personal data (all of which is freely and publicly available).
In most respects this news doesn’t have the slightest impact on the day to day lives of the average American, and no one is really paying a whole lot of attention to it.
As far as competitive intelligence goes, most American corporations aren’t paying any attention to it either.
As I delve into the subject more and more as a way to teach, explain and identify tools, opportunities, and risks from competitive intelligence research and analysis, I keep tripping over elementary steps that I haven’t had to carry out for years that are now ever more important than before.
Here’s one of them…
Much has been made of the ending of the Cold War as the basis for substantially reduced need for human intelligence activities and substantially reduced pre-employment screening and interviewing. This in turn has led to substantial reductions in the kinds and quantities of in-house mentoring and supervision that used to take place to both develop talent in-house and to protect individuals and companies from potentially disastrous hires.
Since we’re no longer looking for ‘Reds under the Beds’ or any of those traditional misnomers for those relatively harsh hiring restrictions in place during the peak of the Cold War, theoretically this should have saved us millions, even billions of dollars nation-wide, creating immense prosperity, and in some ways it did. It can be argued that the 80’s and 90’s represented periods of unprecedented growth as a result of the freeing of the employment restrictions and the reduced costs of hiring and monitoring and supervision.
That argument, though, falls flat very quickly when you also include the point that was predominant with every insurance salesperson and presentation that has ever been made in the last 25 years – the baby boomers’ retirement savings plans were the primary source of that economic boom, not the ‘peace dividend.’
Now how does this tie in to the news stories about breaking cyphers and encryption systems?
One of the key things that happens to be in the news today is the requirement of employers to do adequate background checks to make sure that employees, new and long-term are all legally allowed to work here. This is to help minimize risks involved in hiring illegal immigrants and undesirables like terrorists and criminals on the run.
To facilitate this activity employers have been given access to double blind systems that the government offers to submit SSNs to that the government can then read in order to determine a worker’s authorization to be here.
Now that the SSN encryption system is broken, even partially (and 44% odds are pretty darned good ones for gambling with) any organized crime syndicate can replicate with substantial ease the SSN’s of citizens from across the country, living, dead, missing, or adjusted so as to pass this inspection methodology in spite of itself by taking publicly available data and using it to generate false identities and documents.
It also means that corporate id theft is liable to explode in the coming months and years.
Imagine if you will that you’re a crook out to make a big heist and make it look legitimate.
You take the name of a corporate executive from the articles of the Wall Street Journal. You look online for that executive’s biography and become familiar with the details of their career and their personal background from freely available public sources. You even get your hands on the last 4 digits of their social security number from a number of sources as organizations, companies, and government agencies often use them as usernames or identifiers for their employees and customers.
You feed any of this information into the algorithm that spits out the rest of the individual’s SSN. Once you have this information, you generate the relevant correspondence trail that creates new legal documentation of the identity and get yourself a new SSN card, a new driver’s license out of state, new unused credit cards, a new passport even.
You then set up a business in a non-extradition country in your new name as a ‘division’ of the company that the real person runs, but whose ownership is not the originating company but the ‘new’ you.
‘Your’ new company does business buying and selling on the credit or at least the good name of both the original person and their original company. Everyone thinks that you’re them. You have credit, you have clout, you have power. And when it all goes away, you even have a scapegoat. You walk away with the assets and profits, and they’re left with insurmountable losses and fraud and perhaps even criminal records in a variety of countries established in absentia.
If you think this could not happen, think again. Even without the benefit of legal documents from SSN generated false identity documents, NEC as a corporation was taken for billions over a period of 5 years on a very similar trick. Now we’re going to see it happen with legal documentation supplied by the government to make it harder to fight.
Good competitive intelligence is the tool that gives you access to where your risk factors stand at any given time. It helps you to track transactions, suppliers, competitors, customers, and most importantly irregularities in other companies’ cash flows and investment/revenue patterns.
BI, or business intelligence tends to rely primarily on customer tracking – monitoring what customer purchasing trends are telling you only tells you so much. Hoovers, Dun and Bradstreet and the other notable credit and corporate analytics firms only are able to offer you high-end overviews, not detailed data that comes from long term relationships in the marketplace for companies that aren’t yours and aren’t doing business with you, but are doing business with your competition for the first time in a country or region or product line you’re not keeping your eye on.
With international credit reporting rules that will prevent/impede distribution of this kind of data, your good name and your company’s good name are on the one hand protected, but on the other hand grievously exposed to abuse by those who aim to circumvent the right and honourable ways to do things.
This is why BI alone is not enough to capitalize and defend market trends – competitive intelligence is a required asset, not just a piece of suggested reading material for those long hotel nights on business trips when you wanted something to read to put you to sleep.
And last but not least – about that peace dividend? More and more evidence is coming to light that whereas the good guys ramped down their intelligence infrastructure, the bad guys ramped theirs up and unleashed it on the global marketplace. There is mounting evidence to suggest that the biggest players in the oil speculation market that affects everything from the price of gas to air travel to basic groceries and heating and cooling utilities costs are not the middle eastern oil countries but the oil speculators who get their information from ‘ex-intelligence services’ personnel connected to organized crime and national energy supply firms in various countries.
The beneficiaries of this data have made huge gains over the decades by using progressive political gains to open up new markets for speculative investments and playing those gains against structured speculation in the oil and gas markets and consumer goods markets. Once those markets reached saturation of demand, the speculators yanked their investments out at a tremendous gain and put their money in currency plays to devalue national currency markets simultaneously generating windfall profits and ungluing whole national economies. This encourages world leaders to listen to their political views more seriously or face massive economic consequences.
Evidence of this kind of predatory economic attack has been mounting for years and the economies of Great Britain, Italy, the US, France and others have each been systematically targeted and attacked by these speculative investors, and evidence of their information sources has until recently been merely a matter of surmise. Under the Peace Dividend it clearly could not have been an intentional attempt to undermine national economies or security, right?
As new evidence is coming to light in the wake of the current global economic downturn, we’re starting to see patterns of behaviour, information pathways, human linkages, and human intelligence networks emerging as the bases of these problems. And none of them are people working for the good guys.
The question you have to ask yourself now is this: Are you prepared to enter the global business marketplace blind, uninformed and handcuffed by lack of critical data, or are you keen to find profit-making opportunities by undermining global networks of crooks, bad guys and globally savvy competitors?
The question is… ‘Do I feel lucky?’
Well….. Do you?
(A Competitive Intelligence Blog.)
Over the last 7 days several news stories have emerged about key breakthroughs in deciphering major encryption patterns – one was a cypher system developed at the founding of our nation that had not been broken until now, and the other popularly reported story was the fact that with at least a 44% accuracy rate that the Social Security system of assigning numbers to applicants can be deciphered with extraordinarily minute amounts of personal data (all of which is freely and publicly available).
In most respects this news doesn’t have the slightest impact on the day to day lives of the average American, and no one is really paying a whole lot of attention to it.
As far as competitive intelligence goes, most American corporations aren’t paying any attention to it either.
As I delve into the subject more and more as a way to teach, explain and identify tools, opportunities, and risks from competitive intelligence research and analysis, I keep tripping over elementary steps that I haven’t had to carry out for years that are now ever more important than before.
Here’s one of them…
Much has been made of the ending of the Cold War as the basis for substantially reduced need for human intelligence activities and substantially reduced pre-employment screening and interviewing. This in turn has led to substantial reductions in the kinds and quantities of in-house mentoring and supervision that used to take place to both develop talent in-house and to protect individuals and companies from potentially disastrous hires.
Since we’re no longer looking for ‘Reds under the Beds’ or any of those traditional misnomers for those relatively harsh hiring restrictions in place during the peak of the Cold War, theoretically this should have saved us millions, even billions of dollars nation-wide, creating immense prosperity, and in some ways it did. It can be argued that the 80’s and 90’s represented periods of unprecedented growth as a result of the freeing of the employment restrictions and the reduced costs of hiring and monitoring and supervision.
That argument, though, falls flat very quickly when you also include the point that was predominant with every insurance salesperson and presentation that has ever been made in the last 25 years – the baby boomers’ retirement savings plans were the primary source of that economic boom, not the ‘peace dividend.’
Now how does this tie in to the news stories about breaking cyphers and encryption systems?
One of the key things that happens to be in the news today is the requirement of employers to do adequate background checks to make sure that employees, new and long-term are all legally allowed to work here. This is to help minimize risks involved in hiring illegal immigrants and undesirables like terrorists and criminals on the run.
To facilitate this activity employers have been given access to double blind systems that the government offers to submit SSNs to that the government can then read in order to determine a worker’s authorization to be here.
Now that the SSN encryption system is broken, even partially (and 44% odds are pretty darned good ones for gambling with) any organized crime syndicate can replicate with substantial ease the SSN’s of citizens from across the country, living, dead, missing, or adjusted so as to pass this inspection methodology in spite of itself by taking publicly available data and using it to generate false identities and documents.
It also means that corporate id theft is liable to explode in the coming months and years.
Imagine if you will that you’re a crook out to make a big heist and make it look legitimate.
You take the name of a corporate executive from the articles of the Wall Street Journal. You look online for that executive’s biography and become familiar with the details of their career and their personal background from freely available public sources. You even get your hands on the last 4 digits of their social security number from a number of sources as organizations, companies, and government agencies often use them as usernames or identifiers for their employees and customers.
You feed any of this information into the algorithm that spits out the rest of the individual’s SSN. Once you have this information, you generate the relevant correspondence trail that creates new legal documentation of the identity and get yourself a new SSN card, a new driver’s license out of state, new unused credit cards, a new passport even.
You then set up a business in a non-extradition country in your new name as a ‘division’ of the company that the real person runs, but whose ownership is not the originating company but the ‘new’ you.
‘Your’ new company does business buying and selling on the credit or at least the good name of both the original person and their original company. Everyone thinks that you’re them. You have credit, you have clout, you have power. And when it all goes away, you even have a scapegoat. You walk away with the assets and profits, and they’re left with insurmountable losses and fraud and perhaps even criminal records in a variety of countries established in absentia.
If you think this could not happen, think again. Even without the benefit of legal documents from SSN generated false identity documents, NEC as a corporation was taken for billions over a period of 5 years on a very similar trick. Now we’re going to see it happen with legal documentation supplied by the government to make it harder to fight.
Good competitive intelligence is the tool that gives you access to where your risk factors stand at any given time. It helps you to track transactions, suppliers, competitors, customers, and most importantly irregularities in other companies’ cash flows and investment/revenue patterns.
BI, or business intelligence tends to rely primarily on customer tracking – monitoring what customer purchasing trends are telling you only tells you so much. Hoovers, Dun and Bradstreet and the other notable credit and corporate analytics firms only are able to offer you high-end overviews, not detailed data that comes from long term relationships in the marketplace for companies that aren’t yours and aren’t doing business with you, but are doing business with your competition for the first time in a country or region or product line you’re not keeping your eye on.
With international credit reporting rules that will prevent/impede distribution of this kind of data, your good name and your company’s good name are on the one hand protected, but on the other hand grievously exposed to abuse by those who aim to circumvent the right and honourable ways to do things.
This is why BI alone is not enough to capitalize and defend market trends – competitive intelligence is a required asset, not just a piece of suggested reading material for those long hotel nights on business trips when you wanted something to read to put you to sleep.
And last but not least – about that peace dividend? More and more evidence is coming to light that whereas the good guys ramped down their intelligence infrastructure, the bad guys ramped theirs up and unleashed it on the global marketplace. There is mounting evidence to suggest that the biggest players in the oil speculation market that affects everything from the price of gas to air travel to basic groceries and heating and cooling utilities costs are not the middle eastern oil countries but the oil speculators who get their information from ‘ex-intelligence services’ personnel connected to organized crime and national energy supply firms in various countries.
The beneficiaries of this data have made huge gains over the decades by using progressive political gains to open up new markets for speculative investments and playing those gains against structured speculation in the oil and gas markets and consumer goods markets. Once those markets reached saturation of demand, the speculators yanked their investments out at a tremendous gain and put their money in currency plays to devalue national currency markets simultaneously generating windfall profits and ungluing whole national economies. This encourages world leaders to listen to their political views more seriously or face massive economic consequences.
Evidence of this kind of predatory economic attack has been mounting for years and the economies of Great Britain, Italy, the US, France and others have each been systematically targeted and attacked by these speculative investors, and evidence of their information sources has until recently been merely a matter of surmise. Under the Peace Dividend it clearly could not have been an intentional attempt to undermine national economies or security, right?
As new evidence is coming to light in the wake of the current global economic downturn, we’re starting to see patterns of behaviour, information pathways, human linkages, and human intelligence networks emerging as the bases of these problems. And none of them are people working for the good guys.
The question you have to ask yourself now is this: Are you prepared to enter the global business marketplace blind, uninformed and handcuffed by lack of critical data, or are you keen to find profit-making opportunities by undermining global networks of crooks, bad guys and globally savvy competitors?
The question is… ‘Do I feel lucky?’
Well….. Do you?
09 July, 2009
Welcome Notes:
Welcome Notes:
This particular note is for my new readers. Even if you are not one of my new readers, but one of my returning friends and guests, I still think it’s worth reading, so I beg your patience as I introduce what the objective of this outlet is all about.
Obviously it’s about whatever crosses my mind as important, but I’m sparing the world at large the need to weed through *everything* I’m thinking about to get to certain specific topics.
This blog routinely deals with several key subjects that cross my brain and my research on a daily or almost daily basis – Competitive Intelligence, Business News, Risk Management, Marketing, Personal Achievement, and yes, Art. And most of those subjects have found a focus in one of my projects, The Millionaires’ Race to 2010, which you will hear about a lot if you become a regular reader, which of course I hope you do.
First a quick word about the Race, why it’s important and why it belongs here as a regular topic:
The Race, or The Millionaires’ Race to 2010, is a social marketing project designed to be a proactive step we can all take to both turn the national economies around and provide individual success and financial security in this era of economic turmoil.
The idea is to help people connect with each other in ways that stimulate action in developing new ideas, new businesses, new revenue streams, and new relationships to help solve the hurdles that impede success.
Those of you who know me, know me well enough to know that I categorically *hate* phrases like the one above because they usually mean these kinds of empty promises of hope and miraculous successes that you see and hear in late night TV sales pitches.
The truth is that there is a reason why this particular phrase is so positive – the reason is that it’s actually happening. It’s working. A little more each day as people hear about it and start thinking about it and getting more comfortable with it, and finally start getting into it and getting their hands dirty making it happen. There is real momentum starting to percolate with it.
This brings us back to why this project belongs here in this blog about business subjects, personal achievement and art. It belongs here because it is designed to further all of those subjects together by uniting them in a common focus.
It’s a story about each of us growing and achieving important things personally and together. It’s about the trials and tribulations of growing new businesses. It’s about art, graphic design, events, community, entertainment, haute couture and bas couture; it’s about t-shirts and about advertising. It’s about making all of these subject ingredients into a single gourmet meal of rich tastes, flavours, and experiences, all of which I devoutly encourage you to share with us.
But for all of the Race’s good points and contributions, it does not represent everything that’s happening on these subjects, nor does it show you everything I’m thinking about or encountering on these subjects. There are many serious, important stories and ideas that I will be raising to your attention here. Some you will see are derived from my analysis of mainstream news, some will be based on my independent research, and some will have distinctly *other* sources and provocations.
And then, every so often, I’ll talk about art – whether it’s art I’ve encountered, the art of great friends, or my own art projects and experiments.
At the end of the conversation, these three main foci of discussion, business, achievement, and art, all do have three things in common – me, and the power to inspire, and you. I just get to relay the info and the goodies. The inspiration is the end result. The glue that holds it all together and makes it work? That part is you.
This whole experience or experiment depends entirely on you. If you aren’t reading, participating, enjoying, becoming energized by and discussing this stuff then the momentum stops with you. The entire momentum to evolve, achieve and inspire positive change grows and stops with you.
With great inspiration comes great responsibility – to judiciously act so as to achieve and inspire further achievement in turn. Sounds a little bit like ‘Pay It Forward’, doesn’t it?
So this is it – this is your opportunity to bare witness and be a part of the great things of our era. And when the next era gets their kick at the can, let’s leave them whistling and applauding in appreciation and awe at what we achieved independently and together. There may be 7 World Wonders, but nothing says we can’t make it more and leave our mark on history too.
So new readers or returning, I welcome you alike to join the cause, build the momentum, and create the wonder with me.
They say the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step – but I have a car and work for an airline. I can be there in a couple of hours, plus or minus the security lines at the TSA and finding a decent parking spot at the airport. With the technology of today the milestones are closer, faster, and more attainable then ever before.
We don’t need a race of presumptively nomadic traveling aliens to build our pyramids, we don’t need a millennia of communal effort to carve the titanic statues of our time, and we don’t need to find a group of medicinally inclined heavily medicated people moving obnoxiously large rocks into circular formations without any explanation for it at all in order to leave a legacy of achievement for future generations to oooh and aaah over.
We do need a common purpose, a goal, a focal point of common understanding and agreement to leave a lasting monument to the world for inspiration and motivation for generations to come.
But great things need a great foundation too. To build that foundation we need to start with our own achievements, our own successes, both individually and collectively and then build on those together.
Which brings us back to this outlet, this blog and this community of friends, readers, colleagues, and contributors. It all starts here. With you.
This particular note is for my new readers. Even if you are not one of my new readers, but one of my returning friends and guests, I still think it’s worth reading, so I beg your patience as I introduce what the objective of this outlet is all about.
Obviously it’s about whatever crosses my mind as important, but I’m sparing the world at large the need to weed through *everything* I’m thinking about to get to certain specific topics.
This blog routinely deals with several key subjects that cross my brain and my research on a daily or almost daily basis – Competitive Intelligence, Business News, Risk Management, Marketing, Personal Achievement, and yes, Art. And most of those subjects have found a focus in one of my projects, The Millionaires’ Race to 2010, which you will hear about a lot if you become a regular reader, which of course I hope you do.
First a quick word about the Race, why it’s important and why it belongs here as a regular topic:
The Race, or The Millionaires’ Race to 2010, is a social marketing project designed to be a proactive step we can all take to both turn the national economies around and provide individual success and financial security in this era of economic turmoil.
The idea is to help people connect with each other in ways that stimulate action in developing new ideas, new businesses, new revenue streams, and new relationships to help solve the hurdles that impede success.
Those of you who know me, know me well enough to know that I categorically *hate* phrases like the one above because they usually mean these kinds of empty promises of hope and miraculous successes that you see and hear in late night TV sales pitches.
The truth is that there is a reason why this particular phrase is so positive – the reason is that it’s actually happening. It’s working. A little more each day as people hear about it and start thinking about it and getting more comfortable with it, and finally start getting into it and getting their hands dirty making it happen. There is real momentum starting to percolate with it.
This brings us back to why this project belongs here in this blog about business subjects, personal achievement and art. It belongs here because it is designed to further all of those subjects together by uniting them in a common focus.
It’s a story about each of us growing and achieving important things personally and together. It’s about the trials and tribulations of growing new businesses. It’s about art, graphic design, events, community, entertainment, haute couture and bas couture; it’s about t-shirts and about advertising. It’s about making all of these subject ingredients into a single gourmet meal of rich tastes, flavours, and experiences, all of which I devoutly encourage you to share with us.
But for all of the Race’s good points and contributions, it does not represent everything that’s happening on these subjects, nor does it show you everything I’m thinking about or encountering on these subjects. There are many serious, important stories and ideas that I will be raising to your attention here. Some you will see are derived from my analysis of mainstream news, some will be based on my independent research, and some will have distinctly *other* sources and provocations.
And then, every so often, I’ll talk about art – whether it’s art I’ve encountered, the art of great friends, or my own art projects and experiments.
At the end of the conversation, these three main foci of discussion, business, achievement, and art, all do have three things in common – me, and the power to inspire, and you. I just get to relay the info and the goodies. The inspiration is the end result. The glue that holds it all together and makes it work? That part is you.
This whole experience or experiment depends entirely on you. If you aren’t reading, participating, enjoying, becoming energized by and discussing this stuff then the momentum stops with you. The entire momentum to evolve, achieve and inspire positive change grows and stops with you.
With great inspiration comes great responsibility – to judiciously act so as to achieve and inspire further achievement in turn. Sounds a little bit like ‘Pay It Forward’, doesn’t it?
So this is it – this is your opportunity to bare witness and be a part of the great things of our era. And when the next era gets their kick at the can, let’s leave them whistling and applauding in appreciation and awe at what we achieved independently and together. There may be 7 World Wonders, but nothing says we can’t make it more and leave our mark on history too.
So new readers or returning, I welcome you alike to join the cause, build the momentum, and create the wonder with me.
They say the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step – but I have a car and work for an airline. I can be there in a couple of hours, plus or minus the security lines at the TSA and finding a decent parking spot at the airport. With the technology of today the milestones are closer, faster, and more attainable then ever before.
We don’t need a race of presumptively nomadic traveling aliens to build our pyramids, we don’t need a millennia of communal effort to carve the titanic statues of our time, and we don’t need to find a group of medicinally inclined heavily medicated people moving obnoxiously large rocks into circular formations without any explanation for it at all in order to leave a legacy of achievement for future generations to oooh and aaah over.
We do need a common purpose, a goal, a focal point of common understanding and agreement to leave a lasting monument to the world for inspiration and motivation for generations to come.
But great things need a great foundation too. To build that foundation we need to start with our own achievements, our own successes, both individually and collectively and then build on those together.
Which brings us back to this outlet, this blog and this community of friends, readers, colleagues, and contributors. It all starts here. With you.
Personal Baseline
Personal Baseline:
Now that we’ve gone through and assessed what your financial baselines are, we’re going to delve a little bit into your personal baseline for a while.
So what is a Personal Baseline anyway?
This is what you bring to the table in terms of your personal strengths and weaknesses. Are you healthy? Are you strong? Are you happy? Are you crazy?
Go ahead and seriously think about how healthy or strong you are in each of the following areas of your life and what you bring to a new business venture. Be brutally honest here, as if you aren’t this will come back to haunt you. It *always* does. And then have 2-4 of your best friends do the same critical analysis of you and see what their responses are and how they relate to yours. Again, a score of 1 represents a critical weakness needing immediate corrective action and possible deal-breaker, and a score of 100 represents in the top percentile of the world or better.
Physical Strength
Physical Health
Physical Stamina/Endurance
Mental Health
Personal Energy Levels
Happiness
Risk Affinity
Family Relationships
Personal Relationships
Pet Relationships
Education
Primary Life Experiences
Secondary Life Experiences
Primary Career Experiences
Secondary Career Experiences
Where are your weak points here? Is your marriage or relationship a little shaky? Would it survive you working a lot of overtime hours over the next year to accomplish your dreams?
Do you have young children at home? Will they be a distraction or an asset?
Are you currently happy and full of energy or somewhat depressed and nervous, shy of taking on any kind of risk at all?
Do you have a friend who needs you to help them through a rough patch? Do you have friends who want to help you succeed?
Do you have the will and endurance to go the distance in a time-sensitive environment? Do you need a more quiet and contemplative environment and pace in order to be productive?
Do you have an academic expertise in your chosen subject matter? Do you have extensive practical experience? Is this something so new that no one else has any more expertise on the subject than you do?
Do you have the physical strength to do the job? Some jobs/projects require physical strength and stamina – firemen, acrobats, landscaping, construction, etc.
Did you learn what you know of this business at work or through life experiences? Was it hands on learning, or academic? Do you have all three that apply, giving you an extra advantage by being so well rounded?
Are you currently suffering any health factors that could become a serious problem? How are you treating them or preparing to minimize their impact? Do you have adequate insurance? Is there someone who can step in for you if you became ill at a time critical point?
What are your Personal strengths and weaknesses? Because these also play a huge role in whatever you decide to do to chase your dreams. They impact the how, the when, and the why of each of your decisions both for your business and for your life, so they are critical not just in the decision of what to do, but what tools you need to do them, or do them better.
Having huge areas of strength here will be of unmistakable value to anyone who possesses them, and any weak points here will need to be addressed and covered off before you get too far down the road or any one of them could conceivably lead to serious, even critical problems.
I’ve raised the subject, now you need to delve into your reality and really hammer out some serious answers here. Then take this Baseline and compare it to your other baselines again. What synergies do you see? What elements from one baseline complement elements from the others? And what about your weaknesses? How do they fit into the picture? Do you see any patterns emerging? Any ideas fomenting?
Dig deep, compare and contrast, and at the end of the day realize that these baselines don’t judge you, they offer you insights and are some of the best self-help tools money can buy without having had to spend a dime.
So get cracking, figure things out and check back with me and the Race to 2010.
Play with what your strengths are and smile at all the ‘wicked-cool’ things you can do with them now that you see them in black and white (or multi-colour if you’re filling this out in crayon.)
Y’all come back now, ya hear?
Now that we’ve gone through and assessed what your financial baselines are, we’re going to delve a little bit into your personal baseline for a while.
So what is a Personal Baseline anyway?
This is what you bring to the table in terms of your personal strengths and weaknesses. Are you healthy? Are you strong? Are you happy? Are you crazy?
Go ahead and seriously think about how healthy or strong you are in each of the following areas of your life and what you bring to a new business venture. Be brutally honest here, as if you aren’t this will come back to haunt you. It *always* does. And then have 2-4 of your best friends do the same critical analysis of you and see what their responses are and how they relate to yours. Again, a score of 1 represents a critical weakness needing immediate corrective action and possible deal-breaker, and a score of 100 represents in the top percentile of the world or better.
Physical Strength
Physical Health
Physical Stamina/Endurance
Mental Health
Personal Energy Levels
Happiness
Risk Affinity
Family Relationships
Personal Relationships
Pet Relationships
Education
Primary Life Experiences
Secondary Life Experiences
Primary Career Experiences
Secondary Career Experiences
Where are your weak points here? Is your marriage or relationship a little shaky? Would it survive you working a lot of overtime hours over the next year to accomplish your dreams?
Do you have young children at home? Will they be a distraction or an asset?
Are you currently happy and full of energy or somewhat depressed and nervous, shy of taking on any kind of risk at all?
Do you have a friend who needs you to help them through a rough patch? Do you have friends who want to help you succeed?
Do you have the will and endurance to go the distance in a time-sensitive environment? Do you need a more quiet and contemplative environment and pace in order to be productive?
Do you have an academic expertise in your chosen subject matter? Do you have extensive practical experience? Is this something so new that no one else has any more expertise on the subject than you do?
Do you have the physical strength to do the job? Some jobs/projects require physical strength and stamina – firemen, acrobats, landscaping, construction, etc.
Did you learn what you know of this business at work or through life experiences? Was it hands on learning, or academic? Do you have all three that apply, giving you an extra advantage by being so well rounded?
Are you currently suffering any health factors that could become a serious problem? How are you treating them or preparing to minimize their impact? Do you have adequate insurance? Is there someone who can step in for you if you became ill at a time critical point?
What are your Personal strengths and weaknesses? Because these also play a huge role in whatever you decide to do to chase your dreams. They impact the how, the when, and the why of each of your decisions both for your business and for your life, so they are critical not just in the decision of what to do, but what tools you need to do them, or do them better.
Having huge areas of strength here will be of unmistakable value to anyone who possesses them, and any weak points here will need to be addressed and covered off before you get too far down the road or any one of them could conceivably lead to serious, even critical problems.
I’ve raised the subject, now you need to delve into your reality and really hammer out some serious answers here. Then take this Baseline and compare it to your other baselines again. What synergies do you see? What elements from one baseline complement elements from the others? And what about your weaknesses? How do they fit into the picture? Do you see any patterns emerging? Any ideas fomenting?
Dig deep, compare and contrast, and at the end of the day realize that these baselines don’t judge you, they offer you insights and are some of the best self-help tools money can buy without having had to spend a dime.
So get cracking, figure things out and check back with me and the Race to 2010.
Play with what your strengths are and smile at all the ‘wicked-cool’ things you can do with them now that you see them in black and white (or multi-colour if you’re filling this out in crayon.)
Y’all come back now, ya hear?
Available Credit Baseline
Available Credit Baseline:
Ok – so we’ve talked about what you owe, now we’re going to spend a little time discussing what you could owe.
Optimally we’re hoping that you won’t need or want to owe anything to get whatever project you want to start off the ground. It would not be realistic or comprehensive enough for me to address everything else in terms of what your strengths and weaknesses are if I didn’t also address this subject too.
You will probably need some kind of credit at some point in this process. Whether it is to facilitate cash flow, or to qualify for transaction processing services, or to rent facilities and offices, or for any other relevant business purposes, you’ll probably need some kind of credit.
Some people have unique access to large pools of credit regardless of their personal credit rating. Whether through family or social sources, this access to extraordinary credit is a resource that is available to some, and perhaps to you, and should not be discounted out of hand. Credit can be a very powerful resource if used correctly, so it deserves a lot of respect.
Others are in a credit trap where their personal credit sources are as dry as the desert or as maxed out as a Michael Bay movie is with big bangs.
Then there is the subject of having access to investors, the sale of shares, bonds, or other investment plans to address. The opportunity to raise funds from sources other than your personal bank account would give you access to resources beyond your current means, and allow you to reach ever higher for the brass ring.
The resource of personal credit sources and business investment sources all come with fundamentally the same problems – nothing is free.
By that I mean so much more than just whatever the credit terms are. Sure I believe banks and credit card companies deserve their profits, but that’s not what I mean.
Credit is a slippery slope. It is entirely too easy to have a level of credit debt that you can handle under normal circumstances but that suddenly and completely wipes you out when emergency or unusual circumstances strike.
More emphatically, these days it is becoming more and more regular for those circumstances to have nothing to do with you or your credit worthiness but on the lending institution to be able to stay in business themselves.
In an environment where banks and lending institutions are failing or receiving bailouts to cover off for appalling unparalleled mismanagement and extraordinarily poor risk management, basic credit can be a very dangerous thing as it can be recalled at any time should your institution sell off your account to another institution, be purchased by another bank, or go bankrupt, or in some cases, simply change policies.
Where even applying for credit can have an impact on your insurance rates, it’s critical to make sure that whatever credit you have you treat with unusual care and discretion.
Pay extraordinary attention to the fine print. Whatever it says will be used against you in the future, and you can count on that.
In reality, this particular piece isn’t going to tell you *how* to get credit or *what* to do with it, but it’s here to make you account for the total amount of credit you can reasonably call on if you need it.
Here are some of the areas of credit you can look at if needed. I am *absolutely NOT* recommending you to use any of them, but you should be aware of them and how to access them if needed.
In this baseline the rule of thumb will be like this: Rate how much money or purchasing power you believe you would be able raise from each source of credit on a rating of 1-100 where 1 represents the idea that just asking the question will result in a Bernie Madoff-like audit and investigation and a rating of 100 means you can get credit to purchase major brand name retail chains with a low down payment just on your good name.
Ready? Here we go:
Pay Day Loans:
Credit Cards:
Personal Loans:
Personal Line of Credit:
Business line of Credit:
Mortgages:
Home Equity Loans:
Car Title Loans:
Construction Loans:
Small Business Loans:
Regional Business Start-Up Loans:
Government Loans/Grants:
Other Business Grants:
Private Investment:
Public Investment:
Bonds:
Private Stock Sale:
Financial Advances:
Supplier Advances (Suppliers may be willing to let you have product on spec.):
Insurance Loans (Many insurance policies allow you to borrow against the policy):
Retirement Savings Loans (same as insurance loans):
Industry Specific Loans:
Family Loans:
Ability to get Co-Signed Loans:
Other Loans:
Total Credit Capacity:
Obviously that’s not an all-inclusive list, but it should remind you of a variety of credit and investment options that you can use to raise funding for your venture.
Again, I’m positively *not* recommending any of them – buying on credit is what we’re trying to get successful enough to avoid having to do, but you may encounter a need for it at some point on this project.
Sometimes credit offers you an opportunity to leverage a number of other bonuses if used correctly. Frequent flier miles, cash rebates, interest free periods, tax rebates/deductions, and numerous other incentives exist for various credit options. All of those bonuses exist on the statistical likelihood that you will sooner or later slip up and get charged an additional fee for something or to reward referral business. In other words, the credit companies are betting against you making your payments on time, and statistically they are proven right far more often than not. Just something to keep in mind.
I’ll get into credit strategies some other time, for now it’s just worth seeing what your credit strength is today and to compare it against your credit strength a year from now.
So take a good look at what your credit options are – see what the clauses are on your credit cards, what your interest rates are, what your service fees are, what your credit rating is, see copies of your credit reports from all of the major reporting agencies. Basically, get familiar with what your real ability to get credit is.
It also helps to know what’s on your credit file with the reporting agencies because this information is often looked up by prospective employers when you’re applying for a new job as part of a comprehensive background check. Take the time to fix any errors that you see, and keep an eye out for suspicious transactions that could be telltale signs of identity theft or erroneous reporting.
And when you’ve done all of that you’ll know exactly where you stand on your credit, and that’s a pretty good thing to know.
Until next time,
C./
Ok – so we’ve talked about what you owe, now we’re going to spend a little time discussing what you could owe.
Optimally we’re hoping that you won’t need or want to owe anything to get whatever project you want to start off the ground. It would not be realistic or comprehensive enough for me to address everything else in terms of what your strengths and weaknesses are if I didn’t also address this subject too.
You will probably need some kind of credit at some point in this process. Whether it is to facilitate cash flow, or to qualify for transaction processing services, or to rent facilities and offices, or for any other relevant business purposes, you’ll probably need some kind of credit.
Some people have unique access to large pools of credit regardless of their personal credit rating. Whether through family or social sources, this access to extraordinary credit is a resource that is available to some, and perhaps to you, and should not be discounted out of hand. Credit can be a very powerful resource if used correctly, so it deserves a lot of respect.
Others are in a credit trap where their personal credit sources are as dry as the desert or as maxed out as a Michael Bay movie is with big bangs.
Then there is the subject of having access to investors, the sale of shares, bonds, or other investment plans to address. The opportunity to raise funds from sources other than your personal bank account would give you access to resources beyond your current means, and allow you to reach ever higher for the brass ring.
The resource of personal credit sources and business investment sources all come with fundamentally the same problems – nothing is free.
By that I mean so much more than just whatever the credit terms are. Sure I believe banks and credit card companies deserve their profits, but that’s not what I mean.
Credit is a slippery slope. It is entirely too easy to have a level of credit debt that you can handle under normal circumstances but that suddenly and completely wipes you out when emergency or unusual circumstances strike.
More emphatically, these days it is becoming more and more regular for those circumstances to have nothing to do with you or your credit worthiness but on the lending institution to be able to stay in business themselves.
In an environment where banks and lending institutions are failing or receiving bailouts to cover off for appalling unparalleled mismanagement and extraordinarily poor risk management, basic credit can be a very dangerous thing as it can be recalled at any time should your institution sell off your account to another institution, be purchased by another bank, or go bankrupt, or in some cases, simply change policies.
Where even applying for credit can have an impact on your insurance rates, it’s critical to make sure that whatever credit you have you treat with unusual care and discretion.
Pay extraordinary attention to the fine print. Whatever it says will be used against you in the future, and you can count on that.
In reality, this particular piece isn’t going to tell you *how* to get credit or *what* to do with it, but it’s here to make you account for the total amount of credit you can reasonably call on if you need it.
Here are some of the areas of credit you can look at if needed. I am *absolutely NOT* recommending you to use any of them, but you should be aware of them and how to access them if needed.
In this baseline the rule of thumb will be like this: Rate how much money or purchasing power you believe you would be able raise from each source of credit on a rating of 1-100 where 1 represents the idea that just asking the question will result in a Bernie Madoff-like audit and investigation and a rating of 100 means you can get credit to purchase major brand name retail chains with a low down payment just on your good name.
Ready? Here we go:
Pay Day Loans:
Credit Cards:
Personal Loans:
Personal Line of Credit:
Business line of Credit:
Mortgages:
Home Equity Loans:
Car Title Loans:
Construction Loans:
Small Business Loans:
Regional Business Start-Up Loans:
Government Loans/Grants:
Other Business Grants:
Private Investment:
Public Investment:
Bonds:
Private Stock Sale:
Financial Advances:
Supplier Advances (Suppliers may be willing to let you have product on spec.):
Insurance Loans (Many insurance policies allow you to borrow against the policy):
Retirement Savings Loans (same as insurance loans):
Industry Specific Loans:
Family Loans:
Ability to get Co-Signed Loans:
Other Loans:
Total Credit Capacity:
Obviously that’s not an all-inclusive list, but it should remind you of a variety of credit and investment options that you can use to raise funding for your venture.
Again, I’m positively *not* recommending any of them – buying on credit is what we’re trying to get successful enough to avoid having to do, but you may encounter a need for it at some point on this project.
Sometimes credit offers you an opportunity to leverage a number of other bonuses if used correctly. Frequent flier miles, cash rebates, interest free periods, tax rebates/deductions, and numerous other incentives exist for various credit options. All of those bonuses exist on the statistical likelihood that you will sooner or later slip up and get charged an additional fee for something or to reward referral business. In other words, the credit companies are betting against you making your payments on time, and statistically they are proven right far more often than not. Just something to keep in mind.
I’ll get into credit strategies some other time, for now it’s just worth seeing what your credit strength is today and to compare it against your credit strength a year from now.
So take a good look at what your credit options are – see what the clauses are on your credit cards, what your interest rates are, what your service fees are, what your credit rating is, see copies of your credit reports from all of the major reporting agencies. Basically, get familiar with what your real ability to get credit is.
It also helps to know what’s on your credit file with the reporting agencies because this information is often looked up by prospective employers when you’re applying for a new job as part of a comprehensive background check. Take the time to fix any errors that you see, and keep an eye out for suspicious transactions that could be telltale signs of identity theft or erroneous reporting.
And when you’ve done all of that you’ll know exactly where you stand on your credit, and that’s a pretty good thing to know.
Until next time,
C./
07 July, 2009
The Power of People - People I'm Proud to Know.
The big trick to making a success is always reliant on three key questions: who, how, and when. In almost all instances I can document, and as explained repeatedly by key success figures of our era like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, it tends very much to happen most successfully when it all comes together at once – the perfect triumvirate.
That’s why this Race is getting to be so exciting for me. I’m already seeing how individually so many of us can be successful by helping each other be successful. Here’s a quick example of how the light bulbs are going off in my head and the ‘Eureka!’ is erupting from my lips:
This weekend I ran into a young lady that I’ve met several times in the last 5 years. She works as a server at a local watering hole I visit with friends and family every so often. The place has a very special musical vibe and history that goes with it, and the staff treats us very much like family – and we truly appreciate it. Who.
So Saturday night, Independence Day, the bar owner didn’t know whether it was going to be a big turnout or a small one, so she kept a full staff for the bulk of the night, and our poor server really had no one but us to wait on the whole night long.
Before long we asked her to join us, and had a number of long chats, during which time I mentioned to her a little bit about my Race – the Millionaires’ Race to 2010, and how I’m trying to help as many people as possible acquire their piece of the economic security and prosperity pie.
As I explained how others are working on bringing people together along political bases in order to fix political problems from the ground up, I pointed out that I’m trying to bring people together to fix economic problems from the ground up. I don’t care what someone’s political beliefs are, what their religious outlook is, what their social status is, what kind of car they drive – none of that.
Ok, I do care – if you’re raising money for Osama Bin Laden then you’re not welcome, to put it mildly. But whether I agree with you politically or not has no bearing on whether or not I want to see you lose your job, become unable to look after your families, lose your retirement income or lose your health insurance. Same goes for religion and any of those other silly social delineations that become hot button issues in political fora. I want the nation (in this case both the US and Canada) to be successful, and I want us all to be proud of how we achieved it.
Kristen, our server, seemed to really like the idea, and shared with me that she has her own custom T-shirt design business that she operates as a sideline. How.
Already the light bulbs are starting to go off. Just this past week I was discussing with another Racer the idea that as our individual businesses start to take off, and we start our speaking tours, we were going to need some custom T-shirts and golf shirts for sale at our events. Both Tracey and I are writing books and going on a series of speaking tours in the coming year and will be looking at having a variety of branded products to sell at the engagements. But so will another dozen or so of our Racers.
So I’m having lunch today at a restaurant near my office and my waiter has a very professional, calm, attentive, and active personality. He’s in great shape, tall, and exhibits strong leadership qualities with both customers and other waitstaff. His carriage indicates strongly that he’s someone who is always on the go with another project so I stopped him at one point and asked him flat out – was he doing other projects than this particular gig?
Surprise, surprise, usually the answer is yes. This summer he took time off those other projects and was only working the one job as a kind of vacation, wind down time, but yes, normally he was on the go, working another job and playing in a band. A band that needs T-shirts but has venues. When.
Kristen came to mind instantly as a great match – the band could give her a place that she could sell her shirts, and the band could have some custom shirts designed to sell for the band too. And those who are doing advertising for their businesses or events could have the band write or perform the music for any of their advertising.
Then I remembered that I have a couple of Racers who are Life Coaches, whose role and sole purpose is to help you accomplish what you set out to do. They prod you when you need it, suggest alternative strategies when you hit the wall, and help you organize and prioritize your life so that you have a balanced approach to get the most out of life, among many other aspects of their expertise, these people are your mentors in a life where real mentors are hard to find.
The thought of structuring an event hosted by our Life Coaches to inspire you, teach you, engage you, energize you, organize you, and unleash you on the world – that sounded like a fantastic idea! Especially if you add in some live music, meaningful guest speakers, powerful new books, and a host of specialty products and shirts that help to carry the feeling and spirit on in the days and weeks to come as your efforts at achieving success unfurl. Add in ongoing life coaching to help make sure you get to your goals and the package sounds better and better.
Each participant made stronger by the event, each participant made stronger through the networking at the event, each participant made stronger with follow through after the event and each participant contributing to the success of those involved in hosting the event. Each of us spreading the word about the opportunities discovered at the most positive experience of the year. Each of us there to boost each other up, helping each other grow, build, succeed.
Extraordinary individual success fueled by extraordinary team success. The universal answer for win-win.
Then there’s the web designer who is looking to go out on their own who could help to build e-commerce sites and promotional sites for other Racers and the events where the authors who use print-on-demand self publishing houses to get great low-cost options for getting their products out there. There are the artists who are looking for an opportunity to get their work shown or to find suppliers who can get them different, unique or less expensive supplies.
Extraordinary individual success fueled by extraordinary team success. The universal answer for win-win.
And if you’re reading this, you too can be a part of it. Jump in – the water’s great. And the party’s getting better by the minute!
That’s why this Race is getting to be so exciting for me. I’m already seeing how individually so many of us can be successful by helping each other be successful. Here’s a quick example of how the light bulbs are going off in my head and the ‘Eureka!’ is erupting from my lips:
This weekend I ran into a young lady that I’ve met several times in the last 5 years. She works as a server at a local watering hole I visit with friends and family every so often. The place has a very special musical vibe and history that goes with it, and the staff treats us very much like family – and we truly appreciate it. Who.
So Saturday night, Independence Day, the bar owner didn’t know whether it was going to be a big turnout or a small one, so she kept a full staff for the bulk of the night, and our poor server really had no one but us to wait on the whole night long.
Before long we asked her to join us, and had a number of long chats, during which time I mentioned to her a little bit about my Race – the Millionaires’ Race to 2010, and how I’m trying to help as many people as possible acquire their piece of the economic security and prosperity pie.
As I explained how others are working on bringing people together along political bases in order to fix political problems from the ground up, I pointed out that I’m trying to bring people together to fix economic problems from the ground up. I don’t care what someone’s political beliefs are, what their religious outlook is, what their social status is, what kind of car they drive – none of that.
Ok, I do care – if you’re raising money for Osama Bin Laden then you’re not welcome, to put it mildly. But whether I agree with you politically or not has no bearing on whether or not I want to see you lose your job, become unable to look after your families, lose your retirement income or lose your health insurance. Same goes for religion and any of those other silly social delineations that become hot button issues in political fora. I want the nation (in this case both the US and Canada) to be successful, and I want us all to be proud of how we achieved it.
Kristen, our server, seemed to really like the idea, and shared with me that she has her own custom T-shirt design business that she operates as a sideline. How.
Already the light bulbs are starting to go off. Just this past week I was discussing with another Racer the idea that as our individual businesses start to take off, and we start our speaking tours, we were going to need some custom T-shirts and golf shirts for sale at our events. Both Tracey and I are writing books and going on a series of speaking tours in the coming year and will be looking at having a variety of branded products to sell at the engagements. But so will another dozen or so of our Racers.
So I’m having lunch today at a restaurant near my office and my waiter has a very professional, calm, attentive, and active personality. He’s in great shape, tall, and exhibits strong leadership qualities with both customers and other waitstaff. His carriage indicates strongly that he’s someone who is always on the go with another project so I stopped him at one point and asked him flat out – was he doing other projects than this particular gig?
Surprise, surprise, usually the answer is yes. This summer he took time off those other projects and was only working the one job as a kind of vacation, wind down time, but yes, normally he was on the go, working another job and playing in a band. A band that needs T-shirts but has venues. When.
Kristen came to mind instantly as a great match – the band could give her a place that she could sell her shirts, and the band could have some custom shirts designed to sell for the band too. And those who are doing advertising for their businesses or events could have the band write or perform the music for any of their advertising.
Then I remembered that I have a couple of Racers who are Life Coaches, whose role and sole purpose is to help you accomplish what you set out to do. They prod you when you need it, suggest alternative strategies when you hit the wall, and help you organize and prioritize your life so that you have a balanced approach to get the most out of life, among many other aspects of their expertise, these people are your mentors in a life where real mentors are hard to find.
The thought of structuring an event hosted by our Life Coaches to inspire you, teach you, engage you, energize you, organize you, and unleash you on the world – that sounded like a fantastic idea! Especially if you add in some live music, meaningful guest speakers, powerful new books, and a host of specialty products and shirts that help to carry the feeling and spirit on in the days and weeks to come as your efforts at achieving success unfurl. Add in ongoing life coaching to help make sure you get to your goals and the package sounds better and better.
Each participant made stronger by the event, each participant made stronger through the networking at the event, each participant made stronger with follow through after the event and each participant contributing to the success of those involved in hosting the event. Each of us spreading the word about the opportunities discovered at the most positive experience of the year. Each of us there to boost each other up, helping each other grow, build, succeed.
Extraordinary individual success fueled by extraordinary team success. The universal answer for win-win.
Then there’s the web designer who is looking to go out on their own who could help to build e-commerce sites and promotional sites for other Racers and the events where the authors who use print-on-demand self publishing houses to get great low-cost options for getting their products out there. There are the artists who are looking for an opportunity to get their work shown or to find suppliers who can get them different, unique or less expensive supplies.
Extraordinary individual success fueled by extraordinary team success. The universal answer for win-win.
And if you’re reading this, you too can be a part of it. Jump in – the water’s great. And the party’s getting better by the minute!
What Does Hope Mean To You?
Today is a unique day. It’s my first day of blogging after the whole Canada Day/Independence Day celebration week. It’s also a day when I’ve started to do a lot of work on getting some of my projects completed and ready for publishing. It’s also a day when I have accumulated a lot of work for a series of blogs that will be coming to you over the next few days. It’s also a day when I am starting to seriously promote this blog site and the Millionaires’ Race to 2010 that’s starting this September.
But it’s more than that, really.
I mentioned that Glenn Beck has been working on his 9/12 Project with the idea of bringing together people from all political perspectives to work together to find consensus and solutions to our biggest social and political challenges. Regardless of your personal politics, the idea that we can work together from a grass roots basis to do what we know the current slate of politicians of all parties won’t offers me real hope on the political and social side of things.
As I have started to introduce the Race to people I meet I am getting a lot more hope as well because I am finding a lot of fellow citizens who want to work together to build economic hope in spite of what the bureaucrats and politicians are throwing at us and telling us to swallow.
And what is so important to me is that this hope is being fueled not by nice words, friendly faces, and idealistic speeches, but by people making real connections to do real things in the real world with real consequences and real impacts.
The more I am working on getting this Race underweigh, the more I am convinced that everyday people can overcome the worst economic challenges our countries have seen in 100 years, and that we can do it individually and collectively all at the same time. It just needs a spark.
Like the way we came together after the global famine in the 80’s, the farm disaster of the 80’s, 9/11, Katrina, the Tsunami, and other disasters, we can come together now and make a significant, lasting impact on the economies of our continent and, in turn, the world.
It may sound trite, but the world is a mess. We are a mess. And, yes, We Are the World. One by one we make a difference. One by one we join together to solve these problems, but we don’t stand alone. We stand united.
We stand united against tyranny. We stand united against injustice. And we stand united against suffering. But we also stand for something too.
We stand for Democracy. We stand for fairness and equal opportunity. We stand for the right to do the best we can with what we have. We stand for ethics in business. We stand for personal and corporate responsibility.
We stand for something.
Whether social, political, economic, or any other issues are the ones that drive you, I diffidently suggest that the best way to address them is to find one of these social projects, like The Millionaires’ Race to 2010 or the 9/12 Project, or any other opportunity out there, and help your fellow citizens bring your country back from the brink of disaster and raise it up in the kind of hope that can be quantified, measured, and finally believed in.
But it’s more than that, really.
I mentioned that Glenn Beck has been working on his 9/12 Project with the idea of bringing together people from all political perspectives to work together to find consensus and solutions to our biggest social and political challenges. Regardless of your personal politics, the idea that we can work together from a grass roots basis to do what we know the current slate of politicians of all parties won’t offers me real hope on the political and social side of things.
As I have started to introduce the Race to people I meet I am getting a lot more hope as well because I am finding a lot of fellow citizens who want to work together to build economic hope in spite of what the bureaucrats and politicians are throwing at us and telling us to swallow.
And what is so important to me is that this hope is being fueled not by nice words, friendly faces, and idealistic speeches, but by people making real connections to do real things in the real world with real consequences and real impacts.
The more I am working on getting this Race underweigh, the more I am convinced that everyday people can overcome the worst economic challenges our countries have seen in 100 years, and that we can do it individually and collectively all at the same time. It just needs a spark.
Like the way we came together after the global famine in the 80’s, the farm disaster of the 80’s, 9/11, Katrina, the Tsunami, and other disasters, we can come together now and make a significant, lasting impact on the economies of our continent and, in turn, the world.
It may sound trite, but the world is a mess. We are a mess. And, yes, We Are the World. One by one we make a difference. One by one we join together to solve these problems, but we don’t stand alone. We stand united.
We stand united against tyranny. We stand united against injustice. And we stand united against suffering. But we also stand for something too.
We stand for Democracy. We stand for fairness and equal opportunity. We stand for the right to do the best we can with what we have. We stand for ethics in business. We stand for personal and corporate responsibility.
We stand for something.
Whether social, political, economic, or any other issues are the ones that drive you, I diffidently suggest that the best way to address them is to find one of these social projects, like The Millionaires’ Race to 2010 or the 9/12 Project, or any other opportunity out there, and help your fellow citizens bring your country back from the brink of disaster and raise it up in the kind of hope that can be quantified, measured, and finally believed in.
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