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Xerox Incorporation Business Strategies

Innocent — Mon, 09 May 2011 19:22:17 +0000

Xerox Incorporation Business Strategies

Undoubtedly, the business success of Xerox over the many decades in its history leaves a lot of lessons and strategies for running a business successfully. Here are some of them.

Investing in Product Improvement

Having a better quality product in the market is a critical factor for achieving success in the industry. Consumers will be attracted to your product if they discover it is of great quality, and will as well avoid it if they found out it’s of little quality compared to other brands. Therefore, investment in research, facility, and manpower that can enable you to make your product better in the market place is definitely a wise one.

Indeed, Haloid’s investment in developing better quality paper, which was introduced in 1933 paid off handsomely, as demand for the product was so high that the company wasn’t affected by the depression of that time.

Creating Innovative Products

In addition to constantly improving the quality of your product, having a unique and innovative product in the market can easily set you apart from competitors, and quickly put you in the leadership position as the product registers first in people’s minds as the number one solution to what they need it for.

Haloid was able to soar above the competition at the end of World War II when it entered into an agreement with Battelle to develop XeroX Copier.

Using Cost Effective Marketing Strategies

Marketing costs can be very expensive, yet you may not even get the kind of response you desire. If you think deep you are sure to come up with effective marketing strategies that will not cost you much.

To promote Xerox 914 copier in 1960 on low budget, Xerox came up with clever ideas – placing ads in magazines and TV programs that target business owners, and also offered the machines to small business owners on monthly lease, which made it possible for them to afford it.

Neglecting to Guide against Competitors Encroachment can be Dangerous

Competitors will always try to take some share of the market from you by noticing the areas where they can improve on what you are doing and present a better offer to consumers. You therefore have to be on your guard always, watch what competitors are doing, the changing desires of consumers, and constantly improve on your products to meet, or even exceed consumers’ expectation.

Kodak, Ricoh, and Canon were able to come into the market and got a sizeable chunk of it basically because of the disorganization in Xerox and it carelessness to watch the competition.

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Read Xerox Incorporation Success Story Here

Xerox Corporation – The Way To Number One Photocopier

Innocent — Thu, 05 May 2011 20:07:47 +0000

Xerox Corporation – The Way To Number One Photocopier

The history of Xerox is traceable to Haloid, a photography-paper business that was established in 1906 in Rochester, New York. In 1912, the company was bought over by a businessman named Gilbert E. Mosher.

Haloid was ran profitably over the years that followed, and to broaden the company’s market share, it invested in developing better quality paper, which was launched in 1933. The product was an instant success, with sales reaching $1 million by 1934, taking the company above the impact of the severe economic depression at the time.

To wade off the stiff competition from new paper makers that sprouted up at the end of World War II, Haloid decided to develop new products. In 1947, the company entered into an agreement with Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio to create a photocopying machine based on xerography, a process that was newly invented by Chester Carlson in 1938. Xerography is a method of transferring images from one piece of paper to another using static electricity.

After completing work on the machine, it was launched in 1949. The machine, which was called XeroX Copier however seemed less efficient than was expected. A lot of manual processing was needed to operate it. Also, it was difficult and messy to use, coupled with the fact that it made many errors too frequently.

However, just as the machine project was about being declared a waste of time and money, Battelle engineers discovered that it made excellent masters for offset printing. This quality allowed it to sell heavily, with Haloid reinvesting proceeds from the sales into developing a second-generation xerographic copier.

XeroX Copier continued to sell massively and profitably through the early 1950s. Haloid’s other products, including its photographic paper and several new office photocopying machines.

With photocopying business going to be a significant part of its future business, Haloid changed its name to Haloid-Xerox in 1958. The company introduced its first automatic and plain-paper copier, the Xerox 914 copier, in 1960. To promote it on a tight budget, Haloid-Xerox placed ads in magazines and TV programs targeting business owners. The machines were also offered to small business owners on monthly lease for them to be able to afford them. This marketing strategy proved highly successful as Xerox 914 sold very well, exceeding the company’s expectation even though it was of large size (650-pound).

In 1970, Xerox opened the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California. This underscored the company’s determination to grow and lead the industry through developing innovative products.

The Center churned out several innovative inventions, which were unfortunately not maximally utilized by Xerox due to infighting between the people at PARC and those at the copier division. This resulted in Xerox introducing few new products to the market, and inadvertently opening the door for competitors to strike and cut into its market share.

IBM and Kodak launched their office copying machine in the 1970s, which were well received by buyers – especially Kodak’s more sophisticated copier. By 1985, Xerox’s domination of the photocopying industry was slashed to 40 percent from 85 percent that it was in 1974.

Also taking advantage of the disorganization in Xerox in the 1970s was the Japanese company Ricoh. Ricoh introduced into the U.S. market smaller, less expensive, simple machines which broke down less often compared to Xerox’s. Ricoh was targeting to capture the lower end of the market, and moving up from there. Canon, another Japanese company also came in 1980 to fight for a share in the upper end of the market.

In the face of the strong competitors trying to take its market leadership, Xerox began reorganizing quickly in the late 1970s. It finally started releasing new products in 1981, beginning with the Memorywriter typewriter, which sold massively, capturing more than 20 percent of the electric typewriting market. The Memorywriter was further improved on in 1983 to be able to store large amounts of data internally.

Xerox introduced the top selling 10-series copiers in 1982. These machines had microprocessors to regulate internal functions, and could perform different complicated tasks on different types of paper. They were also made smaller, and less liable to breakdown often compared to the company’s earlier copiers. And to protect its high-end market in the U.S. from Kodak threat, Xerox introduced copiers that made 70 or more copiers per minute.

In the 1990s, Xerox moved into digital technologies from analog. It introduced several new digital products, including digital copiers that had multiple functions, such as being printers, fax machines, scanners as well as copiers. By 1997, Xerox revenue from its digital product sale reached $6.7 billion. Xerox also started changing its image from a Photocopier to a Document company to reflect its huge involvement in producing a wide range of document processing products.

Today, Xerox continues to be market leader with its products sold in more than 130 countries across all the continents of the world.

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Xerox Incorporation Business Strategies

Selling On Amazon

Innocent — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:55:47 +0000

Selling On Amazon

Amazon.com ranks among the largest market platform on the Internet. Every month, millions of different kinds of goods are sold on Amazon.

Have you been wondering how you could sell your products on Amazon? If yes, you will find the lesson below titled, Conquering Amazon very valuable. It’s actually from the book, The Online Millionaire: Strategies for Building a Web-based Empire on ebay and Beyond, by Amy Joyner.

Enjoy!

Conquering Amazon

The Lowdown

Amazon.com is now one of the Web’s biggest retailers. In 1994, however, it was just an entrepreneur’s fledgling dream. Founder Jeff Beezos had an idea that the Internet could offer book lovers a unique experience they couldn’t have in any traditional bookstore-the ability to browse a selection of millions of titles in a single sitting.

In July 1995, Bezos began selling books online from his Seattle garage, fulfilling orders for customers in 50 states and 45 countries in that first month alone. Now, the company’s sales total more than $8.4 billion annually.

In the 12 years since, Amazon.com has evolved into much more than an online bookstore. Now, the company is one of the best-known brands on the Web. It offers a virtual smorgasbord of anything people want to buy online-books, movies, music, gourmet food, computers, clothing, electronics, drugstore items, cameras, sporting goods, tools, hardware, and the list goes on.

The company is well on its way to achieving Bezos’ ultimate goal of offering the “Earth’s biggest selection.” Part of the way Amazon has achieved this is through partnering with other companies-including Toys “я” Us, Target, and Borders-and by opening its marketplace to other merchants of all types and sizes.

In 1999, Amazon launched its own auction platform, as well as an initiative called zShops that enabled individuals and large merchants to open stores and list products for sale for a low monthly subscription fee and a cut of revenues. A year later, Amazon further opened itself to outside sellers with the creation of its Marketplace program. Anyone with something to sell-be it new or used-can be an Amazon Marketplace seller.

There are no monthly subscription fees and no upfront listing fees. Charges are levied only when an Amazon Marketplace item is sold. Now, Amazon also has what it calls “Pro Merchants,” mostly medium-sized to large sellers whose products are included in the general Amazon catalog.

These Pro Merchants typically list and sell a large volume of goods on the site every month, thus supplementing their own website sales. Third-party sales on Amazon .com have grown significantly since the programs started in 2000. Once accounting for just 6 percent of items sold on the web site, merchandise from third-party merchants now amounts to almost 30 percent of Amazon’s sales.

There’s yet another way for outsiders to make money on Amazon. The e-tailer has operated its Associates program since 1996 and essentially created the model for online affiliate marketing programs. Today, Amazon’s is the largest and most successful online affiliate program with more one million members worldwide. Affiliates earn between 4 percent and 10 percent in referral fees for promoting Amazon products on their own sites.

Jeff Bezos, in realizing his own dream of online entrepreneurial success, has helped thousands of others achieve theirs by opening Amazon.com to third-party transactions. The site, which continues to grow in popularity every year, is a good channel for growing incremental sales. Many merchants flock to Amazon because of its huge audience and buyer- and seller-friendly policies.

Though it’s a more expensive marketplace by comparison, sellers report that they encounter less fraud and fewer customer service hassles from Amazon buyers while spending less on managing sales in this channel than in others.

Getting Started

In order to sell on Amazon.com, you’ll need to create an account. (If you’re already a customer, there’s no need to register a separate account, although Amazon does recommend that you maintain separate ones for personal purchases and business sales.)

When you sell at Amazon, the company collects all payments and distributes them to you via a bank draft every two weeks. Therefore, it is important to register for Amazon Payments. You’ll choose a nickname for your company-similar to your user ID on eBay-and will also be asked to provide your phone number and checking account information (including account numbers and routing numbers) so you can get paid for what you sell.

If you’re a new seller, you’ll have to wait at least 14 days before receiving any cash from Amazon for sales completed through this web site. This is purely a security measure that gives Amazon time to make sure you abide by its seller requirements and don’t welsh on any transactions. After this two-week holding period, you can manually disburse funds to your checking account daily, if you choose.

Finally, before you start listing products on the site, you’ll need to set up your seller preferences, in which you outline your default shipping method, as well as your customer service and returns policies.

With these steps completed, you’re set to begin listing individual items for sale in the Amazon Marketplace. In order to outfit your own zShops storefront or easily sell in volume, you’ll need a Pro Merchant subscription, which will enable you to upload listings in bulk.

You’ll pay $19.99 a month for your first two months as a Pro Merchant subscriber and $39.99 a month thereafter. (You must register a credit card with Amazon for monthly subscription charges.)

For the cost, Pro Merchants get privileges that other Marketplace sellers don’t, along with discounted selling fees. Pro Merchants have the ability to list an unlimited number of products for sale on Amazon every month, and can open a zShops storefront that can be promoted directly to customers, something basic Marketplace sellers can’t do.

Basic Marketplace listings expire after 60 days, but Pro Merchant listings stay active until the item sells. In addition, Amazon charges Pro Merchants less for every sale they make through the site. Most Marketplace sellers pay a 99-cent transaction fee on every sale, plus a commission of 6 percent to 15 percent. Amazon automatically waives the 99-cent transaction fee for Pro Merchant subscribers.

The next step to selling on Amazon is actually listing your products for sale. I’ll first walk you the process that a basic Marketplace seller would use, and then tell you about the bulk-listing tools available to Pro Merchant subscribers.

The great thing about Amazon is that most of the products you’ll want to sell are probably already cataloged on the web site. So, setting up a listing is really simple. From any Amazon product detail page, you just click on the link to “Sell yours here.”

You’ll have the option of grading your item as new, refurbished, used, or collectible and adding a comment about the item’s condition. Next, you’ll set the price for your product, based on your own inventory cost and what Amazon and other Marketplace sellers charge for the same product.

Finally, you’ll choose your shipping options-standard, international, or expedited-and submit your listing for inclusion in the Amazon.com search database. Before submitting the listing, you’ll get a chance to review it and to see how much you’ll earn, minus Amazon’s commissions, if the item sells.

As a Pro Merchant subscriber, you’ll probably find it much easier to submit multiple product listings at once, using management software like Monsoon, SellerEngine, ChannelAdvisor, or the site’s free Inventory Loader tool. If you use Inventory Loader, you’ll need to aggregate your inventory database into a single tab-delimited text file, which is essentially a spreadsheet file saved in a specific format that Amazon can read.

Your spreadsheet must include specific fields, such as the item’s International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or Universal Product Code (UPC), price, and quantity available, in a specific order. To ensure that your bulk upload file includes all the information Amazon requires, download the spreadsheet template at www.amazon.com/exec/ obidos/tg/browse/-/1161314/ref=br_bx_c_1_0/103-7307034-5587808 and fill in all the necessary information for your products.

You may find it necessary to make revisions to your Amazon inventory as you sell stock on other web sites or add new items to your product catalog, and you can do so by submitting modifications and additions through a separate bulk upload file.

Occasionally, you may want to sell an item that’s not already included in Amazon’s vast product catalog. Pro Merchant subscribers have the option of adding what Amazon calls “product detail pages” in 15 categories-baby; books; camera and photo; computer and video games; electronics; kitchen, home, and garden; music; musical instruments; pet supplies; software; sporting goods; tools and hardware; toys and games; video and DVD; and everything else.

Catalog additions cannot be made to the following Amazon categories, also known as stores: apparel and accessories; beauty; cell phones and cell phone plans; gourmet food; jewelry and watches; magazines; office products; and health and personal care.

Once you’ve determined that a product you want to sell isn’t already included in the Amazon catalog, you can begin the manual process of creating a product detail page. First, you’ll classify the product by category, subcategory, and type with prompting at each stage by Amazon.

Next, you’ll add the product details-specifically the product name, manufacturer, or publisher-and a description that will appear in the online catalog. It’s important to note that the description should be a basic one, without specific information about the condition of the item you’re offering for sale. That’s because the description will be used by you as well as other merchants who sell the product on Amazon in the future.

After submitting your product details, Amazon evaluates the listing. If you’ve done everything correctly, the item will be added to the site’s product catalog immediately. You will have the option of adding up to eight images to your product submission, provided those photographs meet Amazon’s criteria.

Preferably, products should be photographed against a white background, and they must be in focus and well lit. Image files can be no larger than 50 kilobytes in size and at least 500 pixels in length to be properly displayed. Once a product is accepted into Amazon’s catalog, you can start selling the item, following the steps outlined earlier in this chapter.

How It Works
The great thing about Amazon is that your listings appear alongside those offered by the e-tailer itself and its large merchant partners, like Target, Office Depot, and The Bombay Company. Shoppers can choose to buy directly from Amazon, from one of its big retail partners, or from smaller merchants like you. Price is often the determining factor.

Take, for instance, a search for “Sony PlayStation Portable,” a popular, handheld video game system. The main product page lists a unit available for $199.99 directly from Amazon.com, but shoppers also have the opportunity to choose from “24 new and used” game systems offered at various prices by third-party sellers on Amazon.

These listings are grouped by condition and then by ascending price. Shoppers can see at a glance how the various third-party merchants rank in terms of customer satisfaction and service thanks to Amazon’s five-star seller rating system.

Customers interested only in items from third-party sellers also have the option of just browsing or searching zShops listings. Or they can visit a zShops seller’s storefront directly to see everything that merchant has to offer.

Although it is competing with these third-party merchants, Amazon makes it safe and easy for customers to buy from Marketplace sellers by extending its product and security guarantees to those transactions. Amazon processes all financial transactions conducted on its web site, meaning that buyers never have to share their credit card information with unfamiliar sellers.

When customers decide to buy a product from an Amazon Marketplace seller, they complete the checkout process as if they were buying directly from Amazon. Amazon then sends an e-mail receipt to the buyer and another e-mail notifying the seller that a particular item has sold.

That seller e-mail includes instructions for shipping the product to the buyer, but doesn’t contain any of the buyer’s private credit card information. Amazon pays sellers every two weeks with automated direct deposits to their bank accounts.

A big difference between Amazon and the other online marketplaces is its relatively simple fee structure. Sellers pay no listing fees only commissions after a sale. As previously mentioned, basic Marketplace sellers pay a commission plus a 99-cent transaction fee for every sale, which is waived for Pro Merchant subscribers. Expect to pay a 15 percent commission on most items sold at Amazon.com, with a few notable exceptions. The commission rate is 6 percent on computers; 8 percent on cameras, photo equipment, and electronics; and 10 percent on items in Amazon’s Everything Else store.

Unlike other online marketplaces, you have little control over shipping charges and policies. Amazon requires that third-party merchants ship products within two business days of receiving a customer’s order. When you sell an item in the Amazon Marketplace, Amazon gives you a shipping credit to help cover your costs.

The actual amount of the credit depends on the type of product you’re selling-the credit for books, video games, and DVDs ranges from $2.49 to $3.49-which should cover the cost of shipping a two- or three pound item with the U.S. Postal Service via media mail. The standard shipping credit for other items is a flat $4.49, plus 50 cents per pound.

As a seller, you’re obligated to ship the item even if the credit doesn’t cover your costs. So, make sure to account for additional shipping, packaging, and handling fees when setting your selling price on Amazon.

Like most marketplaces, Amazon has a feedback system through which buyers can rate third-party merchants. Interestingly, however, many Amazon sellers don’t put as much emphasis on cultivating high feedback scores as they do on sites like eBay. That may be because the Amazon Marketplace already provides buyers with an added level of confidence and security because of the financial protections that are in place.

Amazon also takes steps to monitor sellers’ performance and measure them against specific category benchmarks. From your seller account page within Amazon, you can access your “Performance Summary” for all past transactions.

The summary provides a consolidated view of sales, refunds, feedback, and any claims customers have made against you. Amazon sets performance targets for sellers in each category. Those sellers identified as poor performers will receive an e-mail from Amazon with tips on how to improve their performance ratings.

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you if you want to know how to sell products on Amazon, eBay and beyond.

The Online Millionaire: Strategies for Building a Web-based Empire on ebay and Beyond

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KFC Business Strategies

Innocent — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:53:09 +0000

KFC Business Strategies

KFC business experience and success over the decades provides opportunity for entrepreneurs, business owners and managers to learn valuable strategies and ideas to run their businesses to success. Here are business strategies, which have taken KFC from a one-man business to the multi billion dollars enterprise that it is today, and which you can apply in your business.

Your Knowledge/Skill is Invaluable Asset

The success of any business is determined to a large extent by the expertise, knowledge or special skill the founder is bringing to the table. A business stands to succeed if the founder is well experienced, knowledgeable, and possesses uncommon skill in that line of business. This is why it is always advisable for people to set up businesses from their experience or special skill.

Colonel Harland Sanders’ uncommon skill in preparing chicken meals was no doubt a major factor for the success, growth and expansion of KFC.

Uniqueness Sets You Apart

By doing things differently from how other people or businesses are doing it, will cause customers to see you as being different. This perception takes you away from the pack, and places you on a virgin land in the customer’s mind. It is therefore very important to differentiate your business from competitors by the way you create products, attend to customers, deliver your products, etc.

Harland Sanders became very popular in the late 1930 because of the unique method he developed for spicing and pressure-frying chickens.

Directed Focus and Persistence

When we focus our energy and efforts squarely at accomplishing a goal, and we persist on working it out even with little or no progress at the beginning, we would eventually reach the goal in the passage of time.

After losing his business and flat broke at 65, Colonel Sanders’ total commitment to rebuilding his business for another 10 years paid off with 600 franchises, and income of $300,000 before tax.

Allowing Professional Managers

You may have started your business as a one-man enterprise, however, as it grows, you must bring in expert business managers to build it. They can come in as employees or as partners. These are people who can create the structures and systems that will enable the business to run independently and to outlive you.

Having allowed professional managers to take control of Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1964, the business was transformed from a one-man business into a smoothly run modern corporation with expansion to all 50 states and to some foreign markets.
Expanding Your Market

Whatever business you are into, there are always good markets for your products elsewhere other than your immediate location or environment. Most times, the demand for your products may even be greater in some foreign lands, with little or no competition, as well as cheaper cost of production, than what you are experiencing where you are located. To increase your revenue, you must continually discover and expand your market.

By 1992, KFC was making more profits from its international operations than what was being made by its units in the U.S.

Read KFC Success Story: KFC Corporation – The Making of a Global Business from the ground Floor

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KFC Corporation – The Making of a Global Business from the ground Floor

Innocent — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 12:53:02 +0000

KFC Corporation – The Making of a Global Company from the ground Floor

Defying Age and Absence of Money: How Colonel Harland Sanders Rose From Penury At 65 To Create The World’s Most Popular Chicken Restaurant Chain Serving Over 12 Million Customers Daily Around The World

At sixty-five and broke, it is difficult for most people to believe they can still succeed in life. They would probably resign their fate to the circumstances around their lives and hope that the government, family or friends will help them live through the rest of their lives.

But this was not about Colonel Harland Sanders, who, having found himself without a business and completely broke at the age of sixty-five, recharged his inner batteries and created the Kentucky Fried Chicken fast food business, which is today, known as KFC Corporation is the world’s largest chicken restaurant chain, with operations in 109 countries.

Born September 9, 1890 in Indiana, Harland Sanders’ childhood was tough as he struggled by himself to make ends meet. From the age of ten he held a number of jobs, including farm hand, streetcar conductor, army private in cuba, blacksmith’s helper, sales and service station operator.

In 1929, Sanders opened a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky. He cooked for his family and sometimes a customer in the back room. He loved cooking the food his mother taught him, which included pan-fried chicken, country ham, fresh vegetables, and homemade biscuits. Due to increase in the demand for his cooking, Sanders opened his first restaurant in the small front room of his gas station the following year. He served as station operator, chief cook, and cashier, and named the dinning area “Sanders Court & Café.”

In recognition of his contributions to the state’s cuisine, Kentucky Governor Ruby Laffoon gave Sanders an honorary Kentucky Colonel title in 1936, and in 1937, Sanders added a motel to his restaurant, becoming the first motel owner in Kentucky, and expanding the restaurant to 142 seats.

With the invention of the pressure cooker inn the late 1930s, Sanders developed a unique and fast method of spicing and pressure-frying chickens, thereby giving his customers fresh chicken meals. Harland Sanders’ Court & Café became so popular that it was endorsed in 1939 by Duncan Hines’s Adventures in Good Eating.

Sanders business was growing fast in response to his great culinary skill, just as he was perfecting his Secret Recipe, and improving on his cooking skill. However, in 1955 an interstate highway was built to bypass Corbin. This left Sanders without any customer to patronize his restaurant any more. He was totally out of business, and he was 65!

After selling the service station and paying off his debts, he was flat broke. But his resolve to succeed in life wasn’t. Sanders decided to get on the road to sell his Secret recipe to restaurants.

He completely devoted himself to selling his chicken franchise business, and within ten years he had over 600 franchises in the U.S. and Canada. With 17 employees, Sanders had traveled over 200,000 miles in one year promoting Kentucky Fried Chicken, and was making $300,000 before taxes.

In 1964, Kentucky Fried Chicken was getting too big for Sanders to handle. Having reached an agreement with a team of investors led by John Y. Brown, Jr., and John (Jack) Massey, Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken for $2 million dollars. He was to receive a yearly salary of $40,000, which later increased to $200,000, for public appearances.

In three years of take over, Kentucky Fried Chicken had been transformed from a one-man business into a smoothly run corporation with all the trappings of modern management. The company had extended its retail outlets to all 50 states, in addition to extending to Puerto Rico, Mexico, Japan, Jamaica, and the Bahamas.

Massey and Brown changed Sanders concept of a sit-down Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner to a stand-up, take-out store, with focus on providing fast service at low labour costs. This made Kentucky Fried Chicken very successful, with 130 of its franchisees becoming millionaires simply from selling Sanders famous pressure-cooked chickens.

By September, 1970, Kentucky Fried Chicken ran 3,400 fast-food outlets with 823 owned by the company. The following year, with sales reaching $700 million, Kentucky Fried Chicken merged with Heublein Inc., a specialty food and alcoholic beverage corporation.

On December 16, 1980, after seven months of fighting leukemia, Colonel Harland Sanders died. He was not only Kentucky Fried Chicken founder, but its biggest publicist, traveling 250,000 miles a year visiting Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants around the world. An independent survey ranked him the world’s second most recognized celebrity by 1976.

In 1982, now under the management of R.J. Reynolds, which acquired Heublein the previous year, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s sales climbed $2.4 billion. The huge sales can be attributed to the success of its 1981 ad campaign, “We Do Chicken Right”. By 1983, Kentucky Fried Chicken could boast of 4,500 stores in the U.S. and 1,400 units in 54 foreign countries with no other fast-food chain able to compete with it beside McDonald’s.

In 1986, Kentucky Fried Chicken opened its $23 million 2,000,000-square-foot Technical Center to enable the company to keep developing and launching new products into the market. The company also started testing oven-roasted chicken using Collins Foods, one of its multiple franchisees. It also experimented with home delivery service using PepsiCo’s successful Pizza Hut delivery system.

In response to consumers’ growing concerns about the health risk in eating fried foods in the early 1990s, Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to KFC in 1991. The company suspended new product launches to focus on fine-tuning its stores operations and modernization. A $20 million computer system was installed to control fryer coking times, and which also linked front counters with kitchen, drive-thru window, manager’s office, and company headquarters.

KFC’s international business prospered even more than it did in the U.S. The company’s 1992 pretax profits from its international operations stood at $92 million, as opposed to $86 million recorded by its U.S. units. To exploit the opportunities in the foreign market deeper, KFC embarked on an aggressive campaign to increase its international units.

In 1997, PepsiCo, Inc., which bought KFC in 1986 announced the spin-off of its quick service restaurants, including KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut into Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc., with Tricon Global changing its name to YUM! Brands, Inc. in 2002.

By 2006, KFC was serving more than a billion “finger lickin’ good” chicken dinners yearly in over 80 countries and territories across the globe. And in 2009, KFC introduced Kentucky Grilled Chicken, which is a better-for-you option for health conscious consumers who love the flavour of KFC. The new product had less calories, fat and sodium than KFC’S Original Recipe chicken, without sacrificing the great KFC taste.

Although Colonel Harland Sanders is no more, KFC has continued to keep his unique ‘finger lickin’ chicken taste alive for millions of customers worldwide.

Read KFC Business Strategies here

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Selling Formula

Innocent — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:47:33 +0000

Selling Formula

Selling, I believe, is the most important aspect about running a business successfully. The chance for your business to survive, grow and expand is dependent on its ability to make profit, which is unquestionably tied to the ability of the business to continually sell its products in large quantity.

A business needs to sell in large volume to have money flowing in, so that the cost of production can be recovered. A business that is unable to sell as much to cover all the cost of operating it, and leave extra, is on the road to collapsing because soon it will have to face the reality of having no more money to meet the needs of the business.

No doubt, selling should be a top priority for entrepreneurs and managers of business. Whatever your background is, you should learn and develop selling skills. You should be your business’ number one salesman.

If you are having sales problems in your business, or you want to know how you can sell more of your products and keep your business flourishing, you will need to read Zig Ziglar’s teachings on selling. According to Ziglar, there is a formula for selling that can be applied to any industry and get similar effective result. Knowledge of this formula puts you at a vantage position in the market, giving you the opportunity to outsell your competitors.

Below is the excerpt, Sell by Design, Not by Chance, The Formula for Successful Selling Skills, from his best selling book, Ziglar On Selling: The Ultimate Handbook For The Complete Sales Professional.

Enjoy it!

SELL BY DESIGN, NOT BY CHANCE: The Formula for Successful Selling Skills

Sales professionals are open-minded (not empty-headed) and willing to change. Nonprofessionals are so narrow-minded they can look through a keyhole with both eyes at the same time!

BUILDING ON THE PROPER FOUNDATION

Table tennis was a very popular recreational sport during my high school years. One of my buddies taught me to use the “three-finger” grip on the paddle. Being a better than average player allowed me to have lots of fun. I often competed with a friend whose physical talent and competitive spirit were similar, so we alternated in the win-loss column.

One day a new kid came to town, and he used the “handshake” grip and absolutely slaughtered me. Needless to say, I was somewhat chagrined at the experience, but I could immediately see that he could do things with that grip that I would never be able to do the way I was holding the paddle-regardless of how long or how often I practiced.

I immediately changed the way I was gripping the paddle, and for the next few weeks the level of my performance dropped considerably. As a matter of fact, for about six weeks my regular playing partner won virtually every game. However, as I mastered the new concept, we placed closer and closer until the day came that I won.

From that point forward, my table tennis improved remarkably. I’m proud to say that I won the championship tournament we held at Yazoo City High School. Now when you understand that there were forty-two students (including the boy who taught me the new grip) in my senior class, that was no mean feat.

Here’s my point: Sometimes as you change and learn, you might not make immediate progress, but if the fundamentals are correct (and the ones in this book are), you can rest assured that as you “drill for skill” and start to own the procedures, your career will definitely move to new heights (and so will your personal life).

A NEW “GRIP” FOR SOME OF YOU!

In 1987 Bryan Flanagan and Jim Savage took the concepts from my book Secrets of Closing the Sale, as well as information from all my audio- and videotape albums, and combined my research and experience with their own research and experience to develop a sales seminar for our company called “Sell by Design, Not by Chance.”

Bryan had been a national sales instructor for IBM as well as a successful salesman and sales manager before he joined our company as a speaker and trainer. Jim, who was our senior vice president and editor at that time, had a background in education as well as sales and sales management, which allowed him to help shape the program and preserve the educational integrity.

The goal of “Sell by Design, Not by Chance” was to shape a sales training program that would function as a blueprint for success in the world of selling. Much of this book has evolved from the “Sell by Design, Not by Chance” seminar.

Today’s successful persuader must have a specific plan of action. If we had to stop and develop a plan for each sales call, there would be more planning than selling. Since there is a direct correlation between “money earned” and “time spent with a prospect,” we can eliminate unnecessary planning by examining a “formula” with concomitant value.

Concomitant is a seventy-five-cent word that means “transferable skills.” For example, a person who is a good table tennis player will probably have some skills that will transfer to badminton or racquetball. In the world of selling, we need a plan of action that will transcend product line and situational differences.

Our planned selling process consists of a four step formula that we will overview here and develop in detail in the following chapters. The first step is Need Analysis, second is Need Awareness, third is Need Solution, and finally, Need Satisfaction.

PAVLOVIAN SELLING

In 1904 Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his research. Pavlov did research on digestion and the nervous system. He included experiments with dogs in which he rang a bell just before feeding time. In subsequent experiments, he would ring the bell, and the dogs would salivate-whether the food was present or not.’

In today’s sophisticated selling market, getting in front of a client with a brochure and saying, “Stop me when you see something you like,” just won’t make it. You can make an occasional sale, but you can’t make a living-and you certainly can’t build a career.

Too many salespeople are ringing a bell and hoping the suspects will salivate when in fact just the opposite happens. If your actions come across as what some perceive as stereotypically “salesy” in nature, the prospects are turned off.

As an example, at one time cafeterias put the desserts at the beginning of the line. This is done less frequently today because the public has “marketing savvy” to a much larger degree than at any time in the history of the world.

The dinosaur is extinct, and so are the career hopes of any salesperson who comes across as the fast-talking, high-pressure used car salesman who has a model that his grandmother drove only to church (and she must have gone quite often since the odometer has been around twice).

Of course you will see items next to the cash registers in some grocery stores and some retail outlets because impulse purchasing is an important part of sales and marketing, but the sophistication level of the buying public prevents Pavlovian selling to any large degree. Add-on sales can be made using this technique because when you buy a dress suit, a shirt or blouse is a natural addition. However, Pavlovian selling is selling by chance.

Successful sales professionals use a process or design-a blueprint. And the good news is that there is a single blueprint for sales success regardless of product or service. I know this may seem hard to believe, but read on!

Four-Step Formula

1. Need Analysis
2. Need Awareness
3. Need Solution
4. Need Satisfaction

PROCESS

The following is a four-step formula that you can plug into your sales efforts. The time spent on each step may vary, but if you are successful in sales, you will be involved in some form of each of these steps.

STEP ONE: NEED ANALYSIS

Customer-driven (wants) and need-oriented (needs) selling begins with the sales professional doing a Need Analysis. Even if the prospects are coming to you and asking for your product or service, it is entirely possible that they have not properly identified what they are really looking for.

Let me give you a specific example. It is a fact of life that everybody who is breathing is getting older. And when you consider the alternative, getting older isn’t all bad! It is equally true that our population consists of more and more senior citizens, and over the next thirty years or so the number will increase significantly.

There is a tremendous market for goods and services among those senior citizens, but I might point out that many of the products of today were completely unknown just a few years ago.

As simple as telephone answering machines, computers, and mobile telephones might seem to some, these “gadgets” can be quite bewildering to others. The “in-tune” salesperson of today will do well to become “tuned in” to the thinking, fears, concerns, and interests of all prospects, including the senior citizens.

The following example from Agewave by Ken Dychtwald and Joe Flower indicates the importance of properly identifying the need of the prospect and utilizes the senior citizen to make this major point.

Robert Beck was the director of benefits at IBM during its phenomenal growth years in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Because of his work involvements, Beck, who was middle-aged, became very capable at using a wide variety of computer and electronic technologies.

It should not have been surprising to him when his seventy-eight-year-old father commented one day that he wished he could have a VCR like his son’s.

“You can, Dad-all you need to do is go out and buy one,” said the younger Beck. “Easy for you to say,” replied his father. “First of all, even though I’d like to own one, I wouldn’t know which one to buy. Second, I could never carry it into my house. Third, I wouldn’t know how to set it up.

And fourth, I’m not sure that I could follow the instructions on how to use it, and I wouldn’t want to buy something I couldn’t use.” For the elder Beck, money wasn’t the issue; the real concern was the inconvenience of purchasing, setting up, and learning how to use the VCR.

As a solution, the son went with his father to an electronics store and helped him buy a good, easy-to-use VCR. Then they worked out a deal with the store manager whereby one of the technicians would deliver and set it up. For an additional $25, they arranged for the technician-now Mr. Beck’s “personal customer service representative”-to give him three lessons, spaced one day apart, on how to use the VCR. Once he got the feel for the new technology, Mr. Beck quickly became a big fan of videos and eventually had the largest collection of movies on his block. In fact, he began a weekly movie-watching club for his retired neighbors and friends.

He enjoyed his VCR so much that he returned to the electronics store and worked out similar arrangements for a stereo, cordless phone, and coffeepot. For him, making the purchase more convenient and being taught to use the equipment was every bit as important a part of the sale as the product itself.

I hope the point is obvious. The Norwegian word from which sell is derived is selje, which means “to serve.” In order for you to serve your prospects, you must clearly understand their needs before you can proceed.

Customer-driven (wants) and need-oriented (needs) selling begins with the sales professional doing a Need Analysis.

LOOKING INSIDE THE PROSPECT

In Needs Analysis, the goal is to x-ray the prospect. The sales professional develops the skill and talents necessary to look within the customer and find the needs of the customer-to uncover existing needs. These needs may be on the surface or just below the surface, but they definitely exist. Your duty (and opportunity) as a sales professional is to get those needs out into the open-to discover needs.

As you are searching for needs, “wants” and desires will surface. Don’t make the mistake of discounting these wants as frivolous because prospects take action on their “want to’s” as well as their needs.

Please understand that I did not say you invent or create the needs and wants. That’s not selling. You uncover a need that is already there and, in the process, render a real service.

Recently, I had difficulty with one of my tires so I went to the tire store to get it replaced. Much to my chagrin, the service attendant identified a small problem with another tire, which indicated the front end was out of alignment. He explained that if I did not correct the alignment, I would soon be replacing yet another tire.

Needless to say, realigning the front end of my car cost money, but the investment actually saved me additional costs in the future. The attendant (salesperson) did not cause the problem; he simply identified the problem and offered a solution, which is exactly what the professional does. We don’t create problems; we identify them and offer solutions through our goods and services.

NEEDS AND WANTS-REASONS AND EXCUSES

Today’s successful salesperson is customer-desire driven and needs oriented! The days of product-driven, product-oriented sales are gone forever. So, regardless of the product or the service, the customer has needs and wants that must be met. If your product or service meets a need or desire, then you have a chance to make the sale. If no needs or desires are met, no sale!

Basically, people buy because they either need or want something. If we can give persons a reason for buying and an excuse for buying, the chances that they will buy improve rather dramatically.

Many years ago, I was privileged to be part of an organization that raised more money in the state of Georgia than any direct sales securities organization had ever raised. By selling stock in a direct marketing effort, we raised over $40 million to build a paper mill in Blakely, Georgia. In many, many instances, when I sold one member of the family a few shares of stock, virtually every other member of the family bought. They often made me promise not to tell how many shares (some would invest only $50 or $100), but all were able to say they were stockholders with their family, and they were very happy about that fact.

The same principle worked in the cookware business. Many sets of cookware were bought because other family members had bought, and family pride can be a tremendous motivating factor. The reasons people bought were: (1) They wanted the cookware, and (2) the other family members had the cookware. The excuses people had for buying the cookware were: (1) savings on fuel bills, cooking oil, and electricity, and (2) less food shrinkage and increased nutritional food value. Each “excuse” was legitimate, but the overwhelming factor in buying (just as was the case in the stock sales) was “want to.”

Today, home computers, laptops, and cellular telephones are bought similarly. The reasons people buy are: (1) They want these high-tech products, and (2) other family members and peers have the products. The excuses people have for buying the latest technological products are: (1) convenience and (2) communication improvement. Again, each “excuse” is legitimate, but the overwhelming factor in buying is “want to” (which is enhanced by others’ ownership).

People invariably will buy what they want, even above what they need. How many times have all of us seen families literally living in poverty and yet every family member is smoking, drinking soda pop, and watching TV? How many fur coats do we really need in Dallas, Texas? People certainly don’t buy them primarily because they need them; they buy because they want them.

When you start looking at needs and wants, just how many suits of clothes do we really need? How big a house do we need? How many shirts, dresses, blouses, sweaters, or pairs of shoes? Fortunately, for those of us in the world of selling, our job is not to determine only needs (in the strictest sense of the definition of the word need) because people buy more than they need.

I suspect that if you and I were to stop a thousand people on the streets of Any City, U.S.A., and ask them point-blank, “Do you need … (a new car, air-conditioning, a new computer, more life insurance, or any other products, goods, or services)?” very, very few would say, “Well, as a matter of fact… ” I’m also even more convinced that if we were to tell our sales story in a persuasive manner, out of the one thousand people there would be at least fifty-and maybe as many as three or four hundred of them (depending, of course, on our product)-who would buy.

What happened to those people who didn’t “need” our product? Let me remind you that people often have no idea what their needs may be because they don’t know what is available. Fifty years ago we didn’t realize we needed air-conditioning in our cars, computers in our homes, extensions on the telephone line, and 1,001 other things. We don’t make people unhappy by revealing new “needs” to them.

The reality is, we can bring a much more enjoyable lifestyle to them, help them enjoy the ease of living, provide more effective and efficient operations, or offer significant savings through the use of our products. The basic question is not, “Do you need a new computer?” The question is, “Would you like to reduce errors in expensive promotional mailings as well as time spent entering names?”

If you are fortunate enough to sell a product or service that people want and need-and you believe they need and want it, even if they are not yet convinced-you are on your way to sales success!

A salesperson armed with integrity, a strong belief in the product, and the desire to get the product into the hands of as many people as possible is a powerful force with which to deal. And it is even more powerful when you add persuasion skills to the sales arsenal.

For our purposes, wants and needs are basically used interchangeably throughout this book.

If we can give people a reason for buying and an excuse for buying, the chances are rather dramatically improved that they will buy.

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard on Selling, and I very much gladly recommend it to you if you desire to develop winning selling skill.

Ziglar On Selling: The Ultimate Handbook For The Complete Sales Professional

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How To Get Rich

Innocent — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 05:56:20 +0000

How To Get Rich

Most people the world over would like to get rich, but only a few ever achieve it. And those are the ones who follow a particular way to getting rich. Yes, there is a true and proven way to getting what you want, including becoming rich.

Most people think the way to be rich is to set out to make as much money as they can possibly make. And with such mindset, they will want to be paid for every service they render, and for each extra second they spend in their work place – they are all out for immediate gratification.

But that is not the way to get rich. In fact, no one ever attains lasting and fulfilling riches by setting out to be rich. Riches come naturally when your life purpose follows a particular way, which many miss in their hurry to make more money.

I will allow you to discover how to get what you want, including riches from Napoleon Hill in his book, The Master Key To Riches.

Here is the excerpt, enjoy it

An Easy Way To Get What You Want

You who work for wages should learn more about this sowing and reaping business.

Then you would understand why no man can go on forever sowing the seed of inadequate service and reaping a harvest of full grown pay. You would know that there must come a halt to the habit of demanding a full day’s pay for a poor day’s work.

And you who do not work for wages, but who wish to get more of the better things of life! Let us have a word with you. Why do you not become wise and start getting what you wish the easy and sure way? Yes, there is an easy and a sure way to promote one’s self into whatever he wants from life, and its secret becomes known to every person who makes it his business to go the extra mile. The secret can be uncovered in no other manner, for it is wrapped up in that extra mile.

The pot of gold at the “end of the rainbow” is not a mere fairy tale! The end of that extra mile is the spot where the rainbow ends, and that is where the pot of gold is hidden.

Few people ever catch up with the “end of the rainbow.” When one gets to where he thought the rainbow ended he finds it is still far in the distance. The trouble with most of us is that we do not know how to follow rainbows. Those who know the secret know that the end of the rainbow can be reached only by going the extra mile.

Late one afternoon, some forty-five years ago, William C. Durant, the founder of General Motors, walked into his bank after banking hours, and asked for some favor which in the ordinary course of business should have been requested during banking hours.

The man who granted the favor was Carol Downes, an under official of the bank. He not only served Mr. Durant with efficiency, but he went the Extra Mile and added courtesy to the service. He made Mr. Durant feel that it was a real pleasure to serve him. The incident seemed trivial, and of itself it was of little importance. Unknown to Mr. Downes, this courtesy was destined to have repercussions of a far-reaching nature.

The next day Mr. Durant asked Downes to come to his office. That visit led to the offer of a position which Downes accepted. He was given a desk in a general office where nearly a hundred other people worked, and he was notified that the office hours were from 8:30am to 5:30p.m. His salary to begin with was modest.

At the end of the first day, when the gong rang announcing the close of the day’s work, Downes notices that everyone grabbed his hat and coat and made a rush for the door. He sat still, waiting for the others to leave the office. After they had gone he remained at his desk, pondering in his own mind the cause of the great haste everyone had shown to get away on the very second of quitting time.

Fifteen minutes later Mr. Durant opened the door of his private office, saw Downes still at his desk, and asked Downes whether he understood that he was privileged to stop work at 5:30.

“Oh yes,” Downes replied, “but I did not wish to be run over in the rush.” Then he asked if he could be of any service to Mr. Durant. He was told he might find a pencil for the motor magnate. He got the pencil, ran it through the pencil sharpener and took it to Mr. Durant. Mr. Durant thanked him and said “good night.”

The next day at quitting time Downes remained at his desk again after the “rush” was over. This time he waited with purpose aforethought. In a little while Mr. Durant came out of his private office and asked again if Downes did not understand that 5:30 was the time for closing.

“Yes.” Downes smiled. “I understand it is quitting time for the others, but I have heard no one say that I have to leave the office when the day is officially closed, so I chose to remain here with the hope that I might be of some slight service to you.”

“What an unusual hope,” Durant exclaimed. “Where did you get the idea?

“I got it from the scene I witness here at closing time every day,” Downes replied. Mr. Durant grunted some reply which Downes did not hear distinctly and returned to his office.

From then on Downes always remained at his desk after closing time until he saw Mr. Durant leave for the day. He was not paid to remain over time. No one told him to do it. No one promised him anything for remaining, and as far as the casual observer might know, he was wasting his time.

Several months later Downes was called into Mr. Durant’s office and informed that he had been chosen to go out to a new plant that had been purchased recently to supervise the installation of the plant machinery. Imagine that! A former bank official becoming a machinery expert in a few months.

Without quibbling, Downes accepted the assignment and went on his way. He did not say, “Why, Mr. Durant, I know nothing about the installation of machinery.” He did not say, “That’s not my job,” or “I’m not paid to install machinery.” No, he went to work and did what was requested of him. Moreover, he went at the job with a pleasant “mental attitude.”

Three months later the job was completed. It was done so well that Mr. Durant called Downes into his office and asked him where he learned about machinery. “Oh,” Downes explained, “I never learned, Mr. Durant. I merely looked around, found men who knew how to get the job done, put them to work, and they did it.”

“Splendid!” Mr. Durant exclaimed. “There are two types of men who are valuable. One is the fellow who can do something and do it well, without complaining that he is being overworked. The other is the fellow who can get other people to do things well, without complaining. You are both types wrapped into one package.”

Downes thanked him for the compliment and turned to go.

“Wait a moment,” Durant requested. “I forgot to tell you that you are the new manager of the plant you have installed, and your salary to start with is $50,000.00 a year.”

The following ten years of association with Mr. Durant was worth between ten and twelve million dollars to Carol Downes. He became an intimate advisor of the motor king and made himself rich as a result.

The main trouble with so many of us is that we see men who have “arrived” and we weigh them in the hour of their triumph without taking the trouble to find out how or why they “arrived.”

There is nothing very dramatic about the story of Carol Downes. The incidents mentioned occurred during the day’s business, without even a passing notice by the average person who worked along with Downes. And we doubt not that many of these fellow-workers envied him because they believed he had been favoured by Mr. Durant, through some sort of pull or luck, or whatever it is that men who do not succeed use as an excuse to explain their own lack of progress.

Well, to be candid, Downes did have an inside “pull” with Mr. Durant!

He created that “pull” on his own initiative.

He created it by going the extra mile in a matter as trivial as that of placing a neat point on a pencil when nothing was requested except a plain pencil.

He created it by remaining at his desk “with the hope” that he might be of service to his employer after the “rush” was over at 5:30 each evening.

He created it by using his right of personal initiative by finding men who understood how to install machinery instead of asking Durant where or how to find such men.

Trace down these incidents step by step and you will find that Downes’ success was due solely to his own initiative. Moreover, the story consists of a series of little tasks well performed, in the right “mental attitude.”

Perhaps there were a hundred other men working for Mr. Durant who could have done as well as Downes, but the trouble with them was that they were searching for the “end of the rainbow” by running away from it in the 5:30 rush each afternoon.

Long years afterward a friend asked Carol Downes how he got his opportunity with Mr. Durant. “Oh,” he modestly replied, “I just made it my business to get in his way, so he could see me. When he looked around, wanting some little service, he called on me because I was the only one in sight. In time he got into the habit of calling on me.”

There you have it! Mr. Durant “got into the habit” of calling on Downes. Moreover, he found that Downes could and would assume responsibilities by going the extra mile.

What a pity that all of the American people do not catch something of this spirit of assuming greater responsibilities. What a pity that more of us do not begin speaking more of our “privileges” under the American way of life, and less of the lack of opportunities in America.

Is there a man living in America today who would seriously claim that Carol Downes would have been better off if he had been forced, by law, to join the mad rush and quit his work at 5:30 in the afternoon? If he had done so, he would have received the standard wages for the sort of work he performed, but nothing more. Why should he have received more?

His destiny was in his own hands. It was wrapped up in this one lone privilege which should be the privilege of every American citizen: the right of personal initiative through the exercise of which he made it a habit always to go the extra mile. That tells the whole story. There is no other secret to Downes’ success. He admits it, and ever’ success. He admits it, and everyone familiar with the circumstances of his promotion from poverty to riches knows it.

There is one thing no one seems to know: Why are there so few men who, like Carol Downes, discover the power implicit in doing more than one is paid for? It has in it the seed of all great achievement. It is the secret of all noteworthy success, and yet it is so little understood that most people look upon it as some clever trick with which employers try to get more work out of their employees.

Just after the end of the Spanish-American War, Elbert Hubbard wrote a story entitled A Message To Garcia. He told briefly how President William McKinley commissioned a young soldier by the name of Rowan to carry a message from the United States Government to Garcia, the rebel chieftain, whose exact whereabouts were not known.

The young solder took the message, made his way through the fastnesses of the Cuban jungle, finally found Garcia, and delivered the note to him. That was all there was to the story – just a private soldier carrying out his orders under difficulties, and getting the job done without coming back with an excuse.

The story fired imaginations and spread all over the world. The simple act of a man doing what he was told, and doing it well, became news of the first magnitude. A message to Garcia was printed in booklet form and the sales reached an all-time high for such publications, amounting to more than ten million copies. This one story made Elbert Hubbard famous, to say nothing of helping to make him rich.

The story was translated into several foreign languages. The Japanese Government had it printed and distributed to every Japanese soldier during the Japanese-Russian war. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company presented a copy of it to each of their thousands of employees. The big life insurance companies of America presented it to their salesmen. Long after Elbert Hubbard went down on the ill-fated Lusitania in 1915, A Message To Garcia continued as a best-seller throughout America.

The story was popular because it had in it something of the magic power that belongs to the man who does something, and does it well.

The whole world is clamoring for such men. They are needed and wanted in every walk of life. American industry has always had princely berths for men who can and will assume responsibilities and who get the job done in the right “mental attitude,” by going the extra mile.

Andrew Carnegie lifted no fewer than forty such men from the lowly station of day laborers to millionaires. He understood the value of men who were willing to go the extra mile. Wherever he found such a man, he brought “his find” into the inner circle of his business and gave him an opportunity to earn “all he was worth.”

People do things or refrain from doing them because of a motive. The soundest of motives for the habit of going the extra mile is the fact that it yields enduring dividends, in ways too numerous to mention, to all who follow the habit.

No one has ever been known to achieve permanent success without doing more than he was paid for. The practice has its counterpart in the laws of nature. It has back of it an impressive array of evidence as to its soundness. It is based on common sense and justice.

The best of all methods of testing the soundness of this principle is that of putting it to work as a part of one’s daily habits. Some truths we can learn only through our own experience.

Americans want greater individual shares of the vast resources of this country. That is a healthy desire. The wealth is here in abundance, but let us stop this foolish attempt to get it the wrong way. Let us get our wealth by giving something of value in return for it.

We know the rules by which success is attained. Let us appropriate these rules and use them intelligently, thereby acquiring the personal riches we demand, and adding to the wealth of the nation as well.

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you if your desire is to start and run your business and become your own boss.

The Master Key To Riches

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Tyson Foods Business Strategies

Innocent — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 11:31:28 +0000

Tyson Foods Business Strategies

Tyson Foods rise from a small start-up business, which began with a few hundreds of dollars, to today’s multi billion dollar corporation leaves a lot of ideas and strategies for entrepreneurs, business managers and owners to learn from and also succeed.

No Risk, No Gain

Business is about taking risk. You will need to believe you would succeed in investing money, time, and energy into executing an idea. Without the courage to take the risk in exploring and committing resources to actualize an idea, you may not know how successful it would have been.

John Tyson didn’t only commit his life savings to execute his Chicken business idea, but even borrowed more money to add to it. This was because he believed he would succeed, and was prepared to take the risk in trying out the business idea.

Being in Control of Factors of Production

Your business stands more chance to succeed if you are in control of the factors that affect your production, such as supplies, otherwise, it can be brought to it knees if what you need to produce become scarce.

Having been hit by scarcity of baby chicks, and needed feeds, Tyson realized the only way to achieve success in the business was to own a hatchery and a commercial feed business, which he established.

Ensuring Flexibility in Operation

A business with flexible operational structures will be able to adjust to market forces, and economic changes, and respond quickly to seize available opportunities.

Tyson Foods was able to survive the difficult business environment of the early 1960s when the price of poultry products was down compared to the cost of producing them, because it could quickly diversify into profitable related businesses, such as commercial egg business, while making changes to its major business, poultry production.

Investing in the Business

To ensure the growth of your business, and its competitiveness in the market place, you must be ready to make some investments.

In 1971, Tyson Foods invested in constructing a computerized feed mill in Springdale, Arkansas, and a processing plant at Nashville. It also bought two new companies. The investments resulted in Tyson Foods almost doubling in size and in sales.

What is Your Growth Strategy?

To grow your business, you need to have a strategy that will enable you achieve it at the best convenience and cost.

For Tyson Foods, its growth strategy was to acquire existing businesses that had the asset and market share that it desired. Guided by this strategy, Tyson Foods has brought in some of the world’s largest poultry, pork and beef processing companies into its fold, including Holly Farms, Hudson Foods, and IBP, making Tyson Foods the world’s most diversified Meat Company.

Taking Your Business Abroad

As your business takes root and flourishes, the next phase to consider should be how to take it to other regions of the world where demand for your products may exist. In fact, sometimes, your products may be in higher demand overseas than what you are currently selling locally.

Tyson Foods began its international move in 1989 by entering into partnership with Trasgo, and in 1995, the company’s business abroad brought in about $500 million in revenue.

Restructuring is periodically needed

To put your business back in shape, you will need to periodically restructure it to be quicker, more effective and efficient in responding to current challenges.

To keep the company afloat in the late 1990s when prices of poultry products came crumbling, Tyson Foods took a decision to streamline and restructure the company. It sold off some of its non-poultry businesses in 1999, including its seafood and pork businesses.

Read Tyson Foods Business Success Story Here

Experts in business and technology, as well as daily users rate this software higher and above others. Click here to see why.

………………………………..

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Tyson Foods: How John Tyson Turned 500 Chicks Into 23 Billion Dollars Meat Business

Innocent — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 14:42:19 +0000

Tyson Foods: How John Tyson Turned 500 Chicks Into 23 Billion Dollars Meat Business

In 1931, John Tyson, with his wife and their one year old son, Don, moved to Springdale, Arkansas where he made a living by hauling hay, fruits, and chickens for local growers. In 1935, having heard about the price of chickens being higher in Chicago and other Northern states, Tyson decided to buy and take his chickens from Arkansas to Chicago.

With his savings and additional borrowed money, and strong belief he would make good profit selling chickens outside Arkansas border, Tyson set out to Chicago with 500 chickens. True to his belief, he sold the birds and made a profit of $235. He wired home $220 to settle his debt and to pay for another batch of chickens.

From that beginning, Tyson continued hauling chickens to Northern markets. Before the end of the year, he had extended his market to include Cincinnati, Detroit, Cleveland, Memphis, and Houston. In response to the scarcity of baby chicks, which affected his business, Tyson bought a hatchery. He also started a commercial feed business when he couldn’t get the feeds he needed. And in 1937, he named his company Tyson Feed & Hatchery.

By 1943, Tyson’s company was vertically integrated. It owned its chicks, the feeds to nourish them, and the trucks to haul them to the market place to sell them. And to establish his business firmly, he decided to invest in grower farm.

The 1960s began with a difficult year for Tyson Feed & Hatchery as broiler prices remained low compared to cost of producing them. To sustain its business, Tyson diversified into the commercial egg business and the building of new offices in downtown Springdale.

In 1963, Tyson & Hatchery went public and offered 100,000 shares of stocks for $10.50 a share, and the company’s name became Tyson’s Foods, Incorporated. The company made its first acquisition by buying the Garrett Poultry Company. Sadly, in 1966, John Tyson and his wife died in an automobile accident, and their son, Don took over the running of the company.

He formulated the company’s first corporate strategy, when he said that the company was not strictly committed to the broiler market, but a great deal to ensuring that its investors’ funds brought adequate returns to them. This strategy allowed Tyson Foods to diversify to profitable related businesses

The company’s name was changed to Tyson Foods, Inc. in 1971, with its broiler production reaching 72 million. It invested in a computerized feed mill in Springdale, Arkansas, a new processing plant at Nashville, and two additional acquisitions. These almost doubled the size of the company.

As the ’70 closes, Tyson’s production reached 4.5 million chickens per week, and the company was also the nation’s biggest producer of hog. The company continued its growth by acquiring Krispy Kitchens, Ocoma Foods, Vantress Pedigree and the Wilson Food Corporation.

The 1980s began with Tyson Foods acquiring Honeybear Foods in Neosho, Missouri, and the company’s Chick ‘n Quick line gaining lots of ground in grocery stores, eventually becoming the only chicken patty brand sold in the whole of America by 1982.

In 1983, Tyson Foods bought Mexican Original® in Fayetteville, Arkansas as the company continued to diversify its array of products. The following year, the company hit $1 billion in sales, and continuing its acquisition strategy for growth, it bought Valmac, the Arkansas-based poultry. The purchase brought Tyson Foods about $400 million annual sales, and many major restaurant accounts. And by 1986, Tyson Foods was the biggest poultry producer in the U.S. ahead of ConAgra.

In 1989, Tyson Foods made one of its biggest and profitable acquisitions in its history when it bought Holly Farms. The purchase of Holly Farms doubled Tyson Foods’ size, bringing its annual sales to over $2.5 billion, and its employees to about 48,000. Holly Farms brought Tyson Foods into the beef and pork processing business.

Going international, Tyson Foods formed partnership with Trasgo, a Mexican poultry company to establish an international partnership with Mexico and Japan, known as CITRA.

By 1994, Tyson was undisputed leader in poultry production with sales topping $5.11 billion. The company began aggressive international expansion with the formation of a joint venture in China in 1994, and the formation of a subsidiary, World Resource, Inc. in 1995 to help Tyson’s customers worldwide to source products. The company’s international sales brought in about $500 million.

Tyson solidified its position as the world’s largest poultry producer in 1998 by buying Hudson Foods, the fourth largest poultry producer for $642.4 million, thereby increasing its share of the market to 30 percent.

The late 1990s saw the poultry industry in a dip, with oversupply of poultry products and low prices taking a big toll on operators. To deal with this, Tyson took a number of measures to streamline and restructure the company. These included selling off some of its non-chicken businesses, including its seafood and pork businesses in 1999.

In 2001, Tyson Foods bought IBP, the world’s largest processor of beef for $4.4 billion. Tyson Foods had always tried diversifying into related non-chicken products, but had never been successful, until the purchase of IBP.

The acquisition of IBP gave one-quarter of the market for all beef processed in the U.S. to Tyson Foods, making Tyson Foods the largest diversified meat company in the world valued at $23 billion in 2001. By 2002, Tyson’s revenue had soared to $5.9 billion.

Read Tyson Foods Business Success Strategies Here

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Starting a Business – The Fear That Stops Many from Starting Their Business

Innocent — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:53:05 +0000

Starting a Business: The Fear That Stops Many from Starting Their Business

A lot of people desire to start their business and be their own boss, and possibly become rich from it, but they never get to starting the business. And the major reason is the fear that they may not have known all they needed to know to be able to run the business successfully.

You may have birthed a business idea for many years now, but you are not confident you would succeed if you go ahead with it and so the business is still only an idea. It will never be realized if you don’t confront this fear – the feeling of not having adequate knowledge to be successful in business. But how do you deal with it, and what do you need to know to be able to start and run a business successfully?

The entrepreneurial couple, Paul & Sarah Edwards in their book: Why Aren’t You Your Own Boss?: Leaping Over the Obstacles That Stand Between You and Your Dream Discussed this fear in one of the chapters of the book, and proffered practical solution to dealing with it and getting your business started right away.

Here is the excerpt, it will greatly help you:

I Don’t Know the Nitty-Gritty of Starting a Business

I don’t know anything at all about business-how can I get one started?
How do I attract enough customers to make money?
I’m not any good with numbers-how will I keep track of my money?
I’ve already read a lot of books on starting a business – is there a better way to learn what I need to know?

Business. It’s all around us – from your telephone company, to the factory that built your car, to that doughnut shop down the street. We all have many dealings with businesses every day. But, despite all of these interactions, business remains something of a mystery to many of us.

What exactly do they do all day behind those closed doors? How do you turn a little bit of money into a lot of money? Like that scene in the Wizard of OZ when Toto pulls the curtain away to reveal the man operating the machinery who is the “Great and Powerful Oz,” many of us may not have a clue what is going on behind the curtain until it is revealed to us.

While most of us have at one time or another worked in a business-and we are certainly familiar with what it’s like to be an employee – few of us have ever run a business, much less started one from scratch. So, when it comes time to think about starting a business, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the many different things that we don’t understand -what’s going on behind the curtain.

The fact is, you don’t know what you don’t know. The good news is that the mysteries of business can be revealed, and the answers to your questions are all around you.
So, if not knowing anything about starting a business is getting in the way of your dreams of independence, here’s what you can do right now. Don’t allow the nuts and bolts of business continue to be a mystery – step your way around this obstacle by asking the following questions:

1. What do I really need to know to start my business?
2. What don’t I need to know to start my business?
3. Where are the best places to get the information I need?
4. How can I start with what I’ve got?

Let’s go through these questions in detail. By the time you’re done with this chapter, you’ll be able to lift the veil of mystery away from starting a business. In addition, you’ll understand exactly what you need to know to start your own business, and you’ll be able to focus on just that – and not on the things that you don’t need to know. You should be well on your way to leaping over this particular barrier and on the path to making your dreams of independence reality.

Question 1: What Do I Really Need to Know to Start My Business?

Believe it or not, you don’t need to know everything there is to know about business before you start your own business. You don’t need a master of business administration (MBA) degree, you don’t need to take classes after work at your local community college, and you don’t need to buy every book on the business bookshelf at your local bookstore.

When it comes right down to it, there are only a few essentials that you really should know about before you dive into your business. Take a little time to get to know them, and you’ll be on your way before you know it. These things include:

learning the nuts and bolts of business,
finding customers, and
keeping track of your money

Remember: There’s nothing standing in the way of your starting your own business right now-this very minute except yourself. Think about it. Why aren’t you in business right now? What’s holding you back? Most successful entrepreneurs don’t see barriers; they only see opportunities.

To highly motivated entrepreneurs, barriers are simply minor speed bumps on the way to achieving their goals of independence and success. More often than not, they simply blast right through them. And you can, too.

When Barbara Beckstrom and Linda Hicks lost their jobs because the northern Michigan construction firm they worked for went out of business, they soon realized that they just might have been handed a tremendous opportunity to start their own business.

Despite the fact that they knew nothing about starting and running their own business, they forged ahead, driven by the excitement of being their own bosses and the need to make money to live.

Barbara and Linda started their own company-Right Rail, which specializes in installing highway guardrails and fences. But, rather than allow the fact that they lacked even the most basic knowledge of running a business get in the way of their dreams, they learned all they needed to know about starting and running a business by spending time at their local library, eventually creating a business plan to secure financing to buy equipment and materials and to pay wages.

The company quickly grew to annual sales of more than $2 million and eighteen employees.

By deciding you’re in business, you are in business. That’s one of the advantages of free enterprise. You see, in the beginning, It s much more a state of mind than anything else. The formalities of the mechanics of starting your business are details that you can catch up with along the way-just don’t wait too long to catch up!

Despite this fact, many people allow the mechanics of starting a business (or, more likely, the fear of the mechanics) to get in the way of their dreams. Instead of just doing it, they waste days, weeks, and years fretting about the things they don’t know, rather than simply diving in and learning along the way as Barbara Beckstrom and Linda Hicks did.

Key Questions: Are you allowing your lack of business knowledge to get in the way of your starting your own business? Do you always seem to have just one more question that needs to be answered, or one more thing to learn, before you can take that last step and open your new business to the world? If so, step back from your questions for a little bit and ask yourself this: “What is the one thing I could do right now to put myself in business?” Here are some suggestions for what that one thing might be:

• Print business cards with the name of your business, your name and title, and contact information.
• Create a flyer announcing your business and deliver copies to all your neighbors.
• Send an e-mail message announcing your business to all your friends, relatives, and other acquaintances.
• Create a simple, four-page catalog of your products or services on your computer and mail it out to all your friends, relatives, and other acquaintances.

By doing as few as one of these things-and forgetting all about your other questions, at least for a while – you’ll find that your perspective will be changed. Instead of thinking about starting your business, you will be in business.

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you if your desire is to start and run your business and become your own boss.

Why Aren’t You Your Own Boss?: Leaping Over the Obstacles That Stand Between You and Your Dream

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Honeywell Business Strategies

Innocent — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:04:43 +0000

Honeywell Business Strategies

Honeywell’s business success for the 125 years that it has been in business is definitely made possible by the strategies and ideas the founders and managers applied in running it all through the past decades. These ideas, which are universal principles of business success, can be adopted into any industry to achieve similar success, and they include:

Innovation, Bedrock of Business Success

Having an innovative, and uncommon product, which provides huge value to users, is the foundation upon which business success is laid. This is a strong determinant to how far your business can be successful. No matter how hard you can promote a product, if it isn’t unique and serving a dire need, the success of that business cannot be guaranteed.

Honeywell’s success was sure right from the beginning with the invention and popularity of the innovative product, “damper flapper”, which enabled people to automatically keep their homes at conducive temperatures all day and night.

Seek to Lead Your Market

The number one position is the best to be in your industry to achieve tremendous success. Therefore, you need to have a workable plan to follow to get to the top of your industry.

To be market leader, Honeywell Inc.’s strategy was to acquire well established companies that had the resources, expertise, and market share that it needed to dominate the industry.

Expanding Your Market

The world has become a global village with advancement in communications technology. You could easily increase your sales or income astronomically if you expand into foreign markets rather than engaging in fierce competitive battles with other companies in the local market.

By starting to officially expand into foreign markets in 1935, Honeywell took position to reap bountifully from the massive global market available.

Continue to Improve on Your Product

When you improve on your product, you are adding value to it, and your customers will appreciate it by continuing to buy from you, just as more people will be willing to try your product for the first time. No matter how good your product may be, there will still be one or two ways your customers would want it better.

In 1953, Honeywell launched the T-86 “Round” thermostat, which was an improved version of the first one, and which became extremely popular with users.

Diversifying Into Related Industries

When your business is firmly rooted, the next thing to consider is adding related businesses to it. By this you will be taking advantage of available profitable business opportunities, which you can execute with your prevailing expertise. And you will be increasing your income.

Honeywell is today a well diversified company with business interest in several related areas, such as heating controls and alarm systems, security, defense, and aviation.

Concentrating on Area of Strength

A lot of businesses fail because their owners or managers lose focus after sometime and begin to dabble in and out of other businesses they do not have the knowledge or experience to run effectively. Success is guaranteed if you concentrate your time, efforts and resources on the business you have uncommon ability to operate better than other people. You should what products you can create and deliver better than other people and stay focus on it.

Realizing it veered off from its area of strength by going into the computer industry, which became unprofitable in the 1980s, Honeywell got refocused by selling off its computer business in 1991 to concentrate on businesses it had the expertise and experience to deliver effectively, and competitively.

Read Honeywell Inc. Success Story Here

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Honeywell Inc: The Making of a Global Company

Innocent — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:23:59 +0000

Honeywell Inc: The Making of a Global Company

How Honeywell Transformed From Start-up To Multi Billion Dollar Company

Honeywell
The beginning may be humble, but with innovative product that meets the need of many, a business can grow out of the backyard into many nations of the world. Such is the amazing story of Honeywell Inc.

Honeywell’s beginning can be traced back to 1885 when Albert Butz invented and patented furnace regulator and alarm, and in 1886 again invented an innovative device, a thermostat, which he named “damper flapper”. This simple tool automatically controls the temperature of a room by allowing air into the furnace to heat it up and increase the temperature of the room when the temperature drops below a preset low point, and to close the furnace when the temperature reaches a preset high point. With this thermostat, one could keep their home automatically at conducive temperature all the time.

Butz’s patent and business was acquired by the Consolidated Temperature Controlling Co. Incorporated, which became the Electric Heat Regulator Co. in 1893. The company was purchased in 1898 by W.R Sweatt, and by 1916 it was renamed Minneapolis Heat Regulator Company.

Meanwhile, in 1906, a young engineer by name Mark Honeywell had formed Honeywell Heating Specialty Co. Incorporated, a plumbing and heating business, which specialized in hot water heat generators.

1927 came the merger of the two companies, Minneapolis Heat Regulator Company and Honeywell Heating Specialty Co. to form the Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. The new company with W. R. Sweatt as Chairman and Mark Honeywell as President, immediately became the largest producer of high-quality jeweled clocks.

The company sought to dominate its market by acquisition. It bought several companies, including Brown Instrument Co., a global leader in industrial controls and indicators. Though the company had been selling around the world through distributors like Yamatake Trading Company, Japan, for many years, it officially began international expansion in 1934 with the acquisition of Time-O-Stat Controls Corporation and the establishment of the first office outside the U.S. in Toronto, Canada. Still in that year, the company established its first European subsidiary in the Netherlands.

A few years later, it had offices in London and Stockholm. By 1972 there were distributors for the company’s products in Chile, Panama, Trinidad, New Zealand, Argentina, and South Africa. The company continued to expand across the world, and by 1998 its operations had reached 95 countries of the world.

Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. backed on its massive scientific and engineering talents to create and extend its product line to include arrays of aeronautical equipment, while also quickly adapting to change.

In 1953, it launched the T-86 “Round” thermostat, which was an improvement over the chunky rectangular model, and it became an instant hit. Still in production up till date, it is the most popular thermostat in homes worldwide among its competitors.

In 1957, Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. started building its security business with the purchase of a fire detection and alarm firm. Today, the company is easily recognized as a world leader in security systems. Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. became officially known as Honeywell Inc. in 1963 and in 1969 Honeywell again proved to be reliable and dependable as its instruments helped U.S. astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin land on the moon.

In 1991, Honeywell sold off its computer business, which it entered in 1955, when it was no longer profitable with the coming of personal computers in the 1980s, to concentrate on applying its digital computer knowledge on thermostat systems, aerospace, defense equipment, automation control, integrating sensors, and activators, which were its original area of expertise. The company continued to be a world leader in heating controls and alarm systems.

With the purchase of Sperry Aerospace in 1986 for $1 billion, Honeywell established itself the world’s leading integrator of avionics systems. Sperry brought flight controls, space vehicles, and the first FAA-certified wind shear warning system to Honeywell business, with Honeywell’s sales increasing by 21 percent yearly.

In 1999, Honeywell merged with AlliedSignal, Inc. (while retaining the Honeywell name), to form what was described as “aerospace powerhouse.” AlliedSignal brought its expertise in the manufacturing of aircraft equipment such as engines, brakes, flight data recorders, warning systems, collision-avoidance systems, and cockpit voice recorders to Honeywell’s strength in aircraft control system. This marriage increased the company’s aerospace business.

Honeywell adopted AlliedSignal’s operational cost saving strategy called Six Sigma, which it renamed Six Sigma Plus. The strategy helped the company to operate more effectively and efficiently in all its departments at lower cost. By 1999 the Six Sigma operational system had saved the company $2.2 billion.

Today, with product line covering turboprop engines, flight safety and landing systems, automation and controls, heating, ventilation, materials used in semiconductors, polymers for electronics, fibers, friction materials, and consumer car products, meeting the needs of millions of people in more than 95 countries, including Asian Pacific, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Latin American regions; and with over 43,000 employees worldwide, Honeywell has grown exceedingly from a local start-up to a multinational company of immense success.

Read Honeywell Business Strategies here

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Achieving My Goals In The New Year

Innocent — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 09:43:34 +0000

Achieving My Goals In The New Year

Before I share with you what I plan to do to achieve my goals in the new year, I want to firstly wish you a Happy New Year, 2011, and wish you great success in every area of your life this year.

At this time, when a new year is just beginning, I usually assess my performance in the previous year and note areas where I could have done better in achieving my goals. Though I strive to achieve all my goals for the year, the truth is that I don’t always achieve them all. However, I do achieve a significant portion of it, and each year I work to increase my performance over the previous year.

One of my top goals for last year was to achieve a certain monthly income from my online business. But I didn’t get to the target. I have realized why I didn’t meet my target and I’m going to share it with you, including what I intend doing this year to achieve that monthly income target from my online activities, which is still one of my major goals for the new year.

If you didn’t quite achieve the goals you set for yourself in the past year, you don’t need to worry; you could learn one or two things from my experience and what I’m going to be doing this new year to make them happen, which you can also apply to your life.

And if you haven’t been setting goals for yourself, it is not too late to begin this year. Success can never be achieved in any area of life without one first knowing what exactly they want to achieve, and then mapping out a plan to realizing them. You may not achieve all your set goals, but certainly, you will achieve some, and this will give you the confidence to face the future. You would have learnt a lot from the experience, knowing what works and what doesn’t.

Coming back to my last year’s online business experience, and why I didn’t meet my targeted income level, and what I’m going to be doing in the new year to achieve my goal:

Focus

I realize I wasn’t quite focused on my online business activities last year. At different times in the year I found myself drifting away from my online commitment to other engagements, and that meant I didn’t have time to do what I needed to do to build and promote my websites before they can start generating the kind of income I was expecting.

To compound the challenge I was having, I currently have five websites that I’m personally managing. For each of them to succeed they need to be attended to adequately, and I virtually starved them for long all through last year. None of them was adequately fed with content or promoted properly.

The good thing about these websites is that even with my little attention to them, they still made some money, meaning that if I could give more time and attention to them, their earnings will definitely multiply. And that is what I’m going to be doing this year.

If you are running an online business, or you own a website that you hope would be making you money consistently, there are no two ways about it, you will need to give it adequate attention, build and promote it extensively until it reaches the point that it could start making the expected income.

In the new year, I will be concentrating almost totally on three of my websites. I will resist every temptation to divert my attention away from these websites or to launch another one. I will build the selected websites and promote them extensively until I achieve my income goal for them.

I must point out here that though I will be working on three websites this year, more attention will be given to one of the three. And by the ending of the year, I’m confident this one would have become huge. It is better to work on one website at a time, especially if you are new to online business; build and grow it to success before launching another one. Your success in achieving your goals is surer this way than working on several websites at the same time.

Time Management

Another thing I will be taking seriously this year to be able to achieve my goals is working on my time management skill.

There are only 24hrs in a day, and that included time for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, time for washing or cleaning; time for sleeping, and time for doing other things that are not related to achieving your goals, but are equally important to your wellbeing.

To be able to achieve your goals, it means you must be able to manage the time you have for the activities that concern your goals well, and ensure you use that time only for the activities that will enable you reach your goals, and nothing else – you must guide against competing activities eating into the time you have allotted for meeting your goals.

I will definitely improve on my time management, and allot more hours to working on the selected websites this year. This would mean reducing the time I spend on other activities, including the time I spend with my family. I’m sorry to say this, I surely love my family and would love nothing more than to be with them every minute of the day, but the fact before me right now is that I have lots of work to do to take my online business to the level the I desire, and it must be done this year.

But that doesn’t mean I’m going away from their sight for the whole year, no, that won’t happen, I will still create opportunities to spend quality time with them. It’s just that I won’t be able to spend as much time as I used to with them this year.

That’s what I have resolved to do this year, and I know the fortune of my websites will be a lot different by the close of the year.

What do you need to do to achieve your set goals for the year? If you have identified it, great! But you have to back it with ACTION. You need to actually DO it for the result to show. Knowing what to do is not enough to reaching your goal, it is DOING what has to be done that produces the desired result.

Be mindful of the fact that as you set out to achieve your goals in the new year, there will be many obstacles and challenges on the way, which would want to lure you away from doing the necessary work required. You must keep your eye fixed on the goal, and resist all distractions.

Once again, do have a wonderful New Year! And may it be your greatest year ever!

What do you plan to do to achieve your goals this year? Do share it with other readers in your comment below.

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FedEx Business Strategies

Innocent — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 09:54:06 +0000

FedEx Business Strategies

Here are strategies, key business decisions, and actions that have enabled FedEx to attain so much success in the relative short years of its existence, which you can, as business owner, entrepreneur, or manager, adopt.

Finding a Profitable Niche

The best way to get into business is to identify a niche with good profit potential, but little or no competition. This gives your business a greater chance to succeed, rather than trying to compete headlong with industry giants.

FedEx carved out a niche in the courier service business, by targeting people who needed to ship their packages fast. By this focus, it found itself almost not in any competition, and therefore benefited greatly over the years with increasing need for people to ship items quickly and also when the industry was deregulated.

Patience

Success may not happen as quickly as you desire, however, with patience, and dedication to building your business, success will surely come.

FedEx made loses in the first 26 months in business, so much that investors wanted the founder, Frederick Smith, removed in 1975. But only two years after, the company bounced to profitability and later hit a billion dollars in annual revenue within ten years in business.

Preparing For the Breakthrough Event

In business, there will always be a time when certain events, ‘the Breakthrough Events’, will occur that will greatly boost your industry. You need to therefore prepare for such events by gradually and consistently developing your business.

FedEx major breakthrough came for its business in 1977 when the airline industry was deregulated.

Getting To the Market First

Becoming the first business to offer a certain product or service is a great key to business success. This puts you first in the minds of customers as the one to seek if one needs the product or service.

FedEx has enjoyed clear leadership position and dominance of the U.S. airfreight industry because it was the first to emphasize speed in its package delivery. People have come to associate the name FedEx with overnight or speedy package delivering.

Expanding Your Business

If you don’t expand your business, you will be depriving it of the revenues that would have come from other regions or territories. It is therefore important that after you business is firmly established, you should start expanding it to other regions.

FedEx moved into international business in 1984, after it was firmly rooted in the U.S. Having achieved market dominance in the U.S., it was ready to achieve the same success on the global stage.

Diversifying Your Business

You also need to diversify your business after it has been firmly rooted, and so explore opportunities in related industries. This brings in revenues from different sources, and therefore keeps your business financially healthy. Your business continues to thrive even if one or two of your subsidiaries are not making good sales. To be more effective, the subsidiaries should be operated independently, but should collaborate with each other to achieve their individual goals.

FedEx Corp. is a heavily diversified company, consisting of several independently run subsidiaries in different related industries. Although independent, the subsidiaries function collectively in competing with other companies, and collaborate with one another to achieve individual success. This undoubtedly explains why FedEx Corp. is the world’s premier shipping and information services provider.

Read FedEx Success Story here.

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FedEx Corporation: The Creation of Overnight Air-express Industry

Innocent — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 18:17:31 +0000

FedEx Corporation: The Creation of Overnight Air-express Industry

Federal Express Corporation, commonly called FedEx, was established in 1971 by 28-year old Frederick W. Smith, a Tennessee native and former Marine pilot. It was the realization of Smith’s 1965 term paper, which he wrote as an undergraduate at Yale University.

He observed that if a company focuses on offering air freight, having its own planes, rather than using passenger planes, it would provide faster delivering of packages for people who need to move items speedily. Such company would have carved a profitable niche for itself in the courier delivery service industry.

He noted that such company will be able to service smaller cities faster, and that there was a good number of people and organizations who needed their packages delivered fast even if they were going to pay more, than using the then traditional means of sending their package through passenger plane.

His operational strategies included having a fleet of private airplanes, and shipping all packages through a single hub. A company running aircrafts dedicated solely to airfreight would be removed from the schedules and shipping regulations usually associated with commercial-airlines. Also, moving all packages through a single hub enables the company to implement strict control and be able to move packages to their destinations overnight. The company will be able to deliver time-sensitive packages, such as electronics, medicines, and computer parts at record time.

With a fleet of 14 Dassault Falcon aircraft and 389 employees, FedEx began operation in 23 cities in 1973. The small-sized planes collected packages from airports every night and brought them to Memphis, FedEx headquarters, where they were quickly sorted, and then flown to the nearest airports to their destinations, from where they were delivered by FedEx trucks the following morning.

Although the company set out in high hopes, the beginning was however rough. In the first 26 months in business, it made a loss of $29 million, sparking off agitations from investors in 1975 to remove Smith from running the company. Smith’s job was however spared by the support he got from company President, Arthur Bass, who felt he should be given some time.

By 1977 FedEx had 31,000 regular customers, which included such big corporations like IBM and the U.S. Air Force, which it serviced from 75 airports and 130 cities.

The company enjoyed little or no competition on routes between smaller cities because it owned its planes, which could reach smaller cities, while its competitors, such as Emery Air Freight rely on commercial airlines to ship its package. At the close of 1977, the company’s sales was $110 million, and $8 million profit.
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FedEx got a major breakthrough also in 1977 following the deregulation of the airline industry. This meant the company could now use larger planes like 727s, and DC-10s when it needed to ship large packages at once, instead of using several smaller planes to do it at higher cost. The company’s planes could also fly anywhere and anytime in the United States.

Taking advantage of this development, FedEx acquired a fleet of used 727-1OOCs, and quickly expanded into small and medium-sized markets.

As the 1980s closes, FedEx had been firmly established with a growth rate of about 40 percent per annum. With 6,700 employees, 32 Falcons, fifteen 727s, and five 737s, it flew 65,000 packages a night to 89 cities across the U.S.

By 1981, FedEx was clearly the leader in the U.S. air freight business ahead of Emery, Airborne Freight, and Purolator Courier, which had been been in business about twenty years before it. FedEx was able to topple them because it was strongly focused on providing speedy delivery of packages, while its competitors weren’t.

In 1983, FedEx attained one billion in annual revenues, thereby becoming the first company in the United States to reach such height within ten years of its start-up without mergers or acquisitions. And in 1984, it was prepared to replicate its success in the U.S. domestic market in the international arena, which was already dominated by DHL. To achieve this, FedEx started making a number of strategic acquisitions.

It acquired Gelco Express, which already was operating in 84 countries, in 1984, and also made more acquisitions in the United Arab Emirates, Britain, and the Netherlands. The following year, it opened a European hub at the Brussels airport as it attempted to expand its services across Europe. By the close of 1985 FedEx revenue had reached $2 billion.

Early 1989, in order to quickly develop a global delivery system, FedEx again bought Tiger International, Inc., for $883 and thereby possessed Tiger’s heavy-cargo airline, Flying Tiger Line. The acquisition gave FedEx Tiger’s delivery routes, which it had built for over 40 years in its history. These included landing rights in Frankfurt and Paris, three Japanese airports, and cities across South America and East Asia.

Also, the acquisition added Tiger’s large fleet of long-range aircraft, which included twenty-two 747s, eleven 727s, and six DC-8s, to boost FedEx’s fleet.

As a proof of the high quality service FedEx provided, the company became the first international cargo carrier to receive system-wide ISO 9001 certification. By the middle of the 1990s, it was operating in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, with sales reaching $10.27 billion in 1996.

In January 1998, FedEx acquired Caliber System Inc, and the company became known as FedEx Corp. By absorbing Caliber System Inc.’s several businesses, and acquiring more companies in the years that followed, FedEx Corp. became a more diversified company that stretched into different, but related businesses.

The companies function under the motto: operate independently, compete collectively and manage collaboratively.” This ensures that as the companies operate independently, they can focus squarely on giving their customers the best service possible. And as they compete collectively and manage collaboratively, they can maximally benefit from the strong FedEx brand name.

Today, FedEx Corp. is the world’s premier shipping and information services provider.

Read FedEx Business Strategies here.

Experts in business and technology, as well as daily users rate this software higher and above others. Click here to see why.

………………………………..

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eBay Business Strategies

Innocent — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:03:13 +0000

eBay Business Strategies

The business success of eBay is definitely worth studying and its strategies and keys to success unveiled for entrepreneurs and business managers to adopt in their own businesses. The reason is not far fetched. Here is a start-up business worth only a couple of millions of dollars becoming a multi-billion dollar enterprise just in three years.

Having a Clear Purpose

To succeed in business, you need to know exactly what you want to offer, to who, and how. Your purpose must be clearly defined, else you will be wasting resources, time, and energy chasing several things at the same time and achieving nothing in the end.

The reason for creating eBay was well stated: to provide an online auctioning platform for sellers and buyers to connect and trade. By having its purpose in business clearly defined enabled eBay to remain focused in giving its users the best service they can get.

Providing Uncommon Value

The extent of success you can achieve in business depends on the value you are providing your market. The more unique the value you are offering is, the more valuable it will be perceived, and the more people will want to try it out.

eBay’s dominance of the online auctioning industry was made possible by the unique value it brought to the auctioning industry, by being the first to offer auctioning platform on the Internet. Before then, auctions were done in a physical place with both sellers and buyers meeting.

By using eBay, anyone could list their items or place a bid for whatever they wanted from the comfort of their homes. eBay’s platform gave users ease and convenience in participating in auction sales either as seller or buyer, no wonder, by 1998 500,000 users had already joined eBay community.

Choosing Profitable Business Model

Don’t jump into any business until you are sure it will be profitable. You may have to come up with better ways of operating at reduced cost, and selling more, so that you can make good profit.

eBay was set out to be profitable from the beginning. Its business model is simple: to provide a platform for sellers and buyers to trade, and to collect a fee for the service. It is not involved in inventory management and distribution of items sold and bought. This makes its cost of operation low and controllable, and its business highly profitable.

Getting the Best Management Team

As soon as you can afford to, you should employ professional business managers to run your business, instead of trying to do it yourself without adequate business management skill and experience.

eBay’s growth and success is largely attributed to the strong management team that has led it. The company’s revenue in 1998 when Meg Whiteman took over as President and CEO was $4.7 million, and by 2008, ten years on the job, it had risen to $7.7 billion yearly, with hundreds of millions of registered users.

Understanding Your Industry’s Critical Success Factors

There are always certain things that determine business success in any industry. You should be mindful of those in your industry and work to eliminate or develop them as the case may be.

For eBay, building a huge community of users and gaining their trust are critical to success in the online auctioning industry. The more registered users you have, the more other prospective users perceive your platform as being credible for them to also join.

Also, the stronger you have built trust in your business, the freer people are to do business with you.

Realizing these critical factors earlier in business, eBay has continued to strive to build its community of users, and evolved strategies to gain their trust. This has made it difficult for competitors like Yahoo and Amazon to eat into its 80 percent market share.

Read eBay’s Success Story here.

Experts in business and technology, as well as daily users rate this software higher and above others. Click here to see why.

………………………………..

Related Articles:
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Responsibility

Innocent — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:41:24 +0000

Responsibility

Taking personal responsibility for your business, relationship, career, and for every area of your life is crucial to success. You are the one that will work out your success; it is not the responsibility of others.

To be in control of your life, it is important to know what responsibility is, and how to ensure you are not passing it to other people or circumstances unknowingly.

I will just allow Louis Barajas to show you how not taking personal responsibility could be hindering your life success, including business success, and to help you develop the capacity for taking responsibility in every area of your life. This information is from an excerpt from his great book, Small Business, Big Life: Five Steps To Creating A Great Life With Your Own Small Business.

Here it is, enjoy it:

Responsibility

In my seminars, I tell a story about Maria and Roberto. Roberto is on his deathbed and his wife, Maria, is there with him. He says to her, “Maria, I love you so much. You’ve always been there for me. You were with me when I lost my job. You were with me when the house burned down accidentally and we had to rebuild it.

You were with me when my back went out and I couldn’t walk for six months. You were with me when our daughter married the Hell’s Angel. You were with me when she left him and moved back in with her three kids. You’ve been with me through some of the toughest times a man could experience.” Then he thinks for a moment and says, “Come to think of it, maybe you’re the one that brought me all the bad luck!”

The surest way to achieve success in life and in business is taking personal responsibility for both. Unfortunately, I run across so many people who blame everyone but themselves. Before I start working with any business owner, I ask them two questions: (1) Who controls your destiny? (2) Why is your life or business not working? Here are a few of the responses I hear to the first question:

“God controls my destiny.”
“My wife controls my destiny.”
“My kids control my destiny.”
“My parents control my destiny.”
“My boss controls my destiny.”
“The government controls my destiny.”
“The shortage of time, money, or experience controls my destiny.”

There are many other excuses (some so weird that I didn’t write them here because you wouldn’t believe me). But they all boil down to the concept of fatalism. Fatalism is the belief that someone or something other than you controls your destiny.

Unfortunately, with this belief you give up the right to live the life of your dreams. Success requires that you stand up and take responsibility for your life and your actions. You can’t just wait for God or the bank or your friends or whomever to give you what you need.

You have to take the actions that will create what you desire. As someone once told me, “God made the fish and the nets, but he didn’t put the fish in the nets.” You need to cast the net and catch the fish.

For most people, the answer to the second question (“Why is your life or business not working?”) almost always describes circumstances outside themselves. “My life’s not working because I don’t have enough time for my family; I’m working so hard to get the business going:’ “My business isn’t working because we don’t have enough customers.” ”I’ve been sick.” “My kids have been sick.” “Our competition is making an aggressive push into our market.” I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve heard someone say, “It’s my fault things aren’t working.” Only when you take responsibility for how your life and business are functioning can you actually do something to make them both better.

Taking responsibility means making the hard choices and doing the difficult things that will be required of you as a business owner. It’s never enjoyable to have to reprimand or fire someone. It’s not easy to hold salespeople accountable for producing results, to ask someone to stay late to correct a mistake, or to be the “bad guy” who insists on keeping to the budget. But it’s your job.

President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office: “The buck stops here:’ As the owner of the business, your job is to take ultimate responsibility for your business and its workings. The buck stops with you. If you need to lay off staff because of a slowdown in your business, you should never expect your human resources person or your store supervisor to take the heat when it comes to sitting down with people and telling them they no longer have jobs.

It’s not the responsibility of your shop foreman to make the decision about who gets fired. Yes, your manager or HR person or foreman can make recommendations, but let it be your decision. You’re the one who gets both the credit and blame at the end of the day, so you might as well take responsibility for whatever is producing both.

You also have to be willing to take action immediately. Waiting for things to work out is often the worst thing you can do. How many businesses have folded simply because the owners were waiting for things to work out? Truly responsible owners are proactive.

They won’t ask someone else to do the hard jobs, and they won’t wait to make the tough choices. In the same way that everyone has to take responsibility for his or her job, you have to take responsibility for your job as the owner. And that means tough choices, made pro actively, and executed in a timely fashion.

The Personal Responsibility Formula

When you’re ready and willing to step up to the plate and take responsibility for yourself and your business, how do you know what choices to make? Especially in difficult situations or emergencies, when people are looking at you as the owner and asking, “What should we do?” how can you put aside your emotions and make choices that you won’t regret?

Years ago, I heard author Jack Canfield describe a personal responsibility formula at one of his seminars. This personal responsibility formula has changed my life since the first time I heard it. It looks like this:

E (events) + R (your response) = O (outcome)

I believe this formula is an accurate representation of life. Events happen-they happen to you, to the people around you, to your business, to your country, to the world. You have little to no control over most of the events in your life.

However, you do control your response to those events. Notice I say “response,” not reaction. A reaction is a knee-jerk response (with emphasis on the “jerk”). There’s no thought or analysis; often there’s a lot of negative emotion in a reaction.

To understand the difference between responding and reacting, imagine that you have an itchy rash. You go to the dermatologist, and she gives you a prescription for medication. A couple of days later, you go back to the doctor. If she says you are responding to the medication, it means you are getting better. However, if she tells you that you are reacting to the medication, you know that you are not getting better; in fact, usually you are getting worse.

Responsibility is the ability to respond rather than react. You are making a conscious choice to behave in a way that will move you closer to your ideal outcome. But what do most people do when faced with a problem? They react. When you respond to events rather than react to them, you’ve taken a moment to think about the event and decide the best way to handle it.

You realize that, while you can’t control events, you can control your thoughts, attitudes, choices, and decisions. You can lower the intensity of any negative emotion and instead take the actions that will produce the outcome you want. You’re in control of your response to the event, instead of blindly reacting to it.

One of the best ways to respond to events instead of reacting is to focus on your ideal outcome. For example, you have a long commute every morning and you know that eventually there will probably be an accident or unexpected road construction that may slow traffic to a crawl.

It’s Monday morning and you have a full day ahead of you, and the freeway’s jammed. If you’re reacting to the event, you probably get mad or frustrated or worse. You spend the extra hour fuming, honking your horn, and yelling at the other drivers. By the time you get to work you’re in a bad mood, and you make others around you miserable.

But what if you take responsibility and prepare for this almost-certain event? You might decide to have a book on tape or a soothing CD in the car to listen to while you are stuck in traffic. I hook my iPod to my car radio and listen to comedy. There’s nothing like coming into the office smiling! That’s a much better outcome than making others feel lousy for no fault of their own.

Let me share with you just one of many stories of how this formula has made my life better. I came home one Friday from a very exhausting book tour. My family and I like to make Friday a “family date” night, and we usually go to the movies or out to dinner. But I was so exhausted that I excused myself. I told my family they should go to dinner without me-I just wanted to stay home and rest.

My wife, who knows my workshop material almost better than I do, gently reminded me of the personal responsibility formula as she and the kids were jumping into the car. Then my youngest daughter, Aubrey, said that she had been waiting for our dinner date all week and that she really missed me. She also reminded me that I always tell people that life is about creating memories.

Boy, was that a wake-up call! She was right. I remembered the responsibility formula. My ideal outcome was to have a wonderful time with my family. The event was coming home exhausted. I was reacting to my current situation instead of taking responsibility for my outcome. My response was to get off the couch and take my family out to dinner. How did the evening end? We had a great time.

What are some times in your life where you reacted in a less-than-resourceful way? What could you have done differently? How could you have responded to the situation and made it better? What are some of the problems that are likely to arise when you start your small business? How can you create a plan for responding to these opportunities instead of reacting to them?

Winston Churchill once said, “The price of greatness is responsibility.” I believe the price of entrepreneurship is personal responsibility. You must decide if you are willing to direct your thoughts and emotions, to respond to events rather than react to them, to focus on your ideal outcomes, and to make sure your choices are leading you toward those outcomes. Only then will you be ready to build both a great small business and a very big life.

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you to help you make your small business highly successful.

Small Business, Big Life: Five Steps To Creating A Great Life With Your Own Small Business

More Articles.

Making Sales

Innocent — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 04:47:56 +0000

Making Sales

No doubt, making sales is a critical part of any business to achieve success. Simply put, if you don’t make enough sales of your products or services, there is no way you can cover your cost of operation, let alone make profit. And it will only be a matter of time for the business to collapse.

This is why it is very important for business owners, managers, and entrepreneur to know how to sell, so that they can outsell their competitors in the market place.

Ryan Allis discusses The Art of the Sale so powerfully in his book, ZERO TO ONE MILLION: HOW I BUILT A COMPANY TO $1 MILLION IN SALES…AND HOW YOU CAN, TOO, and I want you to read it.

If you’ve been having problem with sales in your business, you are in luck today because Ryan will show you how to turn that situation around after reading this excerpt from his book.

By the way, Ryan’s ZERO TO ONE MILLION: HOW I BUILT A COMPANY TO $1 MILLION IN SALES…AND HOW YOU CAN, TOO, is a great book that I very much recommend you read if you need to know exactly what to do to achieve success in your business – he’s done it for himself and he can help you do it for yourself.

Here is the excerpt. Enjoy it:

The Art of the Sale

The skill of sales is one of the most-prized attributes that an aspiring entrepreneur can have. The ability to layout the reasons why someone should buy from you and not your competitor, in a customer centered fashion-and then go for the sale at the exact right moment-is more difficult than you would imagine.

In your company, you may have a long or short sales cycle. You may sell a product directly to consumers via the Internet and not have to have any interaction with customers at all before they buy. Alternatively, you may be selling a service or product that costs thousands of dollars, and requires the approval of multiple departments.

You may have to present to school boards or Fortune 500 companies. It may take nine months between the time of first contact and the time the sale is closed. If your sales cycle is long, you’ll have to compensate for this in your projections. It can become very frustrating to sell a high-ticket item or service that takes months of presentations, discussions, and contract revisions to sell.

Here are eight questions to answer to get you started on your sales plan:

1. How will the product be sold? In a retail store, online, by direct mail, by catalogs, by infomercials, through distributors, or by a combination?
2. Will you sell your product at wholesale, at retail, or both?
3. Is your main market businesses or consumers?
4. Where do customers currently go to look for the product?
5. How can we be positioned so that we’re in these places?
6. Could the price point support a telesales force?
7. Could the price point support a direct sales force?
8. What is my unique selling proposition? What will make my product so different that customers will buy it rather than competing products?

Take, for example, my good friend Erik Severinghaus’s former company, MainBrain, Inc. MainBrain sold Web-based school administration software that featured grade documentation and recordkeeping for teachers; the capability for parents to view the grades, tardiness, and absences of their children online; a Web-based interface for teachers and coaches to maintain a Web page for their class or sport; school closing information; event calendars; faculty and staff profiles; school message boards; and a staff directory. The software sold for between $5,000 and $25,000, depending on the requested modules and features.

The sales cycle for MainBrain was much longer than that for iContact. After MainBrain contacted a school and set up its first appointment, it could be six months until they got a signed contract. They often had to present to a school board or school administrators’ multiple times, negotiate the details of each contract, and then wait for funding to be available for each school or county that it sells to. iContact, on the other hand, selling Web-based software that costs between $10 and $699 a month rather than $5,000 to $25,000, has a sales cycle of less than a week in most cases, and in some cases, no sales cycle at all. Approximately half of iContact’s customers sign up without ever contacting us.

If I find it easier on the psyche to sell short-sales-cycle products. If you do choose to sell a more expensive product that has a longer cycle, make sure you are very good at the sales process or have a sales team that is. While iContact can rely on our Web site, frequently asked questions (FAQs) page, and free trial to make most of the sales, you will have to take an active role, experiment with direct marketing, and keep detailed follow-up spreadsheets. Either way, learning to sell is a big benefit.

Even though the iContact sales team rarely goes on sales visits, each one of us has to know how to sell. For the half of our customer base that does contact us before purchasing our product, we have to know how to sell via e-mail and phone. We have to know our product inside and out, be able to answer any questions, talk on the phone with confidence, be enthusiastic, listen to the customers’ needs and
emphasize our competitive advantages.

Napoleon Hill, in his book, Succeed and Grow Rich through Persuasion, listed 11 traits that the successful salesperson must possess. I have adapted these traits and created my own list of 9 traits that a successful salesperson must have:

1. Knowledge of merchandise
2. Belief in the merchandise or service
3. Knowledge of the prospective buyer
4. Ability to make the prospective buyer receptive
5. Ability to know the right psychological moment to close the sale
6. Initiative
7. Persistence and the ability to follow up
8. Ability to listen and respond to the customer’s needs
9. A good memory

The customer only wants to know what the product or service will do for him tomorrow. All he is interested in are his own values, his own wants, his own reality. For this reason alone, any serious attempt to state what our business is, must start with the customer, his realities, his situation, his behavior, his expectations, and his values.
-Peter Drucker in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, and Practices

In making sales, you’ll have to set certain factors such as price, return policy, warranty, length of required contract, and so on. If you are the owner of the company, try to give your salespeople a selection of things they are authorized to offer if they feel they can close the sale. For example, if the enterprise sales rep at iContact needs to close a sale, he knows that he can offer a discount up to a certain percentage to get that sale.

As far as return policies go, in nearly all cases, the longer and better your return policy is, the more money you will make in the end. Sure, if you have a lifetime guarantee you might have 1 percent of your orders returned instead of the 0.5 percent you would have had with a 30-day guarantee; however, you may also increase your sales by 50 percent.

If you are selling an item that doesn’t depreciate rapidly (such as technology items) and have anything less than a 90-day guarantee, experiment for a couple of months to see how much your sales would increase by offering a 90-day, or even a lifetime, guarantee. Run the numbers, and nine times out of ten you’ll be way ahead of the game.

The importance of being attentive to your customers’ needs cannot be emphasized enough. If sales are not taking off the way you’d like them to, it might be because-for one reason or another-you’re not selling what anyone wants to buy. If you are going to become a good salesperson and a successful entrepreneur you must always keep your ear to the ground and listen to both prospects and customers.

You must know what makes your customers buy and what is keeping your prospects from buying. If you can determine, and then overcome, the major buying objections of your prospects, you’ll greatly increase sales-and the size of your wallet.

If you choose to sell your product online, much of your success will ride on your sales copy. If you will be writing your sales copy yourself-either for your Web site or for any marketing materials be sure that you emphasize the benefits of your product or service and not the features. People don’t care all that much that your Superturbo Lawnmower 5000 has an oversize fuel tank, autosensing cutting, and extra-sharp blades.

They will care, however, when you tell them that their lawns will be cut in a third of the time without their supervision, making their lives that much easier. Always address prospects’ concerns, explain how and why you are unique and better, and use persuasive devices like case studies and testimonials. If you can remember to always keep in mind the acronym AIDA, you’ll be all right. Start by attracting Attention. Then develop Interest, create Desire, and spur Action.

“If you do choose to sell a more expensive product that has a longer cycle, make sure you are very good at the sales process or have a sales team that is.”

Building a Sales Compensation Plan

To be able to support your future revenue projections, you will need to show how these sales will be made. If all the sales are coming through your Website, you will only need to show your current traffic levels, rates of traffic growth, your visitor-to-customer conversion ratio, and your average sale size.

If you are selling your product to other businesses, however, via either telemarketing or direct sales, you will need a sales force and account managers who are compensated on the basis of customer acquisition and customer retention, respectively. You can view your sales force as the hunters who bring in the contracted revenue, and the account managers as the farmers who sow the relationships with clients, work to get the clients to renew the business at the end of the contract term, and advise the clients on other products or services they may need from your company.

Your sales plan and your sales compensation plan tie back into your sales coverage model, a spreadsheet that reconciles your projected revenues with the sales team and account manager count and cost. Being “at plan” refers to hitting your projected sales figures. Try to come up with a plan that has realistic sales goals, yet will require your team to stretch to hit them. To create a sales compensation plan, start by identifying and making assumptions for these variables:

• Leads generated by channel by month
• Lead-to-customer conversion ratio
• Average up front revenue per sale
• Average ongoing monthly or annual revenue per sale
• Number of leads one sales rep can manage
• Length of the sales cycle in weeks
• Percentage sales commission paid to lead generation source (generally on contracted year one revenue), if lead generator is separate from closer
• Percentage sales commission paid to closer of the lead into a customer (generally on contracted year one revenue)
• Target new contracts per month per sales rep
• Base salary for a sales representative (usually between $30,000 and $75,000, depending on market, type of sales, commission rate, and experience)
• Number of accounts one account manager can manage
• Average up-sell revenue per client per year (sold by the account manager, above and beyond the original contract revenue)
• Percentage commission paid to the account manager on account renewals
• Target percentage of accounts that will renew each year
• Base salary for an account manager (usually between $25,000 and $40,000)

Once assumptions for these variables are in place, you can create your spreadsheet such that it outputs the following information:

• Base salary-to-commission ratio (many companies offer 50 percent base, 50 percent commission for their at-plan compensation)
• Target total annual compensation at plan for a sales representative (usually between $50,000 and $150,000, depending on market, type of sales, and experience)
• Target annual compensation at plan for an account manager (usually between $45,000 and $75,000, depending on market and experience)
• Number of sales representatives you will need to have to hit plan
• Number of account managers you will need to have to hit plan
• Revenue from sales at 75 percent of plan (worst-case projection)
• Revenue from sales at 100 percent of plan (expected-case projection)
• Revenue from sales at 125 percent of plan (best-case projection)

Building out a professional sales plan allows you to determine the breakdown in the number of people that you will need to hit the revenues you have projected as well as allowing you to share with your sales reps and account managers what you expect of them. When the time is right to build out your sales team, ensure that you have a CRM tool in place to track and manage your lead generation rates, sales funnel, sales cycle length, customer retention rates, and commission payments.

“When the time is right to build out your sales team, ensure that you have a CRM tool in place to track and manage your lead generation rates, sales funnel, sales cycle length, customer retention rates, and commission payments.”

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you if you desire to know how to increase your sales, and make more money in your business.

Zero to One Million: How I Built A Company to $1 Million in Sales . . . and How You Can, Too

More Articles.

Principles of Personal Leadership

Innocent — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:35:33 +0000

Principles of Personal Leadership

Leadership, not management, is the determinant of personal and business success. But most people get saddled with providing management for their families and businesses, rather than leadership.

Working hard to achieve your goals is effectively managing your resources, and this is great, but it may not actually translate to success if your achievement does not tally with your values. It could mean you have to start all over again with the project. But if you knew exactly what you want to achieve from the beginning – this is leadership – you would save time and effort, and you will be satisfied – this is success.

To achieve the desired success in any area of your life – relationship, career, business, family, and health, it is very important you begin to provide leadership, and allow other people to take responsibility for the management.

The best selling author and human development expert Stephen Covey dealt on this topic extensively in his famous book, THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change.

Below is an excerpt from the book, where Covey brings out vividly the importance of providing leadership:

PRINCIPLES OF PERSONAL LEADERSHIP

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

PLEASE FIND A PLACE TO READ THESE NEXT FEW PAGES where you can be alone and uninterrupted. Clear your mind of everything except what you will read and what I will invite you to do. Don’t worry about your schedule, your business, your family, or your friends. Just focus with me and really open your mind.

In your mind’s eye, see yourself going to the funeral of a loved one. Picture yourself driving to the funeral parlor or chapel, parking the car, and getting out. As you walk inside the building, you notice the flowers, the soft organ music. You see the faces of friends and family you pass along the way. You feel the shared sorrow of losing, the joy of having known, that radiates from the hearts of the people there.

As you walk down to the front of the room and look inside the casket, you suddenly come face to face with yourself. This is your funeral, three years from today. All these people have come to honor you, to express feelings of love and appreciation for your life.

As you take a seat and wait for the services to begin, you look at the program in your hand. There are to be four speakers. The first is from your family, immediate and also extended-children, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents who have come from all over the country to attend. The second speaker is one of your friends, someone who can give a sense of what you were as a person. The third speaker is from your work or profession. And the fourth is from your church or some community organization where you’ve been involved in service.

Now think deeply. What would you like each of these speakers to say about you and your life? What kind of husband, wife, father, or mother would you like their words to reflect? What kind of son or daughter or cousin? What kind of friend? What kind of working associate?

What character would you like them to have seen in you? What contributions, what achievements would you want them to remember? Look carefully at the people around you. What difference would you like to have made in their lives?

Before you read further, take a few minutes to jot down your impressions. It will greatly increase your personal understanding of Habit 2.

WHAT IT MEANS TO “BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND”

If you participated seriously in this visualization experience, you touched for a moment some of your deep, fundamental values. You established brief contact with that inner guidance system at the heart of your Circle of Influence.

Consider the words of Joseph Addison:

When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow: when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great Day when we shall all of us be Contemporaries, and make our appearance together.

Although Habit 2 applies to many different circumstances and levels of life, the most fundamental application of “begin with the end in mind” is to begin today with the image, picture, or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined. Each part of your life–today’s behavior, tomorrow’s behavior, next week’s behavior, next month’s behavior-can be examined in the context of the whole, of what really matters most to you. By keeping that end clearly in mind, you can make certain that whatever you do on any particular day does not violate the criteria you have defined as supremely important, and that each day of your life contributes in a meaningful way to the vision you have of your life as a whole.

To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.

It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busy-ness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall. It is possible to be busy-very busy-without being very effective.

People often find themselves achieving victories that are empty, successes that have come at the expense of things they suddenly realize were far more valuable to them. People from every walk of life – doctors, academicians, actors, politicians, business professionals, athletes, and plumbers – often struggle to achieve a higher income, more recognition or a certain degree of professional competence, only to find that their drive to achieve their goal blinded them to the things that really mattered most and now are gone.

How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and, keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most. If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster. We may be very busy, we may be very efficient, but we will also be truly effective only when we begin with the end in mind.

If you carefully consider what you wanted to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success. It may be very different from the definition you thought you had in mind. Perhaps fame, achievement, money, or some of the other things we strive for are not even part of the right wall.

When you begin with the end in mind, you gain a different perspective. One man asked another on the death of a mutual friend, “How much did he leave?” His friend responded, “He left it all.”

ALL THINGS ARE CREATED TWICE

“Begin with the end in mind” is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things.

Take the construction of a home, for example. You create it in every detail before you ever hammer the first nail into place. You try to get a very clear sense of what kind of house you want. If you want a family-centered home, you plan to put a family room where it would be a natural gathering place. You plan sliding doors and a patio for children to play outside. You work with ideas. You work with your mind until you get a clear image of what you want to build.

Then you reduce it to blueprint and develop construction plans.

All of this is done before the earth is touched. If not, then in the second creation, the physical creation, you will have to make expensive changes that may double the cost of your home.

The carpenter’s rule is “measure twice, cut once.” You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you’ve thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. Each day you go to the construction shed and pull out the blueprint to get marching orders for the day. You begin with the end in mind.

For another example, look at a business. If you want to have a successful enterprise, you clearly define what you’re trying to accomplish. You carefully think through the product or service you want to provide in terms of your market target, then you organize all the elements – financial, research and development, operations, marketing, personnel, physical facilities, and so on – to meet that objective. The extent to which you begin with the end in mind often determines whether or not you are able to create a successful enterprise. Most business failures begin in the first creation, with problems such as undercapitalization, misunderstanding of the market, or lack of a business plan.

The same is true with parenting. If you want to raise responsible, self-disciplined children, you have to keep that end clearly in mind as you interact with your children on a daily basis. You can’t behave toward them in ways that undermine their self-discipline or self-esteem.

To varying degrees, people use this principle in many different areas of life. Before you go on a trip, you determine your destination and plan out the best route. Before you plant a garden, you plan it out in your mind, possibly on paper. You create speeches on paper before you give them, you envision the landscaping in your yard before you landscape it, you design the clothes you make before you thread the needle.

To the extent to which we understand the principle of two creations and accept the responsibility for both, we act within and enlarge the borders of our Circle of Influence. To the extent to which we do not operate in harmony with this principle and take charge of the first creation, we diminish it.

By DESIGN OR DEFAULT

It’s a principle that all things are created twice, but not all first creations are by conscious design. In our personal lives, if we do not develop our own self-awareness and become responsible for first creations, we empower other people and circumstances outside our Circle of Influence to shape much of our lives by default. We reactively live the scripts handed to us by family, associates, other people’s agendas, the pressures of circumstance-scripts from our earlier years, from our training, our conditioning.

These scripts come from people, not principles. And they rise out of our deep vulnerabilities, our deep dependency on others and our needs for acceptance and love, for belonging, for a sense of importance and worth, for a feeling that we matter.

Whether we are aware of it or not, whether we are in control of it or not, there is a first creation to every part of our lives. We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the second creation of other people’s agendas, of circumstances, or of past habits.

The unique human capacities of self-awareness, imagination, and conscience enable us to examine first creations and make it possible for us to take charge of our own first creation, to write our own script. Put another way, Habit 1 says, “You are the creator.” Habit 2 is the first creation.

LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT – THE TWO CREATIONS

Habit 2 is based on principles of personal leadership, which means that leadership is the first creation. Leadership is not management. Management is the second creation, which we’ll discuss in the chapter on Habit 3. But leadership has to come first.

Management is a bottom line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish? In the words of both Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

You can quickly grasp the important difference between the two if you envision a group of producers cutting their way through the jungle with machetes. They’re the producers, the problem solvers. They’re cutting through the undergrowth, clearing it out.

The managers are behind them, sharpening their machetes, writing policy and procedure manuals, holding muscle development programs, bringing in improved technologies and setting up working schedules and compensation programs for machete wielders.

The leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, “Wrong jungle!”

But how do the busy, efficient producers and managers often respond? “Shut up! We’re making progress.”

As individuals, groups, and businesses, we’re often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we don’t even realize we’re in the wrong jungle. And the rapidly changing environment in which we live makes effective leadership more critical than it has ever been – in every aspect of independent and interdependent life.

We are more in need of a vision or destination and a compass (a set of principles or directions) and less in need of a road map. We often don’t know what the terrain ahead will be like or what we will need to go through it; much will depend on our judgment at the time. But an inner compass will always give us direction.

Effectiveness – often even survival – does not depend solely on how much effort we expend, but on whether or not the effort we expend is in the right jungle. And the metamorphosis taking place in most every industry and profession demands leadership first and management second.

In business, the market is changing so rapidly that many products and services that successfully met consumer tastes and needs a few years ago are obsolete today. Proactive powerful leadership must constantly monitor environmental change, particularly customer buying habits and motives, and provide the force necessary to organize resources in the right direction.

Such changes as deregulation of the airline industry, skyrocketing costs of health care, and the greater quality and quantity of imported cars impact the environment in significant ways. If industries do not monitor the environment, including their own work teams, and exercise the creative leadership to keep headed in the right direction, no amount of management expertise can keep them from failing.

Efficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual has phrased it, “like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic.” No management success can compensate for failure in leadership. But leadership is hard because we’re often caught in a management paradigm.

At the final session of a year-long executive development program in Seattle, the president of an oil company came up to me and said, “Stephen, when you pointed out the difference between leadership and management in the second month, I looked at my role as the president of this company and realized that I had never been into leadership. I was deep into management, buried by pressing challenges and the details of day-to-day logistics. So I decided to withdraw from management. I could get other people to do that. I wanted to really lead my organization.

“It was hard. I went through withdrawal pains because I stopped dealing with a lot of the pressing, urgent matters that were right in front of me and which gave me a sense of immediate accomplishment. I didn’t receive much satisfaction as I started wrestling with the direction issues, the culture building issues, the deep analysis of problems, the seizing of new opportunities. Others also went through withdrawal pains from theirn working style comfort zones. They missed the easy accessibility I had given them before. They still wanted me to be available to them, to respond, to help solve their problems on a day-to-day basis.

“But I persisted. I was absolutely convinced that I needed to provide leadership. And I did. Today our whole business is different. We’re more in line with our environment. We have doubled our revenues and quadrupled our profits. I’m into leadership.”

I’m convinced that too often parents are also trapped in the management paradigm, thinking of control, efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling.

And leadership is even more lacking in our personal lives. We’re into managing with efficiency, setting and achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you if you desire to be much more effective in your personal life, business, relationship, family, and in any area of your life.

THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

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Thought Is Not Enough

Innocent — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 19:13:03 +0000

Thought Is Not Enough

Thought is the power that sets the creative process in motion, which I talked about exhaustively in one of my previous posts. You can read it here if you haven’t before: Create Your Success With Your Thoughts. But today, I want to let you know that Thought is not enough to create the success that you desire in any area of your life.

I’m I contracting myself here? Certainly not. To get anything in life, you need to first create it in your mind through your thought, however, for it to become a reality in your life, there is something you need to do in addition to your thought.

I will allow Wallace D. Wattles to tell you what that other thing is from his book: Financial Success: Harnessing The Power Of Creative Thought.

Here is an excerpt from the book that covers the other part to creating and having whatever thing you desire in life in addition to your thought.

Acting in the Certain Way

Thought is the impelling force which causes the creative power to act. Thinking in the certain way will bring riches to you, but you must not rely upon thought alone, paying no attention to personal action. That is the rock upon which many otherwise scientific metaphysical thinkers meet shipwreck – the failure to connect thought with personal action.

We have not yet reached the stage of development, in which a person can create directly from the formless substance without nature’s processes or the work of human hands. A person must act as well as think.

By thought you can cause the gold in the hearts of the mountains to be impelled toward you. But, it will not mine itself, refine itself, coin itself into double eagles, and come rolling along the roads into your pocket.

Under the impelling force of the Supreme Power, people’s affairs will be so ordered that someone will be led to mine the gold for you. And, another person’s business transactions will be so directed that the gold will be brought toward you. You must arrange your own business affairs so that you are able to receive it when it comes to you. Your thought makes all things, animate and inanimate, work to bring you what you want. However, your personal activity must be such that you can rightly receive what you want when it reaches you. You are not to take it as charity or steal it. You must give every person more in use value than he gives you in cash value.

The scientific use of thought consists in forming a clear and distinct mental image of what you want, in holding fast to your purpose to get what you want, and in realizing with grateful faith that you do get what you want.

Do not try to project your thought in any mysterious or occult way with the idea of having it go out and do things for you. That is wasted effort and will weaken your power to think with sanity.

In the preceding chapters, I have fully explained the action of thought in getting rich. You must use your faith and purpose to positively impress your vision upon the formless substance, which has the same desire for more life that you have. And, this vision, received from you, sets all the creative forces at work in and through their regular channels of action, but directed toward you.

It is not your part to guide or supervise the creative process. All you have to do with that is to retain your vision, stick to your purpose, and maintain your faith and gratitude.

But you must act in the certain way so that you can appropriate what is yours when it comes to you – so that you can accept the things in your picture and put them in their proper places.

You can readily see the truth of this. When things reach you, they will be in the hands of other people who will ask an equivalent for them.

You can only get what is yours by giving the other person what is his.

Your pocketbook will not become bottomless; it will not always be full of money without effort on your part.

Receiving is the crucial point in the science of getting rich – right here, where thought and personal action must be combined. There are many people who, consciously or unconsciously, set the creative forces in action by the strength and persistence of their desires. However, they remain poor because they do not provide for the reception of the thing they want when it comes.

By thought, the thing you want is brought to you. By action, you receive it.

Whatever your action is to be, it is evident that you must act now. You cannot act in the past. It is essential to the clearness of your mental vision that you dismiss the past from your mind. You cannot act in the future because the future is not here yet. And, you cannot tell how you will want to act in any future contingency until that contingency has arrived.

Because you are not in the right business or the right environment now, do not think that you must postpone action until you get into the right business or environment. And, do not spend time in the present planning the best course in possible future emergencies. Have faith in your ability to meet any emergency when it arrives.

If you act in the present with your mind on the future, your present action will be with a divided mind and will not be effective. Put your whole mind into present action.

Do not give your creative impulse to the original substance and then sit down and wait for results; if you do, you will never get them. Act now. There is never any time but now, and there never will be any time but now. If you are ever to begin to make ready for the reception of what you want, you must begin now.

Your action must be in your present business or employment and must be upon the persons and things in your present environment.

You cannot act where you are not. You cannot act where you have been, and you cannot act where you are going to be. You can act only where you are.

Do not dwell on whether yesterday’s work was well or poorly done. Do today’s work well.

Do not try to do tomorrow’s work now. There will be plenty of time to do that when tomorrow comes.

Do not try by occult or mystical means to act on people or things that are out of your reach.

Do not wait for a change of environment before you act. Cause a change of environment through action.

You can act upon your present environment so as to cause yourself to be transferred to a better environment.

Hold with faith and purpose the vision of yourself in the better environment, but act upon your present environment with all your heart and with all your strength and with all your mind.

Do not spend any time in day dreaming or castle building. Hold to the one vision of what you want, and act now.

Do not cast about seeking some new thing to do or some strange, unusual, or remarkable action to perform as a first step toward getting rich. For some time to come your actions will probably be the same as those you have been performing. But, now you will perform those actions in the certain way which will surely make you rich.

If you are engaged in some business and feel that it is not the right one for you, do not wait until you get into the right business before you begin to act. Do not feel discouraged or sit down and lament because you are in the wrong place. No person was ever so misplaced that he could not find the right place, and no person was ever so involved in the wrong business that he could not get into the right business.

Hold the vision of yourself in the right business – with the purpose to get into it and the faith that you will get into it. But, act in your present business. Use your present business as the means of getting a better one, and use your present environment as the means of getting into a better one. Your vision of the right business, if held with faith and purpose, will cause the Supreme Power to move the right business toward you. And, your action – if performed in the certain way – will cause you to move toward the business.

If you are an employee and feel that you must change places in order to get what you want, do not project your thought into space and rely upon it to get you another job. It will probably fail to do so. Hold the vision of yourself in the job you have, and you will certainly get the job you want.

Your vision and faith will set the creative force in motion to bring it toward you. And, your action will cause the forces in your own environment to move you toward the place you want. In closing this chapter, I will add another statement to our syllabus:

There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe.

A thought in this substance produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.

A person can form things in his thought, and by impressing his thoughts upon formless substance, can cause the thing he thinks about to be created.

In order to do this, a person must pass from the competitive to the creative mind. He must form a clear mental picture of the things he wants. And, he must hold this picture in his thoughts with the fixed purpose to get what he wants, and the unwavering faith that he will get what he wants – closing his mind to all that may tend to shake his purpose, dim his vision, or quench his faith.

That he may receive what he wants when it comes, a person must act now upon the people and things in his present environment.

Efficient Action

You must use your thought as I have directed in the previous chapters. You must begin to do what you can do where you are, and you must do all that you can do where you are.

You can advance only by being larger than your present place. And, no man is larger than his present place who leaves undone any of the work pertaining to that place.

The world is advanced only by those who more than fill their present places.

If no one quite filled his present place, there would be a backslide in everything. Those who do not quite fill their present places are a dead weight upon society, government, commerce, and industry. They must be carried along by others at a great expense. The progress of the world is retarded only by those who do not fill the places they are holding. They belong to a former age and a lower stage or plane of life. Their tendency is toward degeneration. No society could advance if every individual was smaller than his place because social evolution is guided by the law of physical and mental evolution. In the animal world, evolution is caused by an excess of life.

When an organism has more life than can be expressed in the functions of its own plane, it develops the organs of a higher plan, and a new species is originated.

There never would have been new species had there not been organisms which more than filled their places. The law is exactly the same for you. Your getting rich depends upon your applying this principle to your own affairs.

Every day is either a successful day or a day of failure. And, it is the successful days which get you what you want. If every day is a failure, you can never get rich; if every day is a success, you cannot help but get rich.

If there is something that may be done today and you do not do it, you have failed in so far as that thing is concerned. And, the consequences may be more disastrous than you imagine.

You cannot foresee the results of even the most trivial act. You do not know the workings of all the forces that have been set mobbing in your behalf. Much may be depending on your doing some simple act; it may be the very thing which is to open the door of opportunity to great possibilities. You can never know all the combinations which Supreme Power is making for you in the world of things and of human affairs. Your neglect or failure to do some small thing may cause a long delay in getting you what you want.

Do, every day, all that can be done that day.

There is, however, a limitation or qualification that you must take into account. You are not to overwork or to rush blindly into your business in the effort to do the greatest possible number of things in the shortest possible time.

You are not to try to do tomorrow’s work today or to do a week’s work in a day.

It is really not the number of things you do, but the efficiency of each separate action that counts.

Every act is, in itself, either efficient or inefficient. Every inefficient act is a failure, and if you spend your life doing inefficient acts, your whole life will be a failure. The more things you do, the worse for you, if all your acts are inefficient ones.

On the other hand, every efficient act is a success in itself, and if every act of your life is an efficient one, your whole life must be a success.

The cause of failure is doing too many things in an inefficient manner and not doing enough things in an efficient manner.

You will see that it is a self-evident proposition that if you do not do any inefficient acts and if you do a sufficient number of efficient acts, you will become rich. If it is possible for you to make each act an efficient one, you see again that the getting of riches is reduced to an exact science, like mathematics.
The matter turns, then, on the question of whether you can make each separate act a success in itself. And, this you can certainly do.

You can make each act a success, because the infinite is working with you, and the infinite cannot fail.

The Supreme Power is at your service. To make each act efficient you have only to put your own power into it.

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you if you desire to harness the full power Of your creative thoughts, and get whatever you want in life, including the good financial success you’ve always desired.

Financial Success: Harnessing The Power Of Creative Thought

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Johnson & Johnson Business Strategies

Innocent — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 21:26:38 +0000

Johnson & Johnson Business Strategies

Surviving in business for more than 120 years, with most of those years as market leader in many product categories means that the ideas and strategies that Johnson & Johnson employed worked, and are worth copying. Here are strategies, which took J & J to the top of its industry, and which can also take your business to greater height.

Providing Solution To Great Challenge

Great businesses result because they find and offer solution to big problem confronting a large number of people.

Right from the beginning, Johnson & Johnson was positioned to discover solution to the healthcare needs of many starting with the production of surgical dressings in 1886.

Continually Improving Product Quality And Speed Of Creation

To ensure the continual success of your business, you need to set up a system that will enable you to keep improving on the quality of your products or services, as well as on the speed at which you develop and launch new products into the market.

Johnson & Johnson’s establishment of a bacteriological laboratory in 1891 enabled it to be on top of the competition in product quality and creation.

Controlling Factors Of Production

Your business survival may be threatened if you don’t have control over the sources of your raw materials or inputs for your production or operation. For instance, competitors could buy off all supplies from your source for raw materials and upset use your production.

To prevent such from happening to it, Johnson & Johnson bought over Chicopee, its big source for textile materials, which is a major raw material it uses for production.

Expanding Your Market

You need to expand your market and increase sale. Other regions or nations might be in dire need of the solution you offer, but if you don’t expand to them, you may never know how much sales you are leaving on the table.

Johnson & Johnson realized the value of expanding internationally back in 1919 when it set up its fist international affiliate in Canada, followed by the establishment of another in Great Britain in 1924.

Doing Things Differently

To stand out in the crowd and achieve uncommon results, you need to do things differently by trying out new ideas, methods or strategies that have not been used before.

Johnson & Johnson was able to effectively challenge Kimberly-Clark in the feminine product category with its introduction of Carefree and Stayfree sanitary napkins into the market because it went against the norm by advertising a woman hygiene product loudly, as it used television to advertise Carefree and Stayfree.

Having A Well Focused Goal

Having a written and well defined goal for your business, which all employees know, directs everyone’s energy, and mindset to achieving the goal.

No doubt, J & J’s goals, “Continuously improving customer satisfaction, cost efficiency and speed of bringing new products to market,” which was written, read, and known by its employees, have helped it to achieve the monumental success it has attained over the decades.

Read Johnson & Johnson’s Success Story here.

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Johnson & Johnson

Innocent — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:27:43 +0000

Johnson & Johnson: Becoming The World’s Largest Healthcare Company Through Innovative Ideas, Products And Services

Johnson & Johnson was founded on the quest to make a difference in people’s lives by providing solution to a serious problem in the healthcare industry. In the 1880s, the percentage of deaths resulting from infections after surgery was on the high side. Then came a ray a hope in the late 1880s when Joseph Lister found that the cause of the infection were airborne germs in operating rooms.

Lister recommended sterilizing operating rooms by spraying them with carbolic acid, but this method, although effective, was impractical. Propelled to find solution to this challenge, Robert Wood Johnson, a New England druggist landed an idea: to produce surgical dressings for hospitals.

Together with his brothers, James Wood Johnson and Edward Mead Johnson, he began producing surgical dressings in 1886 with 14 employees in New Brunswick, New Jersey. And in 1887, the brothers incorporated Johnson & Johnson.

Their product, which was an improved medicinal plaster that incorporated medical compounds mixed in an adhesive, found a ready, eager market, as hospitals have long been looking for how to prevent death resulting from infection after surgery. Following its first product, Johnson & Johnson (J & J) quickly developed a soft, absorbent cotton-and-gauze dressing, and began mass production with the dressings distributed across the United States.

To be able to improve on its products, and create more innovative ones, J & J, in 1891 established a bacteriological laboratory. And by introducing dry heat, steam, and pressure throughout its manufacturing process, the sterility of the company’s bandages was assured,

In 1899, Johnson & Johnson made another improvement on its adhesive bandage by introducing a zinc oxide-based adhesive plaster, which was tougher, and didn’t cause skin irritation for many patients, unlike the previous type.

Johnson & Johnson lead founder, Robert Wood Johnson, died in 1910, with his brother James taking over as Chairman. To ensure the company’s source of textile materials, one of its major raw materials, is within its control, J & J bought over Chicopee Manufacturing Corporation in 1916.

The company expanded internationally in 1919 when it set up its first international affiliate in Canada, and later established Johnson & Johnson Limited in Great Britain in 1924.

Johnson & Johnson continued to diversify as it introduced Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages and Johnson’s Baby Cream in 1921, and Modess sanitary napkins, the company’s first feminine hygiene product in 1927.

Elected president in 1932, Robert Johnson, son of cofounder Robert Wood Johnson facilitated the company’s organizational structure. He created divisions and affiliates with autonomy to direct their own operations. The company also diversified into textiles, Pharmaceuticals, and hygiene products.

To strengthen its Pharmaceutical business, J & J bought McNeil Laboratories, Inc., maker of Tylenol, which was then a prescription drug, but which was relaunched a year after the acquisition as over-the-counter (OTC) medication. Johnson & Johnson also purchased Cilag-Chemie, a Swiss pharmaceutical company in 1959, followed two years later with the acquisition of Janssen Pharmaceutica, maker of Haldol, the major antipsychotic drug, which was introduced in 1958.

Robert Johnson led Johnson & Johnson through tremendous growth in his time as president, with sales reaching $700 million at the time of his death in 1968 from $11 million.

With increasing federal regulation in the 1960s on the healthcare industry, the need to increase sales and profit in its consumer products line became paramount in Johnson & Johnson. To achieve this, James Burke, who became president of J & J’s Domestic Operating Company in 1966 built a formidable marketing team to win the market.

He launched several successful advertising campaigns that saw Johnson & Johnson attaining leadership position in several of its product lines. One of this was the introduction of Carefree and Stayfree sanitary napkins into a market that was already dominated by Kimberly-Clark, the well known leader in feminine products.

Instead of advertising Carefree and Stayfree only in women’s magazines, as adverts for women hygiene products then were low-keyed and discrete, Burke took a different approach. He advertised Carefree and Stayfree on television. And by the ending of 1978, Johnson & Johnson had captured half of the market.

Another of Burke’s marketing success was the transformation of Tylenol from a dwindling high-priced product to a mass-market leader. In response to Bristol-Myers Company’s introduction of Datril, which they advertised as having the same function as Tylenol, but sold at greatly reduced price, J & J Board allowed Burke to do what he had wanted to do for a long time – to bring Tylenol into the mass market.

He slashed Tylenol’s price, and ended up beating all products in the category, including Datril and the market leader, Anacin.

The J & J ‘Signature of Quality’ program, which focused the corporation’s operating companies on meeting three general goals: ‘Continuously improving customer satisfaction, cost efficiency and the speed of bringing new products to market,’ was instituted in 1992. This formed the motivation that catapulted the company to higher success in the 1990s and beyond.

Resulting from a series of acquisitions in the 1990s, including RoC S.A. of France, maker of hypoallergenic facial, hand, body, and other products, the clinical diagnostic unit of Eastman Kodak Company in 1995, and Neutrogena Corporation (for $1 billion), producer of dermatologist-recommended skin and hair care products.

It also included Indigo Medical (1996), specialist in minimal invasive technology in urology and related areas, Cordis Corporation, a world leader in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases for $1.8 billion in 1996, the purchase of Biopsys Medical, Inc. in 1997, a specialist in minimally invasive breast biopsies, and the acquisition of DePuy, leader in orthopedic products, such as hip replacement devices, in 1998 for $3.7 billion in cash.

This shot Johnson & Johnson’s revenue to $21.47 billion by 1999, and $61.9 Billion by 2009, with a net earning of $4.17 billion, and $12.3 billion in 1999 and 2009 respectively.

Founded over 120 years ago on a revolutionary idea to provide doctors and nurses sterile sutures, dressings and bandages to treat their patient’s wounds and prevent them from dieing as a result of infection, Johnson & Johnson has grown to meet the healthcare needs of people worldwide.

It has pioneered many new ideas and products that have changed human health and well-being, including such products as baby powder, sterile bandages and antiseptic mouthwash, disposable contact lenses, and hip and knee replacements. And by mergers, acquisitions and the formation of new companies, J & J has grown to become the largest and most broadly based health care company in the world, a position it is not prepared to cede as it looks into the future.

Read Johnson & Johnson’s Business Strategies here.

Experts in business and technology, as well as daily users rate this software higher and above others. Click here to see why.

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eBay: The Making of the World’s Largest Auction Platform

Innocent — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:28:09 +0000

eBay: The Making of the World’s Largest Auction Platform

Without doubt, eBay ranks amongst the world’s greatest business ideas ever generated. This is evident in the huge growth and success the company has had so far only in fifteen year in business, emerging as the world’s undisputed leader in online auction sales.

eBay was formed in the little living room of Pierre Omidyar, French-born Iranian computer programmer in San Jose, California, September 3, 1995, when he created AuctionWeb (later became eBay in September, 1997) as part of his personal website about the Ebola virus. Having worked for Claris, developing software for Apple Computers, Omidyar knew exactly what he wanted to achieve with eBay: to provide an online market place for sellers to list their products, and interested buyers to place bid.

eBay was actually the fulfillment of Omidyar’s hobby of creating software that bring immense benefits to users, and it became the first auction platform to be established on the Internet. While he kept his job, Omidyar, then 28, ran eBay on part-time, testing the waters to see if people will appreciate the service or platform he was providing.

The first product to be placed on eBay was a broken laser pointer, which to Omidyar’s surprise was bought for $14.83 after bidding closed on it. To be sure the interest bidders had on the product was real, and that the winning bidder knew that the item was broken before making payment for it, Omidyar asked him if he knew the item was broken. And the answer he got confirmed he had hit a goldmine: “”I’m a collector of broken laser pointers,” the winning bidder replied.

eBay had provided a huge platform for millions of people to connect on the Internet and freely sell and buy items and services in a competitive bidding process. It had taken traditional person-to-person trading normally conducted physically in forms like garage sales, collectibles shows, and flea markets, to the Internet. This makes it easier and convenient for everyone to participate right from the comfort of their home.

eBay provided automated system that enabled anyone who had something to sell to list them in minutes, and those who want to buy to easily browse through its categories and bid on the item of their choice. Considering its huge market potential, it was not in doubt that eBay would grow quickly. And that did happen, even faster than expected.

Again, eBay’s business model positioned it to be profitable from the very beginning. By just been the platform for both sellers and buyers to interact, and not involved in keeping inventory or stocking or distributing items, eBay’s cost of operation and business risk are minimal, allowing most of its revenue to translate to profit.

Indeed, by 1996, just a year after take-off, eBay had become profitable enough to hire a Stanford MBA Graduate, Jeffrey Skoll as its first President, and in 1997, eBay’s growth literarily exploded. It recorded 2 million auctions in January of that year alone. And with an investment of $6.7 million into it by Benchmark Capital, a venture capital firm later in the year, eBay was set to harness its full potential.

The company changed leadership again in March 1998 as Meg Whiteman from Harvard Business School was hired as President and CEO. She put together a crack team of experienced business managers, and focused eBay on a defined vision: to connect people, and not to sell them things. eBay at this time had 30 employees, and half a million users. Its revenue was $4.7 million.

Following eBay’s profound growth and strong branding, the company prospered immensely, and its share price soared to $53.50 on the first day of taking it public in 1998, more than the $18 it was expected to sell. This instantly made the founder, Omidyar a billionaire only at 31.

eBay continued to expand its product categories beyond collectibles, into almost any item that anyone or corporation wishes to sell. It bought IBazar, a similar European auction site as itself in February 2002 as part of its quest to expand internationally, and also bought PayPal in October the same year.

The purchase of PayPal is perhaps eBay’s greatest acquisition so far. Owning PayPal does not only solve the problem of having a trusted payment solution for its users, eBay also makes a sizeable income directly as commission from PayPal when its users who signed up for PayPal account from its site make a transaction on their PayPal outside of eBay. Equally gratifying to eBay is the tremendous growth and use of PayPal over the years, which has made it the most commonly used payment solution on the Internet, and generating revenues in the hundreds of millions yearly.

To build customers trust, which is vital for success in its industry, eBay came up with Feedback mechanism, where buyers are encouraged to provide detailed seller rating with four different categories. When giving feedback, buyers are to rate sellers in each of the four categories with a score from one to five stars (with five the highest, and one the lowest).

By viewing a sellers previous ratings, a prospective buyer will be guided to be able to predict to some extent that sellers trustworthiness, and so decide whether to trade with them or not. It also enables eBay to disallow sellers with low ratings from selling certain items. Although, this does not totally eliminate the chance of fraudsters trying to misuse its platform, it does restrict and keep them from wrecking serious havoc.

eBay, over time, also built credibility for its business by having a list of banned items that cannot be listed for auction on its site. Some of these items include: Drugs and drug paraphernalia, Nazi paraphernalia, Bootleg recordings, and human body parts.

By 2008, eBay had become a global company with operations in over 20 countries, hundreds of millions of registered users, and over 15,000 employees, making $7.7 billion yearly revenue.

By continually building its community of users globally (especially in Europe and Asia) with speed, gaining users trust on its platform, and looking out for change in its industry, and responding to them quickly, eBay has continued to lead its industry, controlling more than 80 percent of the market share ahead of competitors like Amazon and Yahoo. And it doesn’t appear it would be slowing down in the near future.

Read eBay’s Business Strategies here.

Experts in business and technology, as well as daily users rate this software higher and above others. Click here to see why.

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Adobe Business Strategies

Innocent — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:28:54 +0000

Adobe Business Strategies

Coming from $1.7 million revenue in 1985 to over a billion in 1999 put Adobe Systems Inc., as one of the fastest growing and successful companies of the period, a growth which has continued up to this time. Below are the strategies, ideas and decisions, which the managers of Adobe came up with and implemented to start and grow their business to the monumental success it is today, and which you can also adopt to your own business.

Industry Knowledge is Important

Businesses cannot be started and run successfully on trial and error basis, a deep knowledge of the industry is needed before getting into it. This will enable you to identify the serious needs of your target customers to be met, and how best to deliver the solution to them.

Adobe’s immediate success from the beginning was based on the founders’ huge expertise of the industry, which they gained from many years of working as software development and graphics researchers for Xerox Inc.

Identifying a Dire Problem to Fix

A business that provides solution to a critical problem will receive instant acceptability, compared to another business which meets a not so severe need that people can do without or find alternative to. The success potential of your business will therefore depend on how important the product or service you are providing is to the target customer. Therefore, identify a dire need in your industry to focus on meeting for your market.

Chuck Geschke and John Warnock founded Adobe because they discovered a serious need that people had in the early 1980s printing out documents from their computer systems – getting their texts and images to come out the same way they looked on the screen when printed.

Serving a Huge Market

The growth of your business will be largely dependent on the size of your market. The larger the population of people who need your product or service, the more your business can grow and make money, and vice versa. In deciding to go into business therefore, find out if your market is reasonably large.

Adobe’s market was huge, and global, and this reflects in the astronomical increase in the company’s revenue year after year.

Continuing Creating Innovative Products

To remain fresh in customers’ minds and top of the competition, your business needs to continue to create improved products that give more value to the customer than those that existed before. Consumers generally want more value for their money, and so will find your offer more attractive.

The continued leadership of Adobe in its industry is as a result of the company’s continued creation of innovative products all through the few decades it has existed. Adobe Illustrator (1987), Photoshop (1989), Adobe Premiere (1993), PhotoDeluxe and PageMill (both 1996), Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash, are just some of them.

Piggy-backing On Existing Successful Companies

One way your business can succeed quicker than it would have is to find a way to use established platforms or channels of successful and respected businesses. This will not only save or make you money, as it exposes your business to your host’s pool of customers, the respect accorded to your host will rub on you too.

Adobe’s business spread quickly locally and internationally and its revenue soared because of its strategy of granting license to established businesses to incorporate its software products into their own products for their markets.

Observing Changes in Your Industry and Taking Position

A crucial business strategy you must adhere to if you don’t want your business to be rendered irrelevant with the passage of time, is to be keenly observant of changes, technological, social, or cultural, taking place in your industry. These changes can make your product or service no longer useable overnight if you didn’t see the changes that were occurring.

By observing the changes taking place, you can adjust your operations accordingly and position your business to reap from the new opportunities that would evolve.

Adobe has been able to develop many cutting-edge technologies over the years from noticing the changes that were going on in its industry. Some of such products include Adobe PostScript , Portable Document Format (PDF), Dreamweaver, Flash, Flex, and Flash Media Server.

Read Adobe Systems Inc. Success Story Here

Experts in business and technology, as well as daily users rate this software higher and above others. Click here to see why.

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How Adobe Changed The Worlds Design Industry

Innocent — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:40:20 +0000

How Adobe Changed The World’s Design Industry

A lot of people never seem to have the courage to quit their job to start a business even when their ideas and contributions are no longer appreciated by their employers. They continue to endure the dissatisfaction of the job, until they are eventually moved out one way or another when they least expect, and left demoralized.

This was however not the case with Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, the founders of Adobe. Both men were employees of Xerox; Geschke managed the company’s Imaging Sciences Laboratory where he directed computer science and graphics research, while Warnock conducted interactive graphics research. Over time, both research colleagues grew frustrated at Xerox for not so much believe in their research efforts as to launch them into the market.

In 1982, Geschke and Warnock decided to start a company together – which they called Adobe, after a creek that ran by their homes in Los Altos, California – believing they would build a profitable company by providing solution to the problem creative professionals faced at the time: getting text and images on a computer screen to translate beautifully and accurately into print. The following year they came out with Adobe PostScript, a technology which revolutionized the desktop publishing industry.

Adobe PostScript is a powerful computer language that made desktop publishing possible by allowing laser printers, typesetting equipment and similar devices to produce pages integrating text and graphics.

To cover the huge market that its potential users provide, Adobe began marketing and licensing PostScript to manufacturers of computers, film recorders, imagesetters, and printers. Apple Computer, Inc., incorporated PostScript in its LaserWriter printer in 1985. And seeing the huge future prospect for Adobe, Apple bought 19 percent stake in the company in 1986, which had reported $1.7 million revenue the previous year with 27 staff.

By the close of 1986, Adobe had developed over 5,000 PostScript applications for every operating system and hardware configuration. PostScript remained the only page description language that allowed multiple computer environments. And used by corporations, professional publishers, and the U.S. government, PostScript quickly became one of the most widely used computer languages worldwide, and its revenue climbed to $16 million.

In 1987, Adobe launched a design and illustration software program called Adobe Illustrator. This software, which allowed users to create high-quality line drawings, became the preferred choice of technical illustrators, graphic designers, and desktop publishers. It also introduced Adobe Type Library, which was a large collection of type fonts – this would eventually become the most widely used collection in the industry.

The company introduced Photoshop in 1989. A software program, Photoshop was created especially for artists and desktop publishers, to provide them with complete toolbox for editing, creating, colour correction and separation, retouching, and manipulating images.

Adobe expanded its business internationally when it gave Canon Inc. of Japan, the world’s largest manufacturer of laser printers, the license to its PostScript in 1989. By this, Adobe’s PostScript technology was taken around the world on the back of Canon. And as a confirmation of the huge success of its products, Adobe recorded more than $121 million sales in 1989.

In the words of Adobe’s president, John Warnock, when he was interviewed in late 1989 by the Los Angeles Times, “If you think you have a formula for success, you’d better figure out how to change it from year to year,” Adobe entered the 1990s with determination to continue to create innovative products and services for professional publishing solutions, business publishing solutions, document solutions, and digital imaging solutions.

The company observed that as computers became more interconnected and people needed to collaborate online using a wide variety of documents, a new problem emerged: sharing this content. Incompatible operating systems and programs hindered collaboration, a problem made worse as the use of e-mail and the web skyrocketed.

In 1993, Adobe’s breakthrough Portable Document Format (PDF) technology provided the solution for the problem, enabling businesses to deliver platform- and application-independent files across operating systems and devices.

Also in the year, the company released Adobe Premiere 3.0 for Macintosh into the video and multimedia industry. With this software, users could perform desktop video editing cheaply than using the expensive equipment that was then available. Adobe’s success continued to increase, and by the closing of 1993 the company’s revenues shot up to $313.4 million from $265.9 million it made in 1992.

By acquiring Aldus in 1994, the maker of PageMaker, one of the industry’s leading desktop publishing software, Adobe maintained its number one position in the desktop publishing industry. The company also introduced After Effects in 1994, software that enabled two-dimensional animation to be created, including special effects and motion composition. By the ending of the year, Adobe’s revenue climbed to $676 million.

Adobe persisted in creating innovative products through the years. In 1996, it released PhotoDeluxe and PageMill. PhotoDeluxe, the first in its category enabled users to manipulate and edit photographs on their computers, while PageMill allowed users to easily produce web pages. By the close of 1997, Adobe’s revenue, due to high demands for many of its products reached $912 million, exceeding $1 billion in 1999.

As the Internet exploded into a viable economic engine, Adobe quickly recognized that static HTML pages could not deliver the end-user interactivity and integration with enterprise systems that businesses required. The company again took the lead – first with Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash, and later with Flex and the Flash Media Server – by making cost-effective, reliable development of engaging websites a reality.

Today, more than one billion Flash technology-enabled devices have been shipped worldwide, and more than 75 percent of online videos are viewed using Adobe Flash technology, making Flash the number one format for video on the web1, and attesting to Adobe’s market leadership, a position that ensures it leads the next wave of industry innovation, helping companies integrate enterprise technologies and rich media into solutions that solve real-world business problems.

With the Adobe Flash Platform, including Flash Player and the Adobe AIR runtime, businesses are building rich Internet applications (RIAs) that offer vital efficiencies and provide a competitive edge by transforming the quality and reach of their services.

Read Adobe Business Strategies Here

Experts in business and technology, as well as daily users rate this software higher and above others. Click here to see why.

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E-Myth MASTERY: The Seven Essential Disciplines for Building a World Class Company – Michael Gerber

Innocent — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:32:33 +0000

E-Myth MASTERY: The Seven Essential Disciplines for Building a World Class Company – Michael E. Gerber

Today, I bring you an excerpt from the book: E-Myth MASTERY: The Seven Essential Disciplines for Building a World Class Company by Michael E. Gerber.

If you have read the author’s previous book: E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, which was a best seller, you would expect nothing less than a thorough and trusted guide that you can use to build your business to world class.

And he surely delivered!

Here is an excerpt from the book on the topic: Customer Perceptions and Behavior: Understanding How Your Customers Think and Make Decisions

After reading this part, you will understand what it takes to get prospective customers order your product the first time, and get existing customers keep coming back whenever they need what you are offering without hesitating.

These are the same strategies that the big and successful companies use to make millions and even billions of dollars in sales every year. Now, you too can bid poor sales good bye forever.

If you enjoy this piece, then you can be sure that the entire book is great, and that’s why I recommend it.

Please read on…

Customer Perceptions and Behavior: Understanding How Your Customers Think and Make Decisions

The human mind is anything but simple.

But the mind is where marketing happens for you and your customers. in order to do an effective job marketing your products and your company, you have to get an insightful understanding of the minds of your customers. T good news is that it’s fascinating, and you’ll enjoy the discoveries and insights you develop about your customers and yourself.

Where do you start?

You start by understanding the basics about how your customers’ min work, and how you can influence them for their benefit and yours. First, you develop the Central Psychographic Model, the CPM, for your primary target market and important flanker markets. Then you’ll look at purchase decision making and something we call the Purchase Decision Chain, which will lead you to an understanding of customer needs and behavior and how best communicate with customers.

The work you do in this business development process requires a great deal of in-depth thinking about some ideas that may be unfamiliar, possibly challenging, probably fun, and certainly valuable. You’ll develop insights about your customers and target markets that will shape everything your company does.

You’ll put those insights to use immediately in the next three business development processes. You’ll create your company’s “sensory package” (the total impact of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste that your customers experience of your business and its products and services). You’ll establish your “positioning” (the place you want your company to occupy in the minds of your customers). You’ll select your “marketing mix” (the specific communications, sales, delivery, and customer service activities you will use to attract and retain customers).

And finally, you’ll combine these elements to develop your marketing strategy. The knowledge and insights you gain in this work will be essential later when you create your lead generation and lead conversion processes. Don’t be in a hurry. Take the time you need to get to the core of your customers. It will pay off handsomely-for both you and them.

So let’s get to it.

Watch Out For The “Fatal Assumptions”

There are two “fatal assumptions” that can get in your way as you try to understand the minds of your target market customers-marketing to yourself and being too product-oriented. Marketing to yourself means thinking your customers think and act as you think and act. If you have ever said, “The way I would do it is … ,” or “What I would want is … ,” or “The way they should think is … ;’ then you have been guilty of marketing to yourself.

Being too product-oriented means thinking more about your products and their specifications, and less about what your customers need and how to communicate with them. It’s thinking backward. The idea that “I’ll create a product and then go out and sell it” is the product -oriented approach, and it’s a poor one.

The idea that ‘I’ll learn what the market needs, then I’ll create the product to satisfy that need” is the customer-oriented approach, and it’s the more effective approach. Product -oriented thinking also means focusing your marketing and sales activities on the features of your product or service, rather than on the emotional gratification it provides your customers.

Perception is Reality

In marketing, there is no such thing as reality; only perceived reality. What the customer, or anyone else for that matter, perceives is what is real for that person. What the customer’s mind perceives, accurately or inaccurately, is the truth in the eye of that customer. What the customer’s mind doesn’t perceive, in effect, doesn’t exist. And perception rules all decision making, including of course, purchasing decisions. So much so that you could define marketing as “the art of managing customer perceptions.”

The key to successful marketing is to provide the gratification the customer seeks. If this happens, it is a “win-win” situation. There is a different approach to marketing that should be discouraged because it benefits neither the customer nor the business serving the customer. It’s the view that one should manipulate customer perceptions in order to make a sale, using any method that works, without regard to the customer’s welfare.

Ethical questions aside, it’s a counterproductive approach to business. Customers always come to realize what is happening and turn away from the selfishly manipulative marketer. In the end, ethical marketing is practical marketing. If customers’ perceived needs and preferences are served, the business wins. If not, it loses.

A Tale of Two Minds

Imagine for a moment that you have a pair of tiny twins living inside your head. Their names are “Impulse” and “Reason.” They do all your thinking for you, all your feeling, all your perceiving. They are your mind, but there are two of them-and they couldn’t be more different from each other.

Impulse speaks no language, understands no words, has no ability to reason. She has no sense of right or wrong. She wants gratification; she avoids pain. She feels desire and fear. She is the ultimate amoral pleasure seeker as well as the ultimate avoider of anything unpleasant. She can be embarrassed, she has a sense of pride and shame, and when she’s done something wrong, she is remorseful. She is always completely honest, straightforward-there’s no deception in her. She is pure passion, emotion, and impulsive instinct. And she wants everything now.

Reason reads, writes, and does arithmetic. She is logical and rational. She eeks facts, information, knowledge, understanding. She is not passionless, but her passions are rational and follow her reasoning. She makes unemotional judgments about good and bad, right and wrong, ethical and unethical, moral and immoral, should do and shouldn’t do, can do and can’t do, valuable and valueless. But she can’t be embarrassed because she has no sense of shame, and he is never remorseful. She thinks, she reasons, she judges, but she doesn’t feel.

They’re an interesting pair, these little twins, but the most interesting thing i that Impulse is the decision maker of the two. Believe it or not, every decision you make is made by Impulse. That’s right, the little crazy person is making all your decisions. Unsettling isn’t it?

Well, it’s not really all that unsettling because Reason has a lot to say about it The two of them work together in a very productive way. They both perceive through the senses-sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Reason takes whatever meaning is inherent in what it perceives and logically processes it, adding no emotion, drawing conclusions.

The result is passed along to Impulse who interprets the result in terms of expected gratification or pain, and reacts emotionally. Impulse provides the emotional response to Reason’s rational conclusions and judgments. Meanwhile, Impulse is also using her sensory perceptions to make associations with past experience and bring forth the emotions they trigger.

So Reason deals in information and judgment while Impulse deals in associations and emotions. The more information Reason can bring to her judgments, the stronger her influence on a decision. The more associations and impressions Impulse can make, the stronger her influence.

The Conscious Mind And The Unconscious Mind

The little twins are real. Of course they’re not creatures inhabiting your skull; they are the two aspects of your mind. Reason is your conscious mind and Impulse is your unconscious mind. They exist in all of us. They are the key to the way we think, perceive, and make decisions. And they are the key to understanding and communicating with your customers and prospective customers.

If your marketing is to be successful, you have to communicate with both of them. And that’s where most businesses fall short. They communicate mostly with Reason, and she’s not the decision maker.

Unconscious Associations

Associations are as important as they are mysterious and unpredictable. Your mind-anybody’s mind-makes associations that rule your behavior and the way you perceive the world. Impulse is the twin responsible for associations. Associations can be triggered by the most trivial perceptions as well as by major events.

For example, a middle-aged man doing yard work hears the rustle of fallen leaves. He perceives the sound and unconsciously associates it with the rustle of papers at an award ceremony at which he was the guest of honor. He doesn’t consciously remember the award ceremony, but he smiles and momentarily feels good because the association triggered pleasant emotions.

Here’s another, more dramatic example. A young woman-an ice-cream lover-is walking home one evening eating an ice-cream cone. Suddenly she is attacked by a couple of dogs. To this day, more than 15 years later, she can’t bring herself to eat ice cream. Her unconscious mind has created an indelible association between ice cream and brutality, pain, and fear. It’s an extreme example to be sure, but it makes the point.

Marketers seek to create associations favorable to their products or take advantage of existing ones. Think, for instance, of the last time you saw a television commercial for perfume or beer or an automobile. Yes, the advertisement presented information, but the real thrust of the ad was to trigger an association in your unconscious mind linking the product with a pleasant experience or impression.

You never know exactly what associations your advertising, your product, or your sensory package are going to trigger with any specific individual people’s experiences and perceptions are much too varied. But you can tap into the common experiences and perceptions of groups of similar people and be confident that the associations will be pleasant or unpleasant for most of them.

And that’s what you do in your business communications and advertising. You understand your target markets in as much depth as you can, but at least to the extent that you know their major common experiences and the way they generally go about their lives.

That tells you the kinds of things most likely to have positive associations. And that gives you insights into the kinds of messages and images your advertising should carry, the way you should interact with customers, and the kind of sensory experience your customers should have when they do business with your company.

The idea, of course, is that if you have an in-depth understanding of your customers and how they make their purchasing decisions, you can influence their decisions for your mutual benefit. So let’s take all this background information and put it into a framework that will help you understand customer decision making and enable you to establish the psychological profile-the Central Psychographic Model (CPM)-for each of your target markets.

Attraction And Avoidance The Essence Of Purchase Decisions

A purchase decision, or any decision for that matter, is simply the emotional response to all the rational and not-so-rational activities in the conscious and unconscious mind. Yes, decisions are made emotionally by the unconscious mind, but with full attention to both conscious and unconscious perceptions, associations, logic, and judgments.

It’s all a matter of attraction and avoidance. The conscious mind is drawn to purchases that make sense, are rational, and have objectively desirable results. It is repelled by purchases that are irrational and have objectively undesirable results. The unconscious mind is drawn to purchases that result in emotional gratification. It is attracted by pleasant associations, pleasant sensory perceptions, and the promise of good results based on the conscious mind’s conclusions and judgments. It avoids anything unpleasant.

Please share this excerpt with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site you belong to enjoy too. They will appreciate you for it! Use the “Share This” button below.

Do you have any questions, inquiries, observations, or contributions regarding this write up or my blog? Please leave it as comment, I will respond to it.

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you.

E-Myth Mastery: The Seven Essential Disciplines for Building a World Class Company

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L’Oréal’s Business Strategies

Innocent — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:47:58 +0000

L’Oréal’s Business Strategies

Here are the business strategies that have taken L’Oréal to world number one position in the beauty and cosmetics industry. As an entrepreneur, business owner or manager, you can actually adopt these strategies to your business and experience similar success.

Continue To Improve On Your Products

You cannot afford not to continue to improve on the value your product gives to your customers. If you fail to improve on your product quality, it would either give room for new entrants with better offers into the market to upstage you, or opportunity to your competitors to create and present better product than yours to your target customers.

If you fail to make your product better from time to time, you may soon find you are no longer relevant in the market place – it’s that dangerous.

Eugène Schueller was able to easily get into, and penetrate the beauty and cosmetics industry in the early 1900s, because he noticed a huge gap between women’s desire and expectation for their dyed hair and the available hair dyes. By improving on the existing dyes therefore to meet women’s needs, he immediately captured a sizeable portion of the market in only two years.

Find Ways To Promote Your Business Affordably

Promoting your business without doubt is very important to its success. Even if you have great product in terms of the value it gives to people who use it, but not many people who would have love to get it know about it, you will not record good sales, and your cash flow will suffer. It may become very difficult keeping the business going because you don’t have the cash to cover overhead and create more products.

You need to find cheap or free means of promoting your business, which are nevertheless effective, especially at the early stage of your business when you are working on a tight budget.

Schueller’s promotional platform, which cost him nothing except for his time and expertise was writing and editing the science column of La Coiffure de Paris magazine, which was first published in 1909. Through this magazine, which he eventually bought in 1912, Schueller was able to bring L’Oréal to the attention of his target market.

Make Your Product Irresistible For Distributors

There are stakeholders or certain people who are instrumental to the success of your business, and who you must recognize and relate with in a win-win situation. One of such people are your distributors. Your distributors can affect your sales positively or negatively depending on how well they are motivated to sell your products.

Give people great offer to distribute your product, and they will consider you first over the competition, and help you achieve your sales goals.

Schueller knew this, and that was why he provided mouth-watering incentives to hair stylist to promote and distribute L’Oréal products. He established a hair-colouring school, which provided training to hair stylists, who in return became motivated to recommend the company’s products to their clients.

Take Position Early On Evolving Trends

You need to keep an eye on evolving trends taking place in your industry and take position early. Most businesses start coming into an industry when it seems to be booming, but they will always be behind those that came first before the boom time. The early comers would have taken the first position in people’s minds, which is a strong competitive advantage to them.

By creating L’Oréal Blanc bleaching powder in 1929 to offer solution to brunettes who Schueller believed would want to become blonde following that trend he observed in the late 1920s, Schueller was positioning L’Oréal for huge gains when the trend becomes matured. And it did happen, millions of brunettes did want to become blonde in the 1930 and 1940s, resulting in millions of sales for L’Oréal Blanc bleaching powder.

Take Advantage Of Events

Many events that take place around you usually hold good opportunity for your business to make money. Take note of these events and think of how possibly your business can benefit from them. With the ideas you will generate, you will be surprised how much opportunities you have been missing all this time.

By thinking about how its company was going to benefit from the first paid holidays introduced by the French Government in 1936, L’Oréal came up with L’Oréal’s Ambre Solaire, which immediately became the leader in the new suntan market.

Develop The Ability To Continue To Create Innovative Products

Attaining and remaining top in your industry require the ability to create and continue to develop innovative products. You therefore need to establish a system that will enable you to do that. You could set up a research and development unit or something similar.

L’Oréal’s success in the several decades of its existence can be attributed largely to its huge investment in research and development, which enable it to create many top selling products. From 500 staff in its research and development unit in 1970 to 1000 by 1984 tells how much serious the company considered it.

Read L’Oréal Business Success Story here

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Experts in business and technology, as well as daily users rate this software higher and above others. Click here to see why.

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L’Oréal: The Creation Of The World’s Largest Manufacturer Of Cosmetics And Perfumes

Innocent — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:57:26 +0000

L’Oréal: The Creation Of The World’s Largest Manufacturer Of Cosmetics And Perfumes

The business success story of L’Oréal is another revelation of how possible it is to build multibillion dollar businesses from the ground-floor, with little or no money. A lot of aspiring entrepreneurs have not been able to start their businesses because they think they don’t have the money or resources to begin. This belief is crushed as Eugène Schueller began L’Oréal from home, and grew it to the billion dollar enterprise that it is today.

This story is full with strategies, and business growth ideas that enabled L’Oréal to grow, expand consistently, and sustain its lead as the world’s largest cosmetics and perfume company, and which you can also apply to your business.

Three years after graduating from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Paris, France’s national chemical school as chemist, Eugène Schueller bagan to formulate synthetic hair dyes at night from his kitchen in 1907. He had observed that most women of his time loved to dye their hair. However, their choice of dye was limited to the fiery red and coal black colour that were available then. Also, these dyes looked somehow artificial.

By improving on the existing hair dyes to meet women’s needs and expectations, Schueller created hair dyes which not only provided a subtle range of colours, but also looked natural. Making his product in the night, and selling to hair saloons who accepted it in the morning, Schueller’s business kicked off on a bright note. Within two years he found the Société Francaise des Teintures Inoffensives pour Cheveux, which later became L’Oréal.

Aware of the importance of marketing and promotion to business success, Schueller made use of the magazine, La Coiffure de Paris that was first published in October 1909. As part of the editorial team, and head of the science column, Schueller was able to promote his business with the articles he contributed to the magazine. His article on hair colouring, in which he was the first to recommend patch tests, established him as expert and brought him more sales. Seeing the power of the media in communicating with his target market, Schueller bought the magazine in 1912.

Quickly grasping that his success is closely linked to that of hair stylists, in 1910 Schueller began to forge a special bond with the profession, which grew stronger over time. Through his determination and ambition, he succeeded in convincing Paris hair stylists to use his dyes. He established a hair-colouring school on Rue du Louvre in Paris, which he personally oversaw, using a former hair stylist from the Russian Court to demonstrate his ideas. The school trained hair stylists, who, satisfied with his products recommended them to their clients. And with representatives selling his products throughout France, L’Oréal grew rapidly.

The 1920s brought in a new age. Women around the world were now working and earning money for themselves. They were also growing more concerned about their appearance, and looking for ways to prevent grey hairs from revealing their age. This development brought huge success to Oréal hair dyes – sales hit the roof as its products were sold massively outside of France, as far as Italy, Austria, Netherlands, and even the United States, Canada, and the UK and Brazil.

In the late 1920s, Schueller observed an evolving trend that could spin huge profit for his business if he took position early. He noticed that a lot of brunettes were longing to be blonde. To exploit the trend, L’Oréal launched the L’Oréal Blanc bleaching powder in 1929. And true to Eugène Schueller’s prediction when he said, “This little bottle holds a huge industry! One day, millions of brunettes will want to be blonde,” the product became a great success through the 1930s and 1940s as blonde hair became very popular.

Led by the highly creative founder and visionary, L’Oréal continued to innovate and find opportunities for its business from events in the society and economy. One of such events that brought L’Oréal huge profit was when the French Government introduced the first paid holidays for French workers in 1936.

Realizing there will soon be need for suntan lotions by holiday makers, L’Oréal created L’Oréal’s Ambre Solaire, which immediately captured the new suntan lotion market. As the company was making giant strides in product creation, it was also expanding its sales network on both national and international level. The company began to sell its products through pharmacies and perfumers, just as new subsidiaries were opened in Italy, Belgium, and Denmark between 1936 and 1937.

L’Oréal’s rise to the top and domination of the beauty and cosmetics industry was its huge investment in research and development, which enabled it to create market leading innovative products from time to time. By 1950 its research and development team included 100 chemists, which created top selling innovative products such as the first lightening tint, Imédia D, launched in 1951; and the first colouring shampoo, Colorelle, introduced in 1955.

As a result of the huge sales recorded by many of its products, which were equally market leaders across the world, L’Oréal was without doubt the highest earning company in France, with growth twice as fast as the cosmetics-industry average in the 1970s. With more money, the company increased its research and development staff from 500 in 1970 to 750 in 1974, then to 1000 by 1984.

Coming out from this huge investment in research and development were more highly successful products, such as Lancôme’s Niosôme, one of the few anti-aging creams found to be effective by independent dermatologists, launched in 1986. From that success, L’Oréal translated the technology for creating Lancôme Niosôme into developing a mass market L’Oréal skin care line. The line, which was sold under the name Plentitude, was introduced in Europe and Austrialia in the late 1980s and in the US in 1989, capturing 10 percent share of the US market in only two years.

As L’Oréal entered the 1990s, it faced a tough competition from Proctor & Gamble and Unilever over worldwide domination of the mass market for cosmetics and fragrance. To fend off these rivals and maintain its global number one position, L’Oréal stepped up its research and development efforts, as well as its marketing drive.

It increased its advertising budget by up to 50 percent for some products, created new image for most of its colour cosmetics, repackaged its merchandise, and made display cases more accessible and user friendly. And by targeted acquisition policy, L’Oréal expanded and captured new markets and distribution channels.

Some of its popular acquisitions included Helena Rubinstein in 1989, American brand of skincare products that was already well positioned on the European , Japanese and South American markets; La Roche-Posay, also in 1989, a high-tech dermatological product recommended by dermatologists all over the world; Maybelline in 1996, the leader in mass-market make-up in the United States. This acquisition did not only make L’Oréal the clear leader in the United Sates, but the world number one in mass-market make up industry.

Others included SoftSheen, the leading brand of hair-relaxing range of products in the world in 1998; Matrix, leader in the US professional haircare products sector in 2000; Mininurse, a leading mass-market skincare product in China, in 2003; and Yue-Sai, another leading Chinese skincare and make-up brand in 2004.

SkinEthic, The Body Shop, and Sanoflore, the French pharmaceutical company and leading name in organic skincare that specialized in designing, manufacturing and marketing natural cosmetics produced by organic farming, were acquired in 2006, followed two years later with the acquisition of YSL Beauté (2008).

And as L’Oréal celebrated its 100 years in business in 2009, its position as the leader in the cosmetics industry the world over remain unshaken. Having reached this position through total commitment to research and development to create excellent and innovative beauty products that meet the needs of men and women around the globe, the company is poised to keep at it, and even step it higher in the years to come.

Read L’Oréal Business Strategies here.

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Think Like A Champion: An Informal Education In Business And Life – Donald Trump

Innocent — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 01:29:18 +0000

Think Like A Champion: An Informal Education In Business And Life By Donald Trump

Donald Trump needs no introduction. His name is already a brand almost of equal level as Coca-Cola as a result of his monumental success in business. If you are aspiring to go into business, or you are in business already in business, hearing or reading from Donald Trump about business is actually priceless.

In this book, Think Like A Champion: An Informal Education In Business And Life by Donald Trump, you will be able to reach into his mind and tap his profound business acumen and principles that have brought him the massive success he is living today. In this book, he shares fifty short essays on his experience on business and life, to help you also become successful.

Below is an excerpt from the book, enjoy it. Don’t forget to share it with your friends by using the “share this” button below.

I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
- Abraham Lincoln

Experience teaches only the teachable.
- Aldous Huxley

Building Connected Thoughts

Comprehensive education dissolves the line between knowing too much and knowing too little on a variety of subjects – subjects that are necessary for success. I was reminded of this recently when I interviewed a young man who was very well versed in his field of expertise and almost uneducated in every other subject that was brought up. It was like he had tunnel vision, and although I admired his knowledge of his field, I had to realize that, considering the scope of my enterprises, he might not be a great fit because of his limited interests. This gave me the idea for this article, and I think it’s something all of you should consider as you are furthering your education and/or entering your careers.

Aldous Huxley, the great thinker and author of Brave New World, wrote an essay in 1959 titled “Integrate Education” that is still pertinent today. He emphasized the importance of building bridges in knowledge and thought, and the word he mentions for this is pontifex, or bridge-builder. It’s an interesting image to keep in mind as we study and learn. By doing so, we increase our learning capacity to include and connect ideas and subjects that may not specifically pertain to our area of interest, but that may serve us well to pay attention to.

Oddly enough, as I was thinking of this situation, I was looking through the February 5, 2007, issue of Time magazine, which featured a letter written by Huxley in 1954, under the heading of “Classic Letter.” This letter is so right on that it could be contemporary. It addresses the misinterpretations by critics and the press in their reviews, and while he admits their footnotes are “snappy,” he goes onto say that, “Snappiness, alas, is apt to be in inverse ratio to accuracy.” This guy knew what he was talking about on a variety of levels and subjects, and whether you agree with him or not, his ideas are well presented.

We’ve all heard the saying “connect the dots.” I see it as having enough knowledge to be able to connect the dots in a reasonable and informed way. The young man I interviewed could not do this. I wasn’t asking for an in-depth review of each topic presented, but an awareness of at least what the topic was. I’ve mentioned before the importance of keeping up with global events on a daily basis if you are planning to get anywhere in this world. Considering the availability of news, blind spots can’t really be rationalized anymore, no matter where you might be living. Information is available to everyone, and if you aren’t plugging into it, it will eventually work against you-maybe on your first interview. Don’t learn this the hard way!

Another tactic for being your own bridge-builder is to visualize how much time is saved when you cross a bridge, versus fording a river or traversing a canyon. It’s also a safeguard for falling into a gap that might take you weeks or months to get yourself out of. We are not omniscient, and sometimes things work out for a reason in a different way than we had planned, but take the time to prepare yourself for your goals. I work at that every single day. I’ve learned that things don’t just automatically fall into line because I want them to. Be proactive in your pursuit of knowledge.

As I write this, I remind myself that if you are reading it, you are most likely someone intent on improving your intelligence quota and someone who is already motivated. So I want you to ask yourself What is it that you are aiming for? What precisely is your motivation? What’s the point of building a bridge if you’re not sure you want to get to other side, or if you don’t know what you’ll do once you get there? A bridge must serve a specific purpose, and your goals have to be just that specific. Visualization is a powerful tool for bringing your intentions into focus.

I was having a conversation a few years ago with a few people when one guy mentioned that the Trump name had become a famous brand around the world and then added, “What’s in a name?” He then sort of laughed and said to me, “in your case, a lot!” I noticed that one guy seemed out of the loop about the quip. So I said “That’s Shakespeare. ‘What’s in a name’ is a famous line from Shakespeare.” So he still looked perplexed and asked “From what?” And although I knew it was from Romeo and Juliet, I said, “Look it up. You might learn some interesting things along the way.”

I’m not proposing that you spend years studying Shakespeare, but a topical knowledge of certain things will greatly enhance your capabilities for dealing in the major leagues with people who are well educated in a variety of subjects. Don’t be left out! Take a few hours a week to review the classics in literature or history or something outside of your usual range of interests. Limiting yourself is not the best choice. Many topics come up in the course of a business discussion or interview, and while we can’t know everything, we should know as much as we can.

Abraham Lincoln’s statement at the beginning of this essay sums up what I’m trying to get across to you. It also incorporates Huxley’s statement about being teachable. An added bonus to this attitude is that it will keep you young. Being a know-it-all will age you before your time, in addition to making you unteachable, so avoid those pitfalls. And building connected thoughts? Whoever thought that Abraham Lincoln and Aldous Huxley could be so connected? This essay proved that they could be, and we didn’t need any dots to help us-just brain power and the attempt at building bridges between eras, cultures, backgrounds, and civilizations. Let that be an example of how to bridge your own gaps and to get yourself where you want to go. Creative thinking is a must these days. Make it work for you.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.
-CARL JUNG

Confronting Your Fears

Recently, an interviewer asked me what my greatest fears were. I said I didn’t have any. He seemed surprised, but this is how I see it: If you label something as a fear, then it creates fear when sometimes it’s not a fear but a concern. For example, I know just as well as everyone else that New York City experienced a major terrorist attack and the thought of that is a concern for all of us, because it affects all of us. It’s happened in many places, so it’s a worldwide concern. But if we let it become a firmly rooted fear, the terrorists will have won.

The same applies to business. Do you fear owning a business? Translate that for yourself as asking: Are you concerned about owning a business yourself? Why? What specifically are those concerns?

It’s much easier to break down a concern than it is a fear. Fear creates a block that will only hinder your creative thinking. Objectivity will remove that block and allow for creative ideas to flow.

An antidote to fear is as simple as problem solving. Whether you have investing, estate planning, or running a business on your mind, or all of those things, they can be broken down into units of thought and dealt with in an orderly manner. It’s a bit like a jigsaw puzzle–you need to find the right place for each piece of the puzzle until the whole is apparent.

When I began to construct Trump Tower, for example, I had several things in mind that I knew I wanted. I wanted a certain kind of marble called Breccia Perniche, which was expensive, beautiful, and rare. It was also irregular and had white spots and white veins, which bothered me, so I went to the quarry itself and marked off the best slabs with black tape. Action turned this concern into a problem solved. I got exactly the marble pieces I wanted, and sitting around worrying about whether those pieces would be right or wrong was getting me nowhere. As a result of deciding to go to the quarry myself, the pieces of this puzzle fell into place and the finished product was perfect.

Know that if you want to own your own business, you will be doing a lot of the work yourself. That’s just the way it is. It isn’t all about giving orders or having other people do the legwork or brainwork for you. That comes into the picture, but you should always be ready to go at it yourself. If that idea bothers you, maybe you’d be better off being an employee. If responsibility comes naturally to you, or if you enjoy that challenge, owning your own business is a good fit.

Fear has a way of making things bigger than they are. There’s an old German proverb to the effect that “fear makes the wolf bigger than he is,” and that is true. But the opposite of fear is faith, which is one reason you’ve got to believe in yourself and see yourself as victorious. You will know you are capable of dealing with any discouragements, bullies, or problems along the way.

When I was faced with some huge debts in the early 1990s, it was widely reported that I was finished, done for, gone. Looking at the numbers alone made that seem clear to the media. However, I never believed I was finished. I simply saw that situation as a problem I had to solve and went about doing that. I’m not saying it was easy, because it wasn’t. It was a big problem. But I refused to give in to fear or to believe what was being said about my so-called demise. I came back to become more successful than I ever was, and that’s why I believe business is very much about problem solving. If you can learn to deal with and solve problems, you will have a much bigger margin for success.

Do not allow fear to settle into place in any part of your life. It is a defeating attitude and a negative emotion. Recognize and zap it immediately. Replace it with a problem-solving attitude, faith in yourself, and hard work. Put that formula into working order for yourself and you’ll b~ dealing from a position of power, not fear. That’s winning.

People with vision master the ability to see through to the heart of issues and investments. They value transparency.
- Robert Kiyosaki

Imagination: A Key to Financial Savvy

I have the great advantage of having graduated from the Wharton School of Business, which is probably the best in the world. They made sure we were well versed in everything having to do with business. This is not always a guarantee of success, but at least we were well equipped for it.

Having had this advantage, I will explain a few things for those who haven’t. Finance and business is a complex mix of components that embraces a large spectrum of enterprises. It’s like having a technique and then being able to apply it to different mediums. As a builder, I instinctively saw the different aspects of finance fitting and falling into place in a large blueprint-and as I learned more, those blueprints became larger and larger. When I look back, I realize I was thinking big way back in school.

This might sound simplistic, but I’m a firm believer in visualization, and it worked for me. A blueprint might not work for you, but they are something I was familiar with. It might be a Mira painting or some other design or sculpture that works for you. I’ve heard some interesting stories of what people visualized on their path to success. One person used a photograph of bread and salt as his inspiration, and he became vastly successful. To each his own on this one.

Some financial courses are dry-but necessary. I was able to handle them by making them more interesting in my own mind by applying the principles immediately to some imaginary project I would come up with. By doing this, I was already working in the real world while I was in school, which I think saved me a lot of time when I actually got started on my own. I had been multitasking before I knew what multitasking was.

In reviewing my career, I think this aspect of my approach, on top of having the foundation of great schooling, is largely responsible for my success. I didn’t realize I was doing it until much later, when I would somehow know how things worked or where things went in the big picture of any project I might be considering or actively involved in. I had already been working on it years before, and while I still encountered problems, things would somehow fall into place as they should. It’s one way of being prepared.

A lot of people have imagination, but it doesn’t help them because they can’t execute. I’m able to execute with the imagination. Make sure your foundation is there to begin with and then grow from there in your imagination. That’s how vision and transparency work together-and results can be remarkable.

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you.

Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education In Business and Life

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How To Manage Your Time Effectively And Achieve Your Goals For The Day

Innocent — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:24:35 +0000

How To Manage Your Time Effectively And Achieve Your Goals For The Day

Time is the currency of life, and we have a limit supply of it. There are only 24 hours of time available in a day for us to use, and that means our success in achieving our goals depends hugely on how well we are able to manage and use this time each day.

Time management is a skill you must develop to be able to get more important things done, and be able to achieve your set goals. If you set great goals for your life and you are not able to achieve them, the improvement that you desire will never materialize.

It is important for you to know that to realize your dream, you need to set and achieve your goals; and to achieve your goals, you need to assign time (from the fixed 24 hours in a day) for their execution, and ensure that the time is used for the purpose.

Effective time management is not easy to attain, but it can be learned, and with consistent practice, it can become habitual.

I want to share with you ways by which you can effectively manage your time every day, and enjoy the feeling of fulfillment that comes with being able to achieve your set goals.

1. Writing a To-do List Daily

This is the starting point in being able to make the best of your time each day in working on your goals. Before starting the day’s work, write down the tasks you would want to accomplish that day in order of their importance. That is, the tasks that relate to your major or most important goals should be first on the list, while those that relate to minor or less important goals, the last.

It is important to list your tasks in this order because, just in case you are not able to accomplish all the tasks at the close of the day, you will still feel happy seeing that the tasks required to achieve your major goals were done. You would be motivated to continue to prepare a to-do list each day before beginning work, and with time it will become a habit, and then you will be able to accomplish a lot more or all of your set tasks for the day. The tasks you couldn’t complete for the day of cause will be moved to the next day’s to-do list where they will be placed in order of their importance.

Notice that the great thing about writing a daily to-do list in this order is that it focuses your time, energy, and other resources that you may have squarely in gradually achieving your goals, beginning with the major ones, rather than dissipating them on other things that do not have anything to do with your goals. And as the day go by, you will gradually see your dream life coming true because you have been able to manage your time well in doing what you needed to do to achieve your goals.

You may prefer to make your To-do list using any of the many electronic task schedulers or organizers, which technology has made available. That’s cool, but I still prefer to take an index card or piece of paper and a pen and write mine down. Somehow, by doing this I tend to complete more tasks for the day.

In fact, psychologists agree that writing down a task to be done makes it easier to accomplish it. And the reason is simply that when you write down your tasks for the day on paper, the process of taking a piece of paper and writing on it makes your whole being to be involved in creating the list, and so it registers more in your mind that the tasks must be done. For this, the cells, tissues, and relevant organs of the body are stimulated to release the needed energy, concentration, and alertness to accomplish the tasks.

Also, having your tasks for the day on paper, pasted on the table or wall, puts it in your view almost every minute. This pushes you to work on them, even when you don’t feel motivated.

2. Assigning Specific Time To Tasks On Your To-do List

Writing a to-do list without assigning a specific time to completing the tasks in it is not enough, the whole essence of preparing the list will be defeated. Since what we are trying to achieve in preparing a to-do list is to manage the limited time we have to use in a day, there is need to allocate time to each task for the list to achieve its purpose.

For each task on the list, state the time the task is to commence and end. For instance, see a short to-do list for the day below:

1. Write the topic for my new book: Five things to do every morning to loss
weight – 7am–11am (4hrs.)
2. Write article for my blog, title: How to choose the right food to
eat – 11:30am–1:30pm (2hrs.)
3. Read and reply emails – 1:30pm-3:00pm (1hr 30mins).

Assigning a specific time to starting and completing a task makes you accountable for the time you have for the day. You know what you should be doing at a particular time of the day, and if you find yourself not doing it, you can quickly switch and get back on track.

However, you should apply some flexibility in working out your schedule. If a task is taking longer time to complete than you anticipated, adjust your schedule a bit and add more time to it. The next time you are performing such task, you would know how much time it will take to complete.

3. Avoid Time Wasters

The major reason lots of people don’t achieve their set goals for the day is that they spend lots of time on activities that are not relevant to their goals. In other words they allow time wasters to steal their time.

There are so many time wasters out there you have to be careful of not giving your time to. These include reading and responding to emails, using social network site, meeting and chatting to friends, watching TV, movie, and making or receiving telephone calls. To identify what time wasters are consider this: any activity that does not help achieve any of your goals for the day is a time waster.

There is nothing wrong with reading and responding to emails, but if it is not an activity in your to-do list that day or within the time period you have set aside to accomplish certain goals, it will be a time waster to be doing it at the time allotted for another task.

Time wasters will always be there, fighting for your attention and time. Sometimes it can be really tempting not to succumb your time to them. There can be serious pressure on you to suspend other things and attend to them, however, to achieve your set goals for the day, you must stick to your gun, and insist that you complete the tasks on your to-do list first before attending to other activities.

How best you manage your time and achieve your set goals for the day will depend on you writing a plan for using your time for the day, and how much you are disciplined not to allow activities that are not in your to-do list to take your time.

I’m sure following this simple guide will help you manage your time well and achieve lots more of your goals each day.

Do You Desire Success in Life?

Would you like a FREE program from Brian Tracy that teaches you how to achieve it?

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Cisco Systems Inc. Business Strategies

Innocent — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 17:05:53 +0000

Cisco Systems Inc. Business Strategies

Building a business from scratch and in less than three decades it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars is no mean feat; it takes generating effective strategies and executing them. It takes taking the right decisions at the right time. Here are strategies that have made Cisco Systems Inc. a multibillion dollar company from a little start-up. You can adapt them to your business too.

Great Business Ideas Can Be Born From What You Are Doing Presently

One of the ways to generate great business ideas is from observing trends, changes, challenges, and needs in your industry or where you are working.

The founding of Cisco Systems Inc. was born out of Leonard Bosack discovering the need for institutions and businesses to link up their computer systems in separate locations with themselves. He was able to know this need existed because he worked in an environment where computers in different departments shared data, and having them therefore in a network would enhance organizational efficiency.

Identify Your Target Customers And Reach Them

A major key to business success is to know exactly who your business is serving, and where they are. Then you will need to come up with an effective strategy to reach them with your product.

From inception, Cisco knew exactly who their customers were: scientists and engineers who used TCP/IP protocols and UNIX-based computers in Universities, research centers, aerospace industry, government institutions, and corporations. It then devised a marketing strategy to reach them through ARPANET.

Make Your Product More Valuable

A sure way to move to the top of your industry is to make your product or service more superior than what competitors are offering.

By 1988, Cisco’s routers supported more protocols than all others in the market. This distinguished it from the pack.

Getting Into An Industry Early Is Key

The ability to recognize a fledgling industry with huge future profit potential, and get in early and take position will certain enable your business to reap great profits when the industry gets matured.

Cisco’s strategy that has resulted more in the astronomical growth of its business over the years has been its ability to pick emerging networking businesses that would spin huge profits in future, and quickly get into them.

Allowing Professional Managers To Run Your Business

To move your business to a higher level from being a start-up, you need to bring in professional business managers, than continuing allowing friends or family members with little business management and marketing expertise to manage the business. Although this may hurt your friends or relations when asked to go, it is however to the interest of the business’ survival and growth to replace them with more qualified and experience managers. And it is a decision you have to be brave to take.

Cisco System Inc. started experiencing serious growth when its management was changed, and headed Morgridge.

Flexibility In Business Operation Is Vital For Survival

Businesses that will remain relevant in the face of technological change sweeping through its industry will be those which can easily and quickly adjust its system or product line to accommodate the change. It is therefore important to build flexibility into your business to be able to accommodate any change that may occur in your industry.

In the early 1990s, there were several new communications technologies, including ATM, introduced into the market. But Cisco System’s business was not adversely hit, as the company was flexible enough to be able to quickly improve on its routers to handle the newly invented protocols.

Expanding Your Market

A lot of businesses record low sales because they are not exploring opportunities to sell their products in foreign markets. The market in your geographical area may already be saturated, while ironically, it is up for the taking in other lands. You need to take opportunity of the fact that the world has become a global village by expanding your business outside of your shores.

Sales from foreign markets account for substantial part of Cisco’s total sales. By 1994, Cisco’s sales from foreign markets was 41.9 percent of its total sales.

Read Cisco Systems’ Success Story here.

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Cisco Systems, Inc.: How Husband And Wife Sold Their House To Create The World’s Largest Computer Systems Networking Company

Innocent — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:22:30 +0000

Cisco Systems, Inc.:
How Husband And Wife Sold Their House To Create The World’s Largest Computer Systems Networking Company

Great business ideas and opportunities usually present themselves in our work places or from what we do, but very few people ever notice, talk less of grabbing them. Fortunately, it was different for Bosack and Lerner, the husband and wife who founded Cisco Systems Inc., the world’s largest producer of computer internetworking products.

In December 1984, the couple, Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner, both staff of Stanford University, established Cisco Systems in Menlo Park, California. Bosack, who was the manager of the computer science department’s laboratory, discovered a way of connecting his department to his wife’s department (the graduate school of business, where she was the manager of computers) 500 yards apart.

Having tried to sell the internetworking technology to existing computer companies without success, the couple decided to set up their own business based on the technology, and named their company Cisco Systems. They were later joined by two of their colleagues, Greg Setz, Bill Westfield, and Kirk Lougheed, as cofounders.

To get the company up and running under very tight financial situation, the couple sold their house, incurred credit card debts, and delayed payment of salaries to their friends who worked for them. Even after two years, the business was still struggling, and Lerner needed to keep another job to supplement the family’s income.

However, things began to change for the new company when it shipped its first product in 1986 – a router for the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) protocol suite. Cisco’s major product was internetworking router. This is a hardware device incorporating software that automatically picks the most effective route for data to flow between networks. Cisco’s router was the first multi-protocol router in the industry, and could therefore connect different kinds of networks, those having different architectures, and those built on different hardware, such as UNIX workstations, Apple Macintosh computers, IBM-compatible personal computers, and IBM mainframes.

By 1987, with eight employees, Cisco’s sale of routers was up to $250,000 every month. At the beginning, the company’s marketing strategy was to reach computer scientists and engineers in the universities, research centers, aerospace industry, and government institutions, who used TCP/IP protocols and UNIX-based computers, through ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.

In 1988, Cisco expanded its target customer base to include mainstream corporations with geographically dispersed branches that used different networks. For these customers Cisco created routers that served an even greater array of communications protocols and therefore distinguished its routers by making them able to support more protocols than those of any other router manufacturer.

And when the commercial market for internetworking began to develop by the late 1980s, Cisco’s reasonably priced, high-performance routers put it ahead of the competition that was building up.

Needing substantial amount of cash to meet the sales growth and expansion of the company, the couple, in 1988, contacted Donald T. Valentine, a venture capitalist, who agreed to provide funding, but demanded owning the controlling share of the company, which the couple accepted. As the new chairman, Valentine moved to restructure the company.

He appointed John Morgridge as the new president and chief executive, and Morgridge replaced a number of Cisco’s managers who were friends of Bosack and Lerner, with more qualified and experienced business managers. Bosack was given the title of chief scientist and Lerner was made head of customer service. Two years later, with sales topping $69.8 million, and staff strength 254 Cisco went public.

Due to frequent disagreement between Morgridge and Lerner, Lerner was fired in August 1990, and in sympathy, Bosack resigned, and the couple sold off their stock for a total $200 million.

Cisco’s growth exploded in the early 1990s. It built up a direct sales force to market to corporate clients, to help them connect the computer systems of their branch and regional offices, and headquarters. And as companies of all sizes began installing local area networks (LANs) of personal computers, the demand for Cisco’s routers to link their networks also grew tremendously, blowing up Cisco’s sales and income. The company’s sales increased to $339.6 million in 1992 from $183.2 million in 1991, with Fortune magazine rating Cisco the second fastest growing company in the United States in 1992.

The introduction of several communications technologies into the market in the earlier 1990s did not affect Cisco’s business, as the company was able to quickly adapt and improve its routers to be able to handle new protocols. The company launched its Fiber
Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), and Token-Ring enhancements, and also launched the first Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) router for the Japanese market, in 1992.

The coming of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology into the industry as a new standard method for multiprotocol data communications presented a challenge to Cisco – ATM can provide high-speed communications of data, voice, video, and image, and does not use routers.

However in February, 1993, Cisco overcame the challenge. It announced a strategy to add ATM to the protocols supported by its products, and the following year, the company launched its first ATM switch.

Cisco also began to explore international markets in the early 1990s. It established subsidiaries in Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia, and a Technical Assistance Center in Brussels, Belgium, to service its European market. By 1994, its international sales accounted for 41.9 percent of its total sales.

To position itself well to be more competitive in the global internetworking market Cisco formed a number of strategic alliances with some of Europe’s biggest telecommunications companies, including British Telecom, Alcatel, Siemens, and Olivetti.

Cisco also partnered with Microsoft Corporation to market Cisco’s first PC-based router card with Microsoft’s Window NT Advanced Server networking software. It equally partnered with Novell to integrate Cisco’s routers with Novell’s Netware software so as to be able to connect Netware and UNIX-based networks; and started working with LanOptics Ltd. to create remote-access products.

To keep ahead of its competitors and to fill the gaps in its product line, targeting providing its customers a one-stop networking shopping, Cisco began its acquisitionist strategy in 1993 when it bought Crescendo Communications, the company that developed ATM technology, for $95 million. Following this acquisition, Cisco was able to develop, and launch in 1994 a new networking architecture, CiscoFusion, which provided the company’s clients gradual transition from routers to ATM and LAN switching, the new switched networking technologies.

Continuing its acquisitionist strategy, Cisco completed 11 acquisitions in 1995 and 1996, which included the purchase of Grand Junction Inc., producer of Fast Ethernet and Ethernet switching products for $400 million, Granite Systems Inc., producer of high-speed Gigabit Ethernet switches for $220 million, and StrataCom Inc., maker of ATM and Frame Relay Wan switching equipment, which could handle voice, data, and video, for a whopping $4.67 billion.

Between 1997 and 1998, Cisco added 15 more companies to its fold, which gave it the opportunity to explore emerging networking sectors, such as digital subscriber line (DSL) equipment, which provides homes and small offices with high-speed access to the Internet via existing telephone lines, voice-over-IP (Internet Protocol), which allows the routing of telephone calls over the Internet.

In 1999, Cisco again acquired 17 more companies, including Cerent Corporation for $7.2 billion, allowing it into more emerging markets, especially the fiber-optic networking and wireless networking. These acquisitions confirmed Cisco as the undisputed world leader in networking systems as its market capitalization surpassed $450 billion in the early 2000, reaching $555 billion for a short period in late March, making Cisco the most valuable company in the world.

Through acquisitions and strategic alliances with such industry giants as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Company, and Intel Corporation, Cisco Systems’ revenue reached $36.1 billion in 2009, 9% less than its highest annual revenue.

In the coming years, Cisco’s innovations, proven ability to perceive and quickly enter profitable emerging markets before its competitors and expand its presence, coupled with the keen attention it gives to providing solution to its customers’ problems, are sure to see it maintaining its leadership in the communications and IT industry for a long time.

Read Cisco Systems’s Business Success Strategies here

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The Success Principles: How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be – Jack Canfield with Janet Switzer

Innocent — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:10:55 +0000

The Success Principles: How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be – by Jack Canfield with Janet Switzer

When it comes to helping you achieve success in life, one of those you must read from or listen to is Jack Canfield. This is a man who brought himself up from a school teacher to selling over 80 million copies of Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which he co-created with Mark Victor Hansen, and helping millions of people the world over change their lives for the better too.

In The Success Principles: How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be, Canfield reveals 64 principles that are fundamental to achieving success in every area of life – these are the same principles that have changed his life and brought him to the monumental level of success he is enjoying today. Treating each of the principles in separate chapter, Canfield provides exercises, techniques, and visualizations to help the reader break limiting beliefs, and align him/herself with the principle.

Without any doubt, this book will not only open your eyes to see yourself successful, it can also help you realize the dream person you want to be.

Here is an excerpt from a chapter: Develop A Positive Money Consciousness. You may not know it, but certain beliefs from your childhood, which have impressed on your mind, and have shaped your perception about money, may actually be the cause why you are not attracting enough money into your life. After reading this part of the book, you will be able to identify these limiting beliefs in your life, and break them, and start seeing a significant change in your financial life.

Read on, and enjoy …

Develop A Positive Money Consciousness

There is a secret psychology to money. Most people don’t know about it. That’s why most people never become financially successful. A lack of money is not the problem; it is merely a symptom of what’s going on inside you.
T. HARV EKER
Multimillionaire and president of Peak Potentials Training

Like everything else I’ve discussed in this book, financial success also starts in the mind. You have to first decide what you want. Next, you have to believe it’s possible and that you deserve it. Then you must focus on it by thinking about it and visualizing it as if it were already yours. And finally, you have to be willing to pay the price to get it – with disciplined effort and perseverance over time.

But most people never get to even the first stages of accumulating wealth. Too often, they are limited by their own beliefs about money and by the question of whether or not they deserve it.

Identify Your Limiting Beliefs About Money

To become wealthy, you’ll need to surface, identify, root out, and replace any negative or limiting beliefs you may have about money. Though it may seem odd that anyone would have a negative predisposition toward wealth, often we hold these beliefs in our subconscious from childhood. Perhaps when you were young, you heard:
Money doesn’t grow on tree.

There’s not enough money to go around.
You have to have money to make money.
Money is the root of all evil.
People with money are evil, bad, and unethical.
People with a lot of money are selfish and self-centered.
Everyone can’t be a millionaire.
You can’t buy happiness.
Rich people only care about money.
If you are rich, you can’t be spiritual.

These messages from early childhood can actually sabotage and dilute your later financial success, because they subconsciously emit a vibration that’s contrary to your conscious intentions.

What did your parents, grandparents, teachers, religious leaders, friends, and coworkers teach you about money as you were growing up and as a young adult?

My father taught me that rich people got rich by exploiting the working classes. He constantly told me he wasn’t made of money, that money didn’t grow on trees, and that money was hard to come by. One Christmas my father decided to sell Christmas trees. He rented a lot, worked hard every night from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve, and just broke even after a month of hard labour. As a family, we were left with the belief that no matter how hard you work, you never get ahead.

Anne was in her midthirties when she attended one of my seminars in Australia. She had inherited a lot of money, but she hated it. She was ashamed of her wealth, hid it, and wouldn’t spend it. When the subject of money came up in the seminar, she began screaming about how money had destroyed her family. Her father, who had made a lot of money, was never home. He was either out working hard to make money or out jet-setting around the world spending it. As a result, her mother drank excessively, causing constant fighting and screaming in their household.

Not surprisingly, Anne’s childhood had been a miserable experience. But instead of identifying her father’s greed and workaholism as the actual cause of her pain, Anne had decided as a child that money was the culprit. Because childhood decisions made during times of intense emotional upset tend to stay with us longer – and remain stronger over time – Anne had retained her negative beliefs around money for over 20 years.

There are many other limiting decisions you can make about money that can keep you from making or enjoying the amount of money you deserve or want. For example:

It’s Not Okay to Make More Money Than My Father

Scott Schilling, the vice president of sales and marketing of Pulse Tech Products Corporation in Dallas, Texas, was attending one of my seminars where we were working on identifying and releasing limiting beliefs.

As I asked the participants to review their childhood for the source of a limiting belief, Scott remembered a day in 1976. He was 18 and had just finished his first month as a life insurance agent – earning a commission check of $1,856. His father, who was in his forty-sixth year with the same insurance company and only one month away from retirement, received his own paycheck that day – for $1,360.

Scott said, “When I showed my check to my father, he never said a word, but the look on his face told me he was deeply hurt. I thought, How could I do that to my dad? How could I make such a great and noble man question himself and his value?”

Scott had made a subconscious decision not to earn more money than his father – in order to avoid causing his father the shame and embarrassment Scott imagined he felt that day in 1976. But less than a month after releasing this decision in my seminar, Scott told me he received a contract to do a week’s worth of sales training for a fee equal to one fifth of his previous year’s total salary.

Becoming Rich Would Violate the Family Code

I grew up in a working-class family. My father was a florist and he worked “for the rich.” Somehow the rich were not to be trusted. They stepped on the little people. They took advantage of the common worker. To become rich would have meant becoming a traitor to my family and my class. I didn’t want to become one of the “bad guys.”

If I Become Wealthy, I Will Be a Burden

My friend Tom Boyer is a business consultant who felt like he had hit a plateau in terms of his income. With some brilliant assistance from our friend Gay Hendricks, he discovered the following childhood decision had put a cap on his success:

I grew up in a decidedly middle-class family in Ohio. We never wanted for food or anything, but my dad made lots of financial sacrifices so that I could pursue my dream of playing the clarinet.

I started out playing on my dad’s old metal clarinet, but soon graduated to a Leblanc, a very middle-of-the-road wooden instrument. When I began to really excel, my clarinet teacher, Mrs. Zielinski, went to my parents and said, “Your son has real talent. He deserves a very, very fine instrument. He deserves a Buffet clarinet.” Now understand, there are only two great clarinets on the planet – the Buffet and the Selmer – and in 1964, a Buffet cost $300, which is about $1,500 today. Though that was a lot of money in my family, nevertheless, it was agreed that Mrs. Zielinski would pick out the clarinet for me, and that was going to be my Christmas present.

On Christmas morning I went downstairs, unwrapped the package, opened the case, and discovered this unbelievably gorgeous clarinet with its polished granadilla wood body and bright shiny silver keys, sitting in its regal blue velvet case. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. I have since seen King Faruk’s crown jewels, and they didn’t compare to that Buffet clarinet sitting in that blue velvet case when I opened it up that Christmas morning.

I turned to thank my parents and didn’t even get the thank-you out of my mouth before my mom said, “We never would’ve been able to afford that if your sister had lived.” (My sister Carol had suddenly died of encephalitis when I was seven years old.)

And in that moment I took on the subconscious belief that the greater a success I am, the greater a burden I will be to those who love me – not only financially, but emotionally.

I now realize this subconscious belief had held me back from attaining the level of success I consciously wanted. I had convicted myself of the crime of being a burden, and now I was punishing myself by not allowing myself the level of success I truly deserve.

You must begin to understand, therefore, that the present state of your bank account, your sales, your health, your social life, your position at work, etc., is nothing more than the physical manifestation of your previous thinking. If you sincerely wish to change or improve your results in the physical world, you must change your thoughts, and you must change them IMMEDIATELY.
BOB PROCTOR, Author of The Power to Have It All

THREE STEPS TO TURN AROUND YOUR LIMITING BELIEFS ABOUT MONEY

You can change this early programming using a simple yet powerful three step technique that replaces your limiting beliefs with more positive and empowering ones. While this exercise can be done on your own, it’s usually more powerful – and more fun! – to do it with a partner or a small group of people.

1. Write down your limiting belief.
Money is the root of all evil.

2. Challenge, make fun of, and argue with the limiting belief.
You can do this by brainstorming a list of new beliefs that challenge the old ones. The more outrageous and fun you make them, the more powerful the resulting shift in your consciousness will be.

Money is the root of all philanthropy.
Money is the root of great vacations!

Money might be the root of evil for someone who is evil, but I am a loving, generous, compassionate, and kind person who will use money to create good in the world.

You can even write out your new money beliefs on 3” x 5” index cards and add them to your stack of affirmations to be read out loud with enthusiasm and passion every day. This kind of daily discipline will go a long way toward helping you manifest success in the arena of money.

3. Create a positive turnaround statement. The last step is to create a new statement that is the opposite of the original belief. You want this “turnaround statement” to be one that sends shivers of delight through your body when you say it. Once you have it, walk around the room for a few moments repeating the new statement out loud with energy and passion. Repeat this new belief several times a day for a minimum of 30 days and it will be yours forever. Try one like When it comes to me, money is the root of love, joy, and good works.

Remember, ideas about financial success never form by themselves! You have to keep thinking the thoughts that build the “thought form” of prosperity. You have to take time each day and focus on thoughts of prosperity and images of financial success. When you intentionally focus on these thoughts and images, they will eventually crowd out the limiting thoughts and images and begin to dominate your thinking. If you want to accelerate reaching your financial goals, you need to practice saying positive money affirmations every day. Here are a few more that I have used with great success:

• God is my infinite supply, and large sums of money come to me quickly and easily for the highest good of all concerned.
• I now have more money than I need to do everything I want to do.
• Money comes to me in many unforeseen ways.
• I am making positive choices about what to do with my money.
• Every day, my income increases whether I am working, playing, or sleeping.
• All my investments are profitable.
• People love to pay me money for what I most enjoy doing.

Remember, you can plant any idea into the subconscious mind by repetition of thought infused with a positive expectancy and the emotion associated with already having it.

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you.

The Success Principles

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THE MAGIC OF THINKING BIG – David Schwartz

Innocent — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:49:40 +0000

THE MAGIC OF THINKING BIG By David J. Schwartz, Ph.D.

The Magic of Thinking Big by Dr. David Schwartz is a powerful book that will surely change your life. If you want more out of your relationship, business, career, or any area of your life, this book will help you achieve it by setting your mind on the path of success and making all achievements possible for you.

Below is a chapter from the book, HOW TO THINK AND DREAM CREATIVELY for your enjoyment. After reading this chapter, you will find how possible it is for you to achieve anything you want in your life. Your mind will be repositioned for you to be able to achieve those things you have thought you wouldn’t be able to ever accomplish before.

Read on…

HOW TO THINK AND DREAM CREATIVELY

FIRST, LET’S CLEAR UP a common fallacy about the meaning of creative thinking. For some illogical reason, science, engineering, art, and writing got tabbed as about the only truly creative pursuits. Most people associate creative thinking with things like the discovery of electricity or polio vaccine, or the writing of a novel or the development of color television.

Certainly, accomplishments like these are evidence of creative thinking. Each forward step made in the conquest of space is the result of creative thinking, lots of it. But creative thinking, lots of it. But creative thinking is not reserved for certain occupations, nor is it restricted to super intelligent people.

Well, then, what is creative thinking?

A low-income family devises a plan to send their son to a leading university. That’s creative thinking.

A family turns the street’s most undesirable lot into the neighborhood beauty spot. That’s creative thinking.

A minister develops a plan that doubles his Sunday evening attendance. That’s creative thinking.

Figuring out ways to simplify record keeping, selling the “impossible” customer, keeping the children occupied constructively, making employees really like their work, or preventing a “certain” quarrel – all of these are examples of practical, everyday creative thinking.

Creative thinking is simply finding new, improved ways to do anything. The rewards of all types of success – success in the home, at work, in the community – hinge on finding ways to do things better. Now let’s see what we can do to develop and strengthen our creative thinking ability.

Step One: Believe it can be done. Here is a basic truth: To do anything, we must first believe it can be done. Believing something can be done sets the mind in motion to find a way to do it.

To illustrate this point of creative thinking in training sessions, I often use this example: I ask the group, “How many of you feel it is possible to eliminate jails within the next thirty years?”

Invariably the group looks bewildered, not quite sure they heard right and thinking they are listening to a real fuzzy-wuzzy. So after a pause I repeat, “How many of you feel it is possible to eliminate jails within the next thirty years?”

Once they’re sure I’m not joking, someone always blasts me with something like “You mean to say you want to turn all those murderers, thieves, and rapists loose? Don’t you realize what this would mean? Why, none of us would be safe. We have to have jails.”

Then the others cut loose:

“All order would break down if we didn’t have jails.”
“Some people are born criminals.”

“If anything, we need more jails.”
“Did you read in this morning’s paper about that murder?”

And the group goes on, telling me all sorts of good reasons why we must have jails. One fellow even suggested we’ve got to have jails so the police and prison guards can have jobs.

After about ten minutes of letting the group “prove” why we can’t eliminate the need for jails, I say to them, “Now let me mention here that this question of eliminating jails is used to make a point.

“Each of you has come up with reasons why we can’t eliminate the need for jails. Will you do me a favour? Will you try extra hard for a few minutes to believe we can eliminate jails?”

Joining in the spirit of the experiment, the group says, in effect, “Oh, well, but just for kicks.” Then I ask, “Now, assuming we can eliminate jails, how could we begin?”

Suggestions come slowly at first. Someone hesitantly says something like, “Well, you might cut down crime if you established more youth centers.”

Before long, the group, which ten minutes ago was solidly against the idea, now begins to work up real enthusiasm.

“Work to eliminate poverty. Most crime stems from the low income levels.”

“Conduct research to spot potential criminals before they commit a crime.”

“Develop surgical procedures to cure some kinds of criminals.”

“Educate law enforcement personnel in positive methods of reform.”

These are just samples of the seventy-eight specific ideas I’ve tabulated that could help accomplish the goal of eliminating jails. WHEN YOU BELIEVE, YOUR MIND FIND WAYS TO DO.

This experiment has just one point: When you believe something is impossible, your mind goes to work for you to prove why. But when you believe, really believe, something can be done, your mind goes to work for you and helps you find the ways to do it.

Believing something can be done paves the way for creative solutions. Believing something can’t be done is destructive thinking. This point applies to all situations, little and big. The political leaders who do not genuinely believe permanent world peace can be established will fail because their minds are closed to creative ways to bring about peace. The economists who believe business depressions are inevitable will not develop creative ways to beat the business cycle.
In a similar fashion, you can find ways to like a person if you believe you can.
You can discover solutions to personal problems if you believe you can.
You can find a way to purchase that new, larger home if you believe you can.
Believe releases creative powers. Disbelief puts the brakes on.
Believe, and you’ll start thinking constructively.

Your mind will create a way if you let it. A little over two years ago a young man asked me to help him find a job with more future. He was employed as a clerk in the credit department of a mail-order company and felt that he was getting nowhere. We talked about his past record and what he wanted to do. After knowing something about him, I said, “I admire you very much for wanting to move up the ladder to a better job and more responsibility. But getting a start in the kind of job you want requires a college degree these days. I notice you’ve finished three semesters. May I suggest you finish college. Going summers, you can do it in two years. Then I’m sure you can land the job you want, with the company you want to work for.”

“I realize,” he answered, “that a college education would help. But it’s impossible for me to go back to school.”

“Impossible? Why?” I asked.

“Well, for one thing,” he began, “I’m twenty-four. On top of that, my wife and I are expecting our second child in a couple of months. We barely get by now on what I make. I wouldn’t have time to study since I’d have to keep my job. It’s just impossible, that’s all.”

This young man really had himself convinced that finishing college was impossible.

Then I said to him, “if you believe it is impossible to finish school, then it is. But by the same token, if you’ll just believe it is possible to return to the university, a solution will come.

“Now, here’s what I would like you to do. Make up your mind you are going to go back to school. Let that one thought dominate your thinking. Then think, really think, about how you can do it and still support your family. Come back in a couple of weeks and let me know what ideas you’ve come up with.”

My young friend returned two weeks later.

“I thought a lot about what you said,” he began. “I’ve decided I must go back to school. I haven’t figured out all the angles yet, but I’ll find a solution.”

And he did.

He managed to get a scholarship provided by a trade association, which paid his tuition, books, and incidentals. He rearranged his work schedule so he could attend classes. His enthusiasm and the promise of a better life won him his wife’s full support. Together they creatively found ways to budget money and time more effectively.

Last month he received his degree one day and went to work the next as a management trainee for a large corporation.

Where there’s a will, there is a way.

Believe it can be done. That’s basic to creative thinking. Here are suggestions to help you develop creative power through belief.

1. Eliminate the word impossible from your thinking and speaking vocabularies. Impossible is a failure word. The thought “It’s impossible” sets off a chain reaction of other thoughts to prove you’re right.

2. Think of something special you’ve been wanting to do but felt you couldn’t. now make a list of reasons why you can do it. Many of us whip and defeat our desires simply because we concentrate on why we can’t when the only thing worthy of our mental concentration is why we can.

Recently I read a newspaper item that said there are too many countries in most states. The article pointed out that most country boundaries were established decades before the first automobile was built and while the horse and buggy was the chief mode of travel. But today, with fast automobiles and good roads, there is no reason why three or four countries could not be combined. This would cut down greatly on duplicated services so that taxpayers would actually get better service for less money.

The writer of this article said he thought he had stumbled across a really live idea, so he interviewed thirty people at random to get their reactions. The result: not one person thought the idea had merit, even though it would provide them with better local government at less cost.

That’s an example of traditional thinking. The traditional thinker’s mind is paralyzed. He reasons, “It’s been this way for a hundred years. Therefore, it must be good and must stay this way. Why risk a changer?”

“Average” people have always resented progress. Many voiced a protest toward the automobile on the grounds that nature meant for us to walk or use horses. The airplane seemed drastic to many. Man had no “right” to enter the province “reserved” for birds. A lot of “status-quo-ers” still insist that man has no business in space.

One top missile expert recently gave an answer to this kind of thinking. “Man belongs,” says Dr. Von Braun, “where man wants to go.”

Around 1900 a sales executive discovered a “scientific” principle of sales management. It received a lot of publicity and even found its way into textbooks. The principle was this: There is one best way to sell a product. Find the best way. Then never deviate from it.

Fortunately for this man’s company, new leadership came in in time to save the organization from financial ruin.

Contrast that experience with the philosophy of Crawford H. Greenewalt, president of one of the nation’s largest business organizations, E.I. du Pont de Nemours. In a talk at Columbia University, Mr. Greenewalt said, “…there are many ways in which a good job can be done – as many ways, in fact, as there are men to whom the task is given.”

In truth, there is no one best way to do anything. There is no one best way to decorate an apartment, landscape a lawn, make a sale, rear a child, or cook a steak. There are as many best ways as there are creative minds.

Nothing grows in ice. If we let tradition freeze our minds, new ideas can’t sprout. Make this test sometime soon. Propose one of the ideas below to someone and then watch his behavior.

1. The postal system, long a government monopoly, should be turned over to private enterprise.
2. Presidential elections should be held every two or six years instead of four.
3. Regular hours for retail stores should be 1P.M. to 8P.M., instead of 9 A.M. to 5:30P.M.
4. The retirement age should be raised to seventy.

Whether these ideas are sound or practical is not the point. What is significant is how a person handles propositions like these. If he laughs at the idea and doesn’t give it a second thought (and probably 95 percent will laugh at it) chances are he suffers from tradition paralysis. But the one in twenty who says, “That’s an interesting idea; tell me more about it,” has a mind that’s turned to creativity.

Traditional thinking is personal enemy number one for the person who is interested in a creative personal success program. Traditional thinking freezes your mind, blocks your progress, and prevents you from developing creative power.

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you.

The Magic of Thinking Big

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Trump University Wealth Building 101: Your First 90 Days On The Path To Prosperity – Donald Trump

Innocent — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:42:17 +0000

Trump University Wealth Building 101: Your First 90 Days On The Path To Prosperity – Donald J. Trump

If it is your desire to build wealth and become free from financial worries, a wise thing to do is to get close to people who have succeeded in building wealth and learn how their minds work.

In this book, Trump University Wealth Building 101: Your First 90 Days On The Path To Prosperity, the billion Donald Trump reveals his wealth building secrets. You will discover Trump’s practical wealth building strategies, and put yourself on the path of making riches and aboundance.

Here is an excerpt from this very valuable book. Enjoy!

Build Wealth-My Way

Through trial and error I’ve learned how to do a lot of things the right way over the years, and I want to share this knowledge with you. To be successful, you’ve got to learn and develop these 12 skills:

1. Get passionate
2. Be tenacious
3. Think big
4. Leverage knowledge
5. Be thorough
6. Take action
7. Take risks
8. Know your audience
9. Learn to negotiate
10. Listen to your gut
11. Enjoy competition
12. Be your own best asset.

Let’s take it one step at a time.

GET PASSIONATE

Passion sounds out of place in business, but it’s at the top of my list. I know for a fact – and from my own experience – that it’s absolutely critical to achieving any kind of long-lasting success.

Exactly what is passion?

Enthusiasm on a big scale. If you don’t have passion, everything you do will fizzle, or at best, be mediocre. You simply have to love what you do to make it big. People with passion never give up because they never have a reason to give up, regardless of their circumstances. It’s an intangible momentum that can make you indomitable.

How do you get passion?

Size up your interests. What do you love doing? Ask yourself, “Can I develop any of these interests into a viable source of income? Can I come up with a personal blueprint? Do I have a foundation in place, or in the works, for this blueprint?”
Cover your bases – and then act. Very often the dividing line between success and failure is a lack of passion. I’ve known people who have had fantastic ideas, but they don’t get them off the ground, and their ideas sit in their head or on top of their desk for a long time. Coming up with an idea is not enough – you’ve got to put your idea into action.

BE TENACIOUS

People think I was born with the Midas touch, and I admit, I’ve been very fortunate. I got a great education from the schools I attended, and from my parents. But I learned to be tenacious when I started in business. That’s important, because most things don’t happen overnight.

As I write this chapter, we’re on schedule to finish Trump Place along the Hudson River in New York City by 2008. With 16 buildings, it’s the largest development ever approved by the New York City Planning Commission and will transform the once-neglected West Side of Manhattan into a very desirable place for residents to live. I bought the land in 1974. That’s a long time to wait. If I hadn’t been tenacious, Trump Place would still be in my head.

Tenacity is when you refuse to give in or give up. You keep fighting the good fight. Very few things of worth are easy achievements. That’s just the way it works.
Tenacity enables you to work through obstacles and problems along the way without becoming worn down or negative. In fact, you should expect problems, so you don’t waste energy.

Tenacity is when you keep moving forward. You don’t allow fear to paralyze you.
Sometimes the most talented people fail, while those far less talented succeed. Why? Because those who succeed move forward with confidence.
I don’t accept excuses in this area, so get to work!

THINK BIG

When you were a child, would you have liked to keep crawling, when everyone else was walking? I don’t think so.

We all have to start with small steps, but the point is: Get to the biggest steps you’re capable of taking. Thinking small will limit your potential. Thinking big will take you places. Thinking big can get you to the top, and I can tell you, it’s not lonely up here.

Successful people like challenges. It’s our nature. Keep in sync with this basic premise, and you’ll begin moving forward with the momentum necessary for great achievement.

Striving from an early age is one secret to success. I learned to work hard from an early age, trying to catch up with my father who was a very successful developer. But you can keep striving no matter what your age or accomplishments.
These three tips will guide you:

1. Ask yourself why your plans are so small. Then begin to expand your horizons.
2. Concentrate on managing your future, not your past. Learn from the past, but don’t stay there.
3. Look at the solution. Don’t focus on the problem.

LEVERAGE KNOWLEDGE

When I was waiting for the opportunity to buy 40 Wall Street, which became the home of Trump University, I spent time studying the building and the area, and kept informed. When the opportunity finally came, I was ready and I knew what I was getting into. I knew the building, and I knew why the owners were having trouble managing it. As a result, I was able to buy this 1.3 million-square-foot landmark, the tallest building in lower Manhattan, for a mere $1 million in 1995.

So when I say knowledge is power, I mean it. Use it to your advantage.
But knowledge is only the foundation of great enterprises. Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. What he meant is: Without imagination and the ability to visualize possibilities, what would be the point of great knowledge?

An example is how I develop golf courses. I get the best experts in the world, and I ask them hundreds of questions. I go over every detail, every tree, every hole, and every idea with them. Fortunately, they love what they do, so they don’t find my questions tedious. By the time construction is underway, I know everything that’s being done, and I can keep an informed eye on the progress.

Put imagination and knowledge together, and in no time you’ll have something plenty big in your “think big tank.”

BE THOROUGH

There’s really no such thing as knowing too much about what you’re doing.
When I was in college, I spent my spare time reading about real estate and foreclosures. I didn’t feel it was a sacrifice of my time, because I was interested in real estate; I wasn’t studying just to pass a test. The knowledge I gained on my own led to my first successful investment. I couldn’t have achieved that if I hadn’t spent the time studying on my own.

In college, I also read something that Rudyard Kipling wrote which I’ve never forgotten: “I keep six honest serving men, they taught me all I knew – their names are What and Why and When – and How and Where and Who.” Finding the answers to these questions will ensure that your information is comprehensive and correct.

On the Apprentice when my associates and I interviewed candidates, sometimes the process went on for hours – one boardroom meeting lasted for over five hours so we could make the most knowledgeable decision possible.

Staying informed is a daily task and challenge, considering how quickly our world is moving. But not keeping up is like agreeing to check out – please don’t do that. Plug in and learn everything you can. You never know when information will come in handy. If I hadn’t studied real estate foreclosures as a student, I wouldn’t have been able to see the great opportunity that led to my first big success.

Resolve to move forward and to learn as much as you can – today and every day.

TAKE ACTION

Knowledge alone isn’t enough. You have to act on knowledge.
That’s why we based one whole season of The Apprentice on this dichotomy, pitting a team of people with higher education who were “book smart,” but clueless in the real world, against a team that was “street smart,” but clueless about the right information.

Learning by doing challenges you to prove yourself.

My first big real estate job was turning around a 1,200 – unit residential development with 800 vacant apartments that had become a disaster. The developers had gone under, and the government had foreclosed. I learned a lot, made a good profit, and got the confidence to take the next step in my real estate career. That wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t put my knowledge to work for me. I studied and prepared, but then I took action.

Did you ever notice how easy some things look until you try them for yourself? Golf is like that. The sport looks effortless and even noncompetitive until you try to play. Suddenly, it takes on an entirely new dimension. The real pros make extremely difficult maneuvers look easy because they’ve spent hours perfecting their technique.
Don’t underestimate anything until you’ve tried it for yourself.
Start practicing!

TAKE RISKS

Many people are afraid to fail, so they don’t try. They talk, but they don’t do. That’s the perfect formula for failure.

My advice? Take some risks, even if you fail.
There has never been, and never will be, an Olympic ice skater who hasn’t taken a spill on the ice, no matter how much he or she knew about ice skating. Skaters acquire their skills by doing, not by watching.

Take some risks, even if you get criticized and are afraid you don’t know enough.
When I was interested in acquiring the (former) Commodore Hotel near Grand Central Station years ago, a friend told reporters my idea was like “fighting for a seat on the Titanic.” Admittedly, I was working against great odds. The area around Grand Central had become really dilapidated, but the armchair critics made me wonder. Why not do something about it instead of just complaining?

Apply this thinking to yourself and to your situation. You’ll not only learn a lot, but by taking risks you’ll learn how much you didn’t know, which is equally important. The new Hyatt Hotel next to Grand Central Terminal was a huge success for me, and sparked the redevelopment of the entire area.

Give yourself a challenge, not once in a while, but every day.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

You’ve heard the phrase, “Life is a performance,” and it’s true. No matter what field you’re in, large parts of life and business involve acting. Acting encompasses people skills, negotiation skills, public relations, salesmanship, and the ability to read your audience, whether your audience consists of four people in your office or 40,000 watching your television show.

Start by realizing that your audience can understand and appreciate many of your experiences. Make an effort to find out what you have in common, and lead with it. I may be a billionaire, but I have bad days just like everyone else. I get stuck in traffic jams, too.

If you take the time to think about what your audience wants, and what you have in common with them, you can create a bond that didn’t exist before. It also frees you from being nervous and allows you to focus better. Think of yourself as a performer, with a responsibility to your audience (who may also be your customers). Showmanship means being prepared for every performance, and the more prepared you are, the more effective you will be. Learn, know, and show: It’s a proven formula.

LEARN TO NEGOTIATE

Negotiation is one of the keys to business and life. Think of it as personal diplomacy. It can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be daunting if you take the time to think and finesse your technique.

Learning to negotiate is invaluable if you hope to connect in any way with other people. You’ve got to understand where the other side is coming from if you want to succeed. Sometimes you can size that up quickly, sometimes not.

I remember negotiating with someone I didn’t like very much, which put an invisible wall between us. Then I discovered that he was an avid golfer, like me. Suddenly we had something to talk about that we both enjoyed. Negotiations went much better after that. Comedians know how to play to their audience, so do the best public speakers. Learn from them.

Businesspeople see me as a master negotiator because I usually wind up with what I am aiming to get. I negotiate to win, and then I win. From the outside looking in, it looks simple, but I spend a lot of time preparing for any negotiation.

The first step is knowing exactly what you want. Be clear about your own goals. Then know what the other side wants. Now give that some thought. Whether you’re in baseball or in business, you’ve got to know the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents to negotiate effectively. No two teams or companies are exactly the same.
Don’t rely on generalizations. Find out for yourself.

For example, when I was hoping to acquire 40 Wall Street, I learned as much as I could about the Hinneberg family, who owned the building. Interested buyers, including me, were told to deal with the family’s agent. But I wanted to know the Hinnebergs personally, to figure out what they wanted. If you want the truth, go to the source.

So I flew to Germany and met with them. I told them I would turn their property into a first-class office building. Then I outlined my plans, step by step. I was prepared, hand it showed. It also landed me the deal. That’s how deals get done.

Negotiating isn’t about calling all the shots – it’s about ability: the power to convince people to accept your ideas. Present your ideas in a way that won’t intimidate them. Let them think the decision is theirs. Bulldozing people into accepting your ideas is a recipe for disaster.

I walked into one deal with an aggressive plan in my head, but had to change my strategy when I met the individual in charge, who came from a prominent family. He was insecure and unassuming, not at all the powerhouse type I had expected. So I immediately started thinking how I could build up his esteem enough to get him into the negotiating arena. I could tell that he would walk away to avoid confrontation. I gained his confidence by building up his self-esteem.

Sometimes, you have to be a psychologist to figure out the best approach. Sometimes you have to be stubborn. Sometimes you have to be a chameleon and change your mind. What I’m saying is: Don’t limit yourself.

Learn to balance passion with reason; you need both to negotiate successfully. Passion gets your adrenaline going, but reason keeps you on track.

LISTEN TO YOUR GUT

We all have instincts – the important thing is to know how to use them.
Knowing how to use your instincts is a mystery, even to those with sharp business skills. Some instincts you can’t explain, but there are signs that can guide you to – or away from – certain people and certain deals.

Within a few seconds of meeting Mark Burnett, the creator of The Apprentice, I liked him, both as a person and as a professional. At other times, I’ve met people that I dislike for no particular reason. I try not to be judgmental, but I’ve learned to trust my gut and steer clear.

How do you learn how to do that? Tune in.

Have you noticed when you’re in a situation that produces heightened alertness, how careful you are about what you say or do? Those are your instincts working for you. Trust them. Together, logic and instincts will help you make the best decisions.

When I first started building golf courses, my instincts told me it was a good business decision. I knew that if I combined my passion for golf with my knowledge of the process, I would succeed. So I found the best golf course designers in the world and spent many hours working with them. The results have been spectacular because I paired instinct and logic.

Spend some time with this innate aspect of yourself. Learning how to handle your instincts can give you an edge in many situations, business or otherwise. There are many things we can’t see or hear; that is when we need to use our instincts to guide us.

Listen to your gut, and you will always have a reliable guide!

ENJOY COMPETITION

I like competition. I think it’s healthy.

On July 12, 2005, I broke ground for the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Las Vegas. Starting a new building is always a big deal, but this one was particularly special. It was my first real estate venture in that town, and the fulfillment of a longtime dream.

Adding to the drama was the fact that the building is right across the road from Wynn Las Vegas, the signature property of my one-time nemesis, Steve Wynn, who reinvented the Strip with such mega resorts as The Mirage, Treasure Island, and the Bellagio.

Steve Wynn and I go way back. We squared off over the Hilton properties in Atlantic City back in the 1980S. Both of us have always built big, and we have the egos to match. With us, it used to be like the old Western standoff, “This town’s not big enough for the both of us.” Now we’re good friends. Back in the days, though, the competition was fierce – and I loved our battles.

Competition fires me up.

Competition pushes me to expand and extend my efforts beyond what I thought was possible.

Competition forces me to outdo myself, I love competition because, ultimately, it makes me bigger.

BE YOUR OWN BEST ASSET

Being a brand might sound complex to you, but it’s not. Being a brand simply means that you are your own best asset. I never planned on becoming a brand, but, given my ideas, my aesthetic, and the circumstances that led to an expanding network of interests, “Trump” has become a great brand that delivers luxury and exclusivity.

It all started with Trump Tower, my signature building that serves as the model for my brand. People pay more to live in or rent space in my buildings because of the association with me and my ideals. These ideals are constantly put into practice in ways both big and small, such as the illuminated seven-story waterfall cascading over finely matched Italian marble in the atrium of Trump Tower.

I avoid the commonplace and give tenants and buyers more than they might expect. That’s a big part of the Trump brand. Become your own best asset and adopt the mentality of an investor. Make decisions and take or delegate actions now that will bear fruit later. That’s the key to wealth creation. Don’t jump at the best offers, or slap your name on anything you think people might buy. Believe in whatever you put your name on, and make sure it reflects who you truly are.

GET GOING!

Are you ready for the challenge of creating and building unlimited wealth? You’ve got work to do – work that’s going to teach you how to create and build the wealth you want!

Recommended Resource

This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you.

Trump University Wealth Building 101: Your First 90 Days on the Path to Prosperity

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Apple Inc. Business Strategies

Innocent — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:52:14 +0000

Apple Inc. Business Strategies

Apple Inc.’s rise from the scratch to become one of the world’s greatest business success stories is the result of the quality of its management’s ideas, and strategies. These same ideas and strategies brought out below can also be applied to other businesses for equal success.

Two Heads are better Than One

Whenever it is possible, having two or three people that share the same goals and aspirations, and who are comfortable working together is better than one person doing it alone. They will be able to achieve success easier as they share responsibilities and join resources together.

Apple’s success was almost instantaneous because the company was formed by the partnership of two exceptionally gifted individuals, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs, separately in electronic product creation and marketing.

Seeking Advice from Experienced People

If you haven’t got any experience of doing something before, it is a wise idea to seek the advice of someone who has. They will be able to guide you through the right path to achieving your goal, and to prevent you from making terrible mistakes that could cost you a great deal.

Steve Jobs consulted with Mike Markkula about how to build Apple into a big company.
Advertising is needed

You need to have a plan and budget for advertising, so that you can reach your target market effectively, and they can know what you offer. Having a great product that people don’t know about will not make a company successful. However, if you cannot afford the service of an advertising firm to handle your campaign, you will need to study your industry and consult with experienced people in the industry to create your campaign.

Steve Jobs, realizing the crucial role of effective advertising to business success hired the services of a proven firm to manage Apple’s advertising campaign, which resulted in Apple’s sales shooting above the roof.

Knowing What Buyers Require In a Product

Buyers usually assess products based on certain solutions that they need. For instance, they may want a product that is easier, simpler, or more convenient to use than others available in the market. And they want the product at reduced price.

In your industry, you need to know the solutions a large number of your target users require so that you can create products at lower costs that offer them. Not knowing this first before creating a product will not lead to success, but failure.

Knowing that a lot of people were not technically knowledgeable, and that they needed personal computers they can easily operate themselves, at lower prices than what was obtainable, Apple created the Macintosh personal computer, which was launched in 1984, and which sold two million units a year after it was released.

Remain Focused

Nothing more can fall a business than its management jumping from one unrelated business idea to another. You need to remain focused in your line of business and expand it. Even when you are diversifying, it is better if it is to related industry. Maintaining focus will allow you to bring out the best of your potential, and enable you to come up with the best ideas and solutions for your business.

The decline in fortune of Apple’s business in the 1990s was due largely partly to the company’s management’s involvement in many unrelated business areas than Apple’s primary business. The company became profitable and vibrant again when Steve Jobs refocused Apple on what it knew how to do best: make desktop and portable Macintoshes for professional and consumer customers.

Read Apple’s Success Story here.

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Experts in business and technology, as well as daily users rate this software higher and above others. Click here to see why.

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Apple Inc – How 21 And 26 Years Old College Dropouts Created A Multi-billion Dollar Company With $1,300

Innocent — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:39:36 +0000

Apple Inc – How 21 And 26 Years Old College Dropouts Created A Multi-billion Dollar Company With $1,300

This is the amazing story of how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak took the world by storm using their talents, ideas, marketing skill, and $1,300 to reinvent and catalyze the growth of the personal computer, building one of the largest companies in the world with annual sales running in tens of billions of dollars. It is a story that shows the insignificance of needing large chunk of cash to start a business, and how to build a world class business from scratch.

In Aril 1976, Steve Jobs, then 21 years of age, and his partner, Steve Wozniak, 26, founded a company they called Apple Computer having dropped out of college to pursue business. Their business, which started with the creation and marketing of Apple I computer, began with capital investment of $1,300, which the partners contributed from selling some of their most treasured possessions comprising a van and two calculators.

Steve Wozniak, a talented and self-taught electronics engineer was the product creation engine room, while Steve Jobs provided the marketing skill in the business, and together the duo were set to cause a huge ripple in the personal computer industry.

From Steve job’s garage, Wozniak created the company’s first product, Apple I computer, a computer without keyboard or power supply, which was particularly produced for use by a computer hobbyist club in the San Francisco Bay area. Priced at $666 each, the company sold 200 pieces of the computer the first year.

Encouraged by their success with Apple I, the partners immediately started work on another computer that summer, Apple II, which was to appeal to a greater market beyond computer hobbyists.

With the desire to build a big company, Job met with Mike Markkula for advice on how to achieve it. Mike Markkula had managed marketing for Intel Corporation and Fairchild Semiconductor, and Jobs wanted to draw from his experience. Seeing that the future of Apple Computer was great, Markkula bought over one-third of the company for $250,000, and helped Jobs with the company’s business plan.

In 19977, one year after Apple Computer was formed; Jobs hired Mike Scott to be President, and recruited Regis McKenna, an advertising guru and owner of one of the most successful advertising agency in Silicon Valley, to create advertising strategy for the company.

Having designed Apple logo, McKenna started advertising Apple personal computers in consumer magazines, with Apple II placed in retail stores. By June, 1977, Apple’s sales reached $1 million.

The huge and almost instant success of Apple II was not only due to Apple’s marketing effectiveness. It was also largely due to the innovations and functionality, which Apple II had over other microcomputers of its era:

It was the first microcomputer to use colour graphics and a television set as its screen. Also, its expansion slot made it more useful than other computers. Apple II could read and store information on cassette tapes, although slow and unreliable. However, by 1978, Wozniak had invented the Apple Disk II, which was then the fastest and cheapest disk drive available, and which made it possible for Apple to develop software for Apple II.

As a result of Apple’s innovative product creation backed with strong marketing, the company had, by 1978, become one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States, with more than 100 dealers distributing its products. And in December 1980, Apple went public.

By 1981, Apple’s research and development budget reached $21million. This was justified by the release of 40 new software programs and launch of its first hard disk. At the close of 1982, Apple had become the first personal computer company to make $1 billion in annual sales.

In April 1983, Jobs brought in John Sculley to replace Mike Markkula as Apple’s new president. John Sculley was a proven and successful top class marketer, having led Pepsi-Cola as president against tough competitors like Coca-Cola in that industry. Jobs was sure John Sculley experience and expertise would help Apple to break IBM’s domination of the business office market.

Propelled by Steve Jobs’ desire to create personal computers that anyone without technical knowledge can use at lower prices, Apple released the Macintosh personal computer in 1984. Selling for $2,495 a piece, 70,000 Macintosh with a new disk drive that was faster than those used in other machines, were sold in the first 100 days of release.

In September the following year, a new Macintosh with more memory and two disk drives was launched. Sure that anyone who tried the Macintosh would want to buy it, Jobs sponsored a national advertising campaign that asked people to try the Macintosh for free for 24 hours and more than 200,000 did. As the Macintosh and its accessories were selling hot, so also was Apple II, which reached a record of two million sales by 1985.

In the midst of Apple’s success, a bitter infighting between divisions and between Jobs and Sculley caused Jobs to leave the company in 1985 following the board of directors’ support for Sculley, and compulsion on Jobs to resign. Jobs went ahead to found NeXT Incorporated, which later became a strong competitor to Apple in the business computer market.

The 1990s saw Apple falling from grace to grass. The company lost sales and market share almost throughout the decade as a result of poor management decision from different CEOs that led the company during this period. Michael Spindler who replaced Scully in 1993 made the terrible mistake of licensing Apple technology to outside firms, which resulted in the massive production of Apple clones into the market that seriously wore off Apple’s profits.

Spindler also made the mistake of grossly underestimating the demand for Apple’s new product, Power Macintosh, released in 1994. By 1995, unfulfilled order for the product reached $1 billion. Noting this flop, Apple’s stock value nosedived by 15% in two days.

Gil Amelio took over from Spindler after the latter was sacked by the board of directors in 1996. Under Amelio, who seemed to be unable to relate to Apple’s unique corporate culture, Apple’s financial losses deepened, climbing to $816 million in 1996 and $1 billion in 1997. Apple’s stock, which was valued at $70 per share in 1991, crumbled to $14 per share, while its market share, which was 16 percent in the late 1980s had been suppressed to only four percent.

In July 1997, Amelio got the boot. But before then, Apple board of directors, realizing the company could only be saved at that point by its creator, made plans to bring back Steve Jobs to lead it again. Apple bought Jobs’ NeXT for $377 million, and two months after Amelio’s sack Jobs was named Interim CEO.

With the same passion, understanding, and determination that he employed in making Apple the great success story it was in the 1980s, Jobs quickly set out to reposition Apple as a profitable, vibrate, and innovative leader in the personal computer industry.

He stopped the licensing of Apple’s technology to outside firms, streamlined the company’s product line from nineteen products to only four, thereby removing Apple from making such items as printers, portable digital assistant, scanners, and other peripherals. Jobs focused Apple firmly on what it knew how to do best – making of desktop and portable Macintoshes for professional and consumer customers.

Uncomfortable with Apple not having popular computers that sell for less than $2,000, Jobs commissioned Apple’s production team to develop such, and ten months later the iMAC, a sleek and colourful computer, was unveiled in August 1998, which went ahead to be very successful in the market.

By the ending of the decade, Jobs had turned around the company from losses to profits. The company made a profit of $309 million in 1998, which swelled to $601 million in 1999. Its stock value equally exploded by 140 percent, reaching $99 per share in 1999.

The company entered the new decade with interim dropped from Jobs title, and with great confidence, an eye for innovation, and business opportunities outside of personal computers.

With the introduction of the iPod digital music player in October 2001, Apple’s focus shifted to the mobile consumer electronic market, from which it has enjoyed great success and most of its revenue. The iPod is the market leader in portable musical player, selling over 220 million units so far.

From the iPod, Apple has continued to create more innovative hand-held digital electronics that have remained to shape people’s habits worldwide. These include its iPhone, which was launched in 2007, and since held the leading market share of 28 percent. Others are Apple TV and iPad.

As Apple sustains its hold on the mobile consumer electronic market, repeatedly churning out innovative products that meet the desire of its market; and as the company keeps an eye wide open for new business opportunities to exploit arising from the ever changing consumer behaviour, it is bound to remain successful in the years to come.

Read Apple’s Business Strategies here.

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Put your business on the path to success with a solid plan created with Business Plan Pro Software .

Experts in business and technology, as well as daily users rate this software higher and above others. Click here to see why.

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PSA Peugeot Citroen S.A. Business Strategies

Innocent — Fri, 28 May 2010 11:12:35 +0000

PSA Peugeot Citroen S.A. Business Strategies

The Peugeot Company has continued to wax strong after more than 120 years of formation because of strategies and ideas its managements have implemented over the many decades in its history.

Today, knowing these strategies, and adopting them to your business’ situation can help you overcome difficult challenges, and achieve great success in your business. Here they are:

Looking Into The Future

If you do not want your business to be pushed behind or totally made obsolete, you need to constantly observe the changes, and inventions going on in your industry, and understand how such could affect your business in future. This will enable you to take the proper steps to position your business to benefit, and not suffer from the developments.

Armand Peugeot realized that the internal combustion engine, which had been newly invented, could replace the steam engine that was then in use in future automobile, and so made sure he got the new technology, even if he had to travel to German in search of it.

What Is Your Business Known For?

If you cannot answer this question in few seconds, it means it will be difficult to achieve success in that business. Your business has to stand out for something, which registers on people’s minds. Whenever anyone desires or needs that thing, your business readily comes to their minds. Decide on what you want to be known for, integrate it into your business, and communicate it to your target customers.

Peugeot vehicles were known for their sturdiness, dependability, and excellent finishing. They were also known for being useful and practical more than being attractive.

Being First In Something Is Important

Being the first in the industry is pivotal to business success. It provides a great opportunity for a business to reach prospective buyers first and win them over before other businesses start coming.

No doubt, there is always a golden place in buyers’ heart for the first business in the market. Therefore, to take advantage of this, you need to be creative and come up with firsts in product design or creation, marketing, and distribution.

By introducing the first diesel-powered passenger automobile in the world in 1921, and the first touring car fitted with a diesel engine in 1933, Peugeot won the hearts of many automobile lovers.

Innovation Keeps Your Business Fresh

Your business needs to continue to remain relevant, and useful to its customers, and attract new prospects. It needs to continually develop products that offer better value and more benefits than they were before. Simply put, you need to make innovation a business policy.

Peugeot has always been an innovative company, and has continually strived to improve on its products. By 1932, it had refined its 201 and 301 model lines, making them more elegant and attractive.

Developing Strategies Against Recession And Competition

It’s not unlikely that you will face difficult economy and tough competition from other businesses. However, you need to come up with strategies to overcome the challenges and remain thriving in business.

Living through the depression of the early 1980s and 90s, as well as the competition from Japanese companies was by the development and implementation of strategies, which enabled PSA Peugeot Citroën to thrive rather than sink.

You Need To Have Cost Cutting Strategy

A crucial aspect of your operation that can affect your profitability and competitiveness is your ability to keep your cost of operation down. Higher cost of operation will not only wear off your profit, it could also make your price higher, and therefore affect your competitiveness. This is why you need to have a strategy to keep your cost down.

PSA Peugeot Citroën implemented certain cost cutting strategies in the 2000s, which resulted in reduction of its operational cost by € 600 million a year.

Read PSA Peugeot Citroen S.A. Success Story here.

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PSA Peugeot Citroen S.A.- From Textile Mill To Bicycle To Automobile Production

Innocent — Thu, 27 May 2010 19:57:11 +0000

PSA Peugeot Citroen S.A.: From Textile Mill To Bicycle To Automobile Production

It is not usual to have family businesses surviving more than a few years from the back of their house because of the unprofessional attitude that members bring to bear on the business. But this wasn’t the case with the Peugeot family, which by the 19th century was already a prominent textile miller in the Alsace region of France.

The family diverted its business to steel making in the early 19th century after the bothers, Jean-Pierre and Jean-Frederic Peugeot invented the cold-roll method of manufacturing spring steel. With the bicycle craze of the 1880s, the Peugeot business, through Armand Peugeot, grandson of Jean-Pierre, entered into the wheeled vehicle industry.

From the manufacture of machine tools, which was largely successful, Armand launched Peugeot’s first passenger automobile in the later part of the 1880s. It was a three wheeled, steam-powered motoring car. Realizing that internal combustion engine, which was then an emerging technology, would become the preferred engine type for automobile production, Armand traveled to Germany in 1891 to look for the perfect twin-cylinder engine, and two months later he found and bought Daimler’s 525-cc version.

With the purchase of the engine, Peugeot went on to build cars and soon became one to reckon with in the industry, as its cars won some of the early automobile races ever held. In fifteen years after the company got into automobile production, it had established production plants across France, producing a complete range of vehicles for all uses, with emphases on sturdiness, dependability, and excellent in finishing. These were features that continued to distinguish the Peugeot brand through the decades in its history.

The company was focused on producing utilitarian models like “Le Bébé” (the Baby), the world’s first compact car (1905), and the Quadralette, which was engineered the same way as the Bébé. From the production of the Quadralette, Peugeot created the model 5 CV, which reached a record sale of 83,000 chasis.

In 1921, Peugeot made a remarkable contribution to the automotive engine market – it introduced the world’s first diesel-powered passenger automobile. The company continued to handcraft its automobiles, even though it embraced the new automotive technologies of the late 1920s.

Peugeot’s first modern automobile was the model 201, introduced in 1929. The model, which began the company’s system of naming its automobile models, brought Peugeot to the limelight as a manufacturer of reliable vehicles, selling about 142,000 units before it was phased out in September 1937.

Peugeot has always sought to innovate and continually improve on its products. By 1932, the company had refined its 201 and 301 model lines, making them more elegant and attractive. It began producing its aerodynamic series in 1935 starting with the 402 model.

The following year, it rolled out the 302 model. This was a scaled-down version of the 402, with innovative features that included synchromesh gearbox – it was also the world’s first touring car fitted with a diesel engine.

As the 1970s unfolded, Peugeot was looking into international expansion so it could compete on a global scale. To achieve this, it bought Citroen, and the new company became known as PSA Peugeot Citroen SA. Two years later, the company added Chrysler’s European operations to its holdings.

The economy recession of the early 1980s caused PSA to record net losses at the beginning of the year, however, by successfully launching a number of new products, such as the popular Citroen BX, and the luxury XM models; and by extending the Peugeot 05 range; as well as entering new markets, including the China, and the fast-developing Pacific region, the company rebounded with a profit of over FFr 8 billion at the close of the decade

The 1990s also came with its challenges. The European and the world economy were once again in recession at the early part of the decade, affecting businesses’ revenue projections. In addition to the negative impact of the recession, the European automobile manufacturers were also threatened by the entrant of Japanese carmakers into the European market.

To avoid falling behind in the fierce competition that was imminent, a number of European companies, including PSA formed strategic partnership, which included sharing the same production platforms among different makes, as well as in sales and distribution. This strategy enabled PSA to maintain its number one position in France, and among the leading automobile manufacturers in Europe.

And by launching several new generation models, such as the extended Peugeot 06 line, Citroen Xantia, and Xsara midrange sadans, PSA ended 1998 with sales climbing FFr 221.44 billion.

As the year 2000 sets in, PSA’s strategy was to increase its sales beyond Europe by twenty-five percent of its total projected sales. To achieve its growth objective and reduce cost of production, PSA Peugeot Citroën developed an industrial base of global dimensions consisting of 15 production centers and 16 powertrain and casting plants (engines, gearboxes, running gear, etc.), and a plan to continuously improve industry efficiency by standardizing parts and making assembly easier.

The company also signed strategic cooperation agreements with other manufacturers to produce vehicle platforms and components.

From these steps, PSA Peugeot Citroën has been able to cut its production costs by € 600 million a year.

And with presence in 160 countries, PSA Peugeot Citroën’s worldwide sales at the close of 2008 reached 3,260,000 units, which looked to go even higher in the years to come as the company focuses on expanding its production base close to its major priority markets – China, Latin America, and Russia.

Read PSA Peugeot Citroen S.A. Business Strategies here.

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Experts in business and technology, as well as daily users rate this software higher and above others. Click here to see why.

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