Launch Day!

Launch Day for The Millionaires' Race to 2010.

Today’s the big day! The start of The Millionaires Race to 2010! And there is a *lot* of work to do. Our web site’s still under construction and will be up a bit later with lots of neat new features, but that shouldn’t slow you down from getting started in the Race to 2010! Now’s the time for you to launch yourself into a brand new project that will help both you and your country get back into the innovating, economic growth spurt that we really need to get this country back on track. And we’re going to help you!

Throughout the year we’re going to be landing in cities right across Canada and the US promoting the Race and the income generating projects of our participants. We’ll help you sell your products, your books, your services – we’ll go the whole nine yards on our road trip across the nation(s).

As we stop in various cities we’ll also work directly with a number of you to help make your dreams of success a reality.

So take time today to put your plans on paper, and get to dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s so you can get your project under weigh. And maybe a year from now we’ll be showing you off to the country as one of the continent’s newest millionaires!

Throughout the day today I will be posting new stories, new blogs, new tools and a whole lot more to get you revved up, excited and rolling on your way to financial freedom. Opportunities will be made available to come on tour with us or to help you get rolling, so don’t be shy – check back frequently throughout the day, as new updates will be released all day long!

Cheers and have a great Race Day!

C./

Couponing and Cash for Clunkers.

One of the biggest lessons I learned about marketing came at the expense of The Hudson's Bay Company in Canada. It's the oldest company in the continent dating back from the discovery of North America, and as one of the very first trading post companies it has been in operation since the year 1670.

It is still in operation today but under American ownership as a result of numerous management mistakes and fiduciary failures which needed to be corrected by someone with deeper pockets and a better management team. I'm not 100% sure that their owners (the holding company that owns Lord and Taylor's) are necessarily that team, but they will certainly do no worse.

How does the Hudson's Bay Company of Canada have anything to do with our government's Cash for Clunkers program? Good question. I have a great answer.

The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) went through tumultuous financial times in the 80's and 90's like most retailers. They tried to buy a number of other chains in order to diversify their market reach and expand market dominance of the hard-fought department chain consumer market and to reposition their products for re-sale as they went through their product aging cycle/ Clothes that were unable to sell in HBC would be sold at a discount through their lower cost Zellers subsidiary and so on.

So far so good. But things go off the rails in this story right about....now.

The department store industry during this era was faced with a massive change in consumer spending thanks to the evolution of box stores and mass market retail sales clubs. Now the all-in-one stop department stores were no longer competitive on pricing and their product lines were being put in direct competition with good quality, low cost substitutes. Throw in a recession or two in Canada and you have the makings of financial disaster.

Right about then there was a management philosophy that was prevailing over experience and common sense in businesses around the world that hit the company in several key and devastating ways. Over time I'll go into other aspects and applications, but one of them was inflicted on/by their marketing department in specific that applies to this story.

There are certain words that will always draw attention in any piece of advertising: New, Sale, Half-Off. Those kinds of things always get attention and almost always draw in customers looking for a great deal.

The new philosophy at the marketing department was implemented post-haste. Once a month the company would have a blockbuster sale and advertise it extensively using each of those key, top-draw advertising bell-ringers.

Inventory flowed, sales figures climbed, Hallelujah's were said. Monster sales volumes occured as thousands thronged to get the best deals of the season. Profit margins were low, but volume made it profitable.

Then sales trickled off. No one seemed to need the products they had just bought in such massive quantities once the sale wore off. Sales figures for the rest of the month were down, but since they had had such a great sale to start the period, their overall numbers still looked good. The sale to start the next month again was a huge hit - throngs came by the thousands and staff simply could not keep up with demand. Again, a big success and a big sigh of relief as the month started off so well.

But again the numbers for the rest of the month were off. They still were not gaining any real market penetration and the overall numbers were still down as they kept losing marketshare to the box stores and Walmarts that kept popping up all over the place.

Well, if it's working on a monthly basis, let's see if it will work on a weekly basis?

So they did. The big sales started to show up every weekend, tailored to meet the needs of their biggest customers - the families who needed the one-stop convenience that a department store offered.

Again the company was rewarded - the public loved the idea of being able to go get stuff every weekend at huge discounts, and for a few months the volumes on the weekends soared outrageously, even leading the company to believe that they might be able to recoup some of that lost marketshare and start gaining it back.

But the company next noticed a horrible trend - no one was shopping during the week! The customers now shopped only on weekends - literally! Some stores that ordinarily would do $50-100 k in business on a weekday would be lucky to do $1000 for the entire store in total. But the costs of running the stores stayed constant - they still had to staff every department, keep the inventory on the floor, clean the facilities, etc because of the long term rental agreements that the malls they were located in had included in their rental contracts. And the properties were far too valuable to give up. So those stores *had* to lose money 5 days a week so that they could make money on the other two. Hmmmm.....not so good.

And then came the kicker - the consumer had learned the drill. They now knew that HBC would continue to offer these sales days because they had to in order to move inventory and keep from financial crisis from lousy cash flow. Now the consumer could relax their spending and only shop for the quantities they needed in the short term and only on sales days.

HBC's sales volumes plummeted, even on their big sales weekends. And now their customers were trained by the company not to shop the rest of the week either and sales volumes there were almost non-existant. What idiot would pay double for a fridge, shirt, lawn mower or vacuum on a Monday when they could go one day earlier or 5 days later and buy it half-off?

Worse still, they had sold the customers all that the customers would need for months to come in advance and now they didn't need the store anymore. They *could* shop, but there was no incentive that said they *had* to shop.

The company was in panic mode. It was so stressed out it took little time to learn the lessons of the day then and went straight to desperation mode. If the customer was driven by sales prices, then that must be where the solution lay. Now once a month 80% off days showed up. Couponing, discounting, desperation set in. The company was heading straight to disaster.

Sooner or later the day came when their maximum discounts were no longer enough to lure in customers. Combined with crippling overstocking of unmovable inventory the company faced financial collapse. Stores were sold off, the company shrank in desperate cost cutting measures...layoffs, angry creditors...you know the drill.

Again, the question applies - how does this apply to the Cash for Clunkers deal?

Car sales to domestic manufacturers have been sliding for years. The big three did all the financing and discounting deals they were prepared to do and again had spikes and collapses in sales that left them holding millions of vehicles in inventory and empty bags of profit. The solution? A huge discount to drive a selling spree, in this case sponsored by the federal government. And as soon as that incentive ends, just precisely when do you expect anyone will need to buy a car again? The drought that follows the big sale may just be the last nail needed to seal the coffin on our domestic car industry the way improperly planned sales spikes nearly destroyed the oldest company on the continent.

Add to that an energy tax that will punitively increase the cost of gas and a requirement to increase the manufacturing cost of vehicles to meet the arbitrary mileage requirements of new legislation concerning vehicle manufacturing and the pitifully weak domestic industry as a whole faces extinction.

There is no doubt that the industry needs a boost or faces catastrophic failure, but so did the department store industry in Canada in the 80's and 90's. The solution wasn't to spike sales at the cost of future sales then any more than it will be for our car industry today.

The solution is finding the right products that people want to buy and offering them with better wuality and better pricing. Oh, and get rid of the dealerships that are eating up your profit margins and giving the industry a perpetual black eye. Make car buying a thing people want to do, not something people abhorr more than having a root canal and quadruple bypass 2-for-1 special. In other words, run your business properly and you won't need to have the massive sales except when you have surpluss inventory that you need to clear out. Which is what sales were designed for in the first place.

Marketing to sell a Million by September next year.

I shared a rough outline of what you can do to make a lot of money fairly easily, and a little bit of how it could work. Now I am going to get to one of the two subjects that determine whether you’re going to be successful at it –how to get your customers to notice you.

This is the difference between Marketing and Advertising.

Advertising is sending a message out to attract customers. Marketing is making sure your product and your customers have a great meeting.

‘Sales’ is what happens when that great meeting results in a buying decision.

I do not pretend to have the penultimate sales advice – I’m good, very good, but it isn’t what I focus on. My focus is almost exclusively on Marketing because if it is done properly then every sales professional will tell you that they *love* working for you because 90-95% of their job is done for them. Their leads are all warmed up, the customer already is familiar and educated about the product, the pricing is already structured to be affordable but valued by the customer, all the upkeep and service agreements are all thought out and work for everyone – the complete package is buying-decision-ready. The sales pro then really just needs to tip the scales, collect the orders and keep in contact with the customer to make sure they are happy while leaving the door open for any follow-up orders or referrals.

So if I do my job properly, my team’s job is made much, much easier, and everyone makes a *lot* more money and everyone, including the customer, is a lot happier about it.

So recently I told you to build a product that allows you to share a knowledge base or skill that you have with others who can benefit from it. Whether it’s crafting, cooking, cleaning, carpentry, plumbing, computers, electronics assembly, shopping, history, music, entertainment or anything else, there is an infinite supply of topics that your personal take on could be of value and interest to others.

I also told you that you could format it in a way that you could give courses on how to do what you know how to do. Those courses could add a whole new revenue stream and introduce your products to whole new audiences.

I then told you that a second product in that field could just be what you need to go over the top.

But I didn’t tell you how to do the Marketing to get it in your customers’ hands.

Here’s one approach you could use – remember, just like I described in my earlier blog, there are literally thousands of ways to market your products and services. This is just one example.

Let’s say you’ve written a book on negotiating contracts. It’s pretty safe to bet that not *everyone* you meet in a department or book store is going to want or need to read that book.

Who does need that information? I can think of dozens of groups that would benefit tremendously from it and from a presentation that tailors the interpretation of the book to their needs. Chambers of Commerce, union reps, sales professional development associations, business students at university and college, law students, legal firms, insurance companies, realtors, and many, many more groups and organizations need that kind of information. So do the spouses who run the households, by the way. They do all the negotiating within the family, with suppliers for services and products for the home, work out the insurance policies and coverage, negotiate and organize schedules, and so on. Ever notice that no one has set up professional development days for those who professionally manage our families and our homes? We might want to work on fixing that. Just a thought.

So if you targeted each of those groups above in each neighbourhood near where you live then you should be able to build a pretty decent list of groups that would be interested in hearing what you have to say.

Your next step is to put together the most enticing invitation you can possibly come up with for each group. You want to find a way to present to them and get paid for doing it. Send invitations to every member, to the Chambers, to the local media, to any relevant people. Send reminder notices as the days get closer. Do follow up calls to anyone who calls to ask info about the event. Try and get on local radio or TV to talk about the event. Send letters to the editor and articles to your local papers discussing what's going to happen at the event or why the subject is very topical and important right now. Once you have the list of attendees, this will also give you the opportunity to sell your product – in this case the book on negotiating contracts.

Or you could combine the two and sell your courses and include a copy of the book for free by factoring your profit margin into the cost of the course.

You could also team up with others in your neighbourhood or subject matter and sell the courses or books in package deals to widen the reach of customer base and minimize your per presentation costs by splitting it between the various presenters.

So let’s take some specific examples and do the math, shall we?

Your local Chamber of Commerce has a list of member companies, usually several thousand long and for a nominal fee or free you should be able to send an invitation to all member companies as a special opportunity just for their members. Out of that list, if you have a successful invitation, you should probably expect to get about 5% response rate or at least 50-150 calls, of which you’ll probably close about 1/3 as sales. (These numbers I’m using are industry standards for moderately successful mail campaigns.)

That means that you should be able to expect between 16 and 50 sales by inviting your local CoC. Assuming each other group listed above produced similar results, then you could roughly multiply that number by the number of groups you invite. If you invite 10 groups, you’ll probably end up with approximately 300 paying customers for an event or a book sale.

If you make $25 in profit from each sale, then one event should have a single payout of $7500 or more in your pocket before taxes.

If you want to earn $1,000,000 on that basis, you only need to host 134 events.

If you were able to make as much as $50 in profit per sale, you would only need to host 67 events to make your target income.

That means having an average of a little more than one event per week.

That’s the kind of schedule that most people can handle.

Sure, most of the events will probably be out of town because you’ll run out of local options fairly quickly, but think about it. The only day you really have penciled in each week is the one you deliver your presentation on. Everything else in your life suddenly became a *lot* more flexible.

And don’t forget the $7,500+ per week incentive.

See, what happens here is that you find your customers in an environment in which they see your product for the value it brings to them. If you try and pitch a pool cleaning company to a branch manager at Intel at the office, I can guarantee they won’t be interested. If you pitch them the same option at a pool supplies or patio furniture retailer you are far more likely to get the sale. It’s the same potential customer – but the environment, the circumstances, the sales logic are all completely different.

It’s the ability to meet the customer’s needs that matters. In one environment, they don’t need a pool cleaner. In another it’s a perfectly natural fit. In one case they see no value at all – how is a clean residential pool going to make the world’s largest computer chip manufacturer more profitable? But in the other environment the value makes sense – it’s safer and healthier for your family, it frees up more time to spend with your family, it’s less expensive, better quality…whatever the benefits are, this is where they make *sense.*

By attacking your market in the right environments, where it is natural to the customer to want to do that kind of business, they are already interested in making a buying decision. From there on you add to it by adding in opportunities to reach out to new kinds of customers as well, blending both traditional customer types (busy working business pros for example) with entirely new markets (launching the first PD days for household managers) and offering new products to extend the sales cycle while you’re at it.

In one fell swoop you’ve managed to sell to your traditional client base, a new client base, and to sell add-on revenue.

And if you’re lucky and smart enough to combine your events with those of a couple of other people whose products match up well with yours, then you can shave your costs down and increase your profitability. Of course the more profitable each event is, the fewer events you have to have to achieve your objective of $1,000,000 in new revenue this coming year.

In another blog I’ll start sharing some tips and tricks on how to increase your profitability per event in order to make your goals easier to attain – I just wanted to give you the basic outline of how this can work for now.

Of course there are any number of challenges with this approach. What happens if you don’t like public speaking? You could split the proceeds with someone who is – you write the content, they deliver the show. What if you can’t sell to save your life? Same thing. You split the proceeds with someone who can. What if you can’t write very well. You deliver the show, and have someone work with you to write what you know.

There is usually a way to make this idea work for just about anybody, if you really want to try it, but as I said before, it’s nowhere near the only way to go to accomplish your dreams.

Find your own path and borrow from what you can learn here to make your path more rewarding and productive. That’s what we’re here for.

The Unreachable Stars.

Of course life always catches us when we least expect it. The rainy day fund is always sucked dry just before it actually rains, the insurance on the other driver's vehicle lapsed two days before the accident, the money runs out before the month does - whatever the circumstance, the point remains the same. We are often subject to those whims and fates that are just a tad oustide our circle of immediate control.

We often ask for it by the lives we lead. I know *exactly* why I have a back problem - I went asking for it by doing a lot of things no sane person should put their backs through during those early years known as 'the invincible years.'

This week has been little different. Work is work - the hours are long, and the pay is perhaps not what one would like, but it's my job and I'm proud of it. My projects always beckon, and I always wish I had more time for them. And home had the blissfull scenario of having a rush job to prevent an attack of seasonal bugs and rodents from deciding to invade my home which ate up my entire weekend outside in the hot, hot sun.

But what sustains me, outside of the love of my family and friends, is my ever-insatiable quest to achieve my dreams by helping others. Seems weird, probably, I know, but it's true nonetheless.

Most of my friends are doing reasonably well and the best help I can give them is a friendly smile and a sincere interest in their lives and well-being. Some deserve a shoulder and warm hearted word to help them keep their world together during their truly heartbreaking trials.
And others, like me, aim to reach for the stars, and so by striving, change them.

It's not just ambition, and it's not idle pride that drives them. There's an element of curiosity, true, but in reality we strive to accomplish something worthwhile, something greater than ourselves.

No matter whether lasting a moment in time or an eternity in stone, there are accomplishments and achievements that stand out in a life, in a lifetime, in an era. I fully believe that in each and every person lies the ability to accomplish those kinds of achievements but I also know that the vast majority of us never really take the chance to achieve them.

I read recently where 8/10 people plan to and desire to write a book. Of those people, less than 20 % will try, and of that 20% less than 20% will complete the book, and less than 20% of those will ever send their work to be published. That means that less than 0.0064 % of the population will ever write the books which they have in their hearts desire to write and see it through to publication.

How many other dreams in society are left un-reached for? How many advancements in society are left unachieved because they were never started? How many lives will be lost because no one tried to solve the unsolvable enigmas of science? How many lives could be changed if more people reached the unreachable stars?