Posts Tagged ‘business’

Some of you may know me for my work on outsourcing. I’ve spoken from the stage on several occasions about this topic, and it’s had a significant impact on the way I run my business. Before I started doing it, I was banging my head on the wall trying to do everything myself and getting nowhere fast. Since I’ve been able to leverage my more valuable skill sets by outsourcing the lower value skill sets, I’ve been able to achieve much more.

And lately I’ve had alot of people come to me to ask about how to more efficiently achieve an outcome through better systems or more efficient processes.

So I’ve put together a three part series sharing some of my thoughts on the topic. It’s by no means super comprehensive, but I will share some gems to get you started.

I’m a big believer that lifestyle is important. If you’ve chosen the Internet as a lifestyle and you’re working on it as if you were working on a job, then you probably need to reevaluate your strategy.

The first step I’d recommend is checking out Tim Ferriss, who wrote The Four-Hour Work Week. That will definitely give you a mindset rock. Tim’s mind is really cool in terms of being lazy; I love being lazy as well. Not as lazy as Tim, I work a little more than four hours a week, but I don’t see it as work; I see it as play. When I’m in front of the computer, I’m having a great time.

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This is Part 3 in the series.

Read Part 2 here and Part 1 here.

If you find someone who’s good, using these contracting sites I’ve outlined in previous posts in this series, actually pay them more than they expect when the job is done. That creates an instant loyalty. We talked before about how these countries have currencies and economies that, because our economies in certain Western countries are better, if you give some people a bonus of $10 USD or $20 USD for a job, that’s massive.

It makes a big difference, and can be a whole days’ worth of work.

For you it’s nothing, really, it’s not much at all, another $10, but for these people it can feed their families for a couple of days, and that’s a lot.

This is just a way to create the loyalty and build a sense of team around what you’re doing.

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I’m super pumped. Why? Because the UFC will be in Australia this weekend for UFC 110.

You might think I’ll be there at Acer Arena to witness is, but I won’t. You see, tickets were literally sold within hours of the pre-release! So, hell yes I was bummed. Tickets are now going for upwards of $600 on eBay. Now THAT is a market, and its easy to see why MMA is undisputedly the fastest growing sport on the planet.

The UFC organise events every 2-3 weeks, enough to keep their fans satiated, but still leaving them wanting more. They’ve branched out all over the world and audiences are clambering to get in to their events, which almost always sell out. And not only that, some of the PPV numbers are just massive, rivalling and even surpassing other sports like boxing and football. They are growing so fast it will be interesting to see how the organisation handles the growth, and how its president Dana White handles his time. Right now it seems he’s everywhere – choosing and cutting fighters, doing deals with venues, and even making appearances on the hit tv show ‘Ultimate Fighter’. As the UFC gets bigger and bigger he will definitely have let some of this stuff go if the company is to grow without a bottleneck.

Now let’s look at the fighters. First I want to preface this by saying I’m an exercise physiologist/scientist and have worked with many elite athletes. When I look at a UFC fighter, it amazes me as to how extreme their sport is. So lets take a look at how the best athletes prepare, and how you can take those same lessons and apply it in your business.

Before a fight, they usually take 4-6 weeks of their lives and commit to a training ‘camp’. This removes them totally from their normal daily routines and people and FORCES them to train, eat, sleep and recover. They also strategise and watch footage of their opponent, putting together a strategy to beat them.

How does this apply to you?
Do you find your productivity explodes when you have a deadline? When you’ve made it public and other people expect a good performance from you? If you answered yes, and you KNOW this works for you, why not turn all your projects into 4-6 week ‘camps’, make yourself accountable and get a great team on board?

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Consider the following scenarios:

Car and truck manufacturers spend fortunes to produce beautiful commercials. Everyone remembers the scenery and the stunning visuals. But who remembers the car or the truck?

An ad wins in the Oscar of the advertising agency, the Clio. All well and good for the ad agency. But sales don’t pick up. Where does that leave the company that commissioned the ad campaign in the first place? A company spends $100,000 for a perfect dot.com name, but less than a tenth of that amount for website design. In the process, it turns away potential customers who find it difficult to navigate the website or find that “hot merchandise” that is being promoted. These are examples of marketing that sucks. Most marketing “sucks” for the following reasons:

Many companies don’t understand what marketing is. One company spent more than a million dollars for 10,000 copies of a beautiful brochure, only to keep them warehoused in the end. The reason? The brochures were too expensive to give away to just about anyone. Companies operate by generalities. An expert says that a 1% hit rate for direct mail marketing is good enough. And companies limit themselves by this adage, if it is true at all. Many companies undertake only one form of marketing, such as print advertising, instead of a swarming offense that targets everyone wherever that person turns, from print ads to outdoor advertising to infomercials.

Many expensive programs are devoid of innovative thinking. They’re hung up on doing what their competitors do, but better. In the end, no one remembers. The key lies in innovation, in being remembered. Many companies don’t make use of available research. There are databases that can be accessed to enhance the marketing effort. Many marketing professionals remain unaccountable for results or the lack of them. It’s all about moving what you sell!

If you ask yourself: “How do I earn or create a million dollars?” Your mind goes to work to discover the answer. Your mind is compelled to work ceaselessly until a satisfactory answer is found. Note that most individuals ask themselves questions like every one asks: “How do I get a job, salary or work?” Or “Can I earn $50,000 doing this?” The wrong question will generate the wrong result or a less than outstanding outcome.

Questions pre-determine the answer. The size of your question determines the size of your answer. Few people ever ask million dollar earning, inventing, innovating, generating and creating questions. They are yours to ask.

The difference between earning $100,000 per year and a million dollars per year is one zero. To earn a $100,000 per year a person must
work 250 days @ $400 a day. To earn a million a year the $400 must be increased to $4,000 per day. The difference is one zero.

If your loved ones life depended on it could you do it? The answer : “YES!”

Statistics prove that each millionaire creates ten new jobs and each billionaire creates ten thousand new jobs.

As you ask yourself and others better questions, your results will vastly improve, the world will be better off, your quantity and quality of service will expand, the difference you make will experience quantum change, and you will leave a profound legacy.

If you want to be a coach, if you want to help others live the life of their dreams, then you really should have made significant progress towards your own goals. Secondly, you must learn to have the proper motivation for helping other people. When we love the people we want to help as ourselves, then we are truly ready to coach. But only a few people know how to truly love themselves. And that is a barrier to becoming a great coach.

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Unless we can succeed in overcoming the pain of achieving success it will be impossible to reach your goals in life. The only way to properly understand motivation is to understand the nature of desire. There are two types of desire, the desire to gain pleasure and the desire to avoid pain. Out of the two, the strongest desire is to avoid pain.

Pain is always a bigger motivator than pleasure. Understanding the power of fear is the first step to understanding motivation. The power of fear does two things for you:

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Think about what you can trade off in your everyday life so that you are spending more of your valuable time on what really matters. What unimportant things can you replace with more important activities? Fill in the chart below realistically, replacing those unimportant things with something small and easy that, over a period of time, will make a difference in your life. Create a new, more valuable schedule for your average day—one that invests your time wisely. It doesn’t have to be hard and the changes don’t have to be huge. Don’t make this into a big production or make it so difficult that you can’t do it. Keep it easy.
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1. Take 100% Responsibility for Your Life – In a society where people blame everything from their parents to the government for failure, those who don’t buy into this mentality or succumb to the “victim” thinking succeed. To blame something or somebody outside yourself is saying they have control of your life and not you. Someone else’s opinion of you doesn’t have to become your reality.
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