Entreprenuer : What’s it really like?

It’s like vertigo. A rollercoaster ride. Volatile. Emotional. Everlasting.

It’s like a summer romance and married couple of 40 years all in one.

Being an entreprenuer before you’ve made an income can be devasting difficult to process. The world precieves you as a “wannabe” and you struggle from day to day fighting to prove yourself. Hoping that if you just keep moving closer to your complete vision that the next step will present itself until you breakthrough.

Each day is a love story sometimes peppered with thriller and nightmare scenes.

You have to love it.

You have to want it with all of your being.

You have to have courage and balls!!!!!

I’m 2 weeks away from launching my first business. And I can say, although It has been life and soul demanding journey, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Each day you get closer the more valuable your work becomes.

In the beginning you dream and envision what your future will be like, but when you actually complete 90% of the work, it no longer seems like a dream. It becomes a reality. A moment to embrace!

I haven’t discussed my journey as much as I have wanted but I will update as frequently as I can from here on in.

Best of luck to you.

Get Feedback To Increase Sales

Most companies don’t take advantage of feedback. Sure, the blue chips do. And any large organisation that continues to grow its customer base will invite feedback for analysis. However, I don’t know too many people that will sleep with a person without knowing what their name is, what their interests are and if they’re crazy!

Same applies to business. Your can’t go to bed with random strangers! It just does not work like that. Business is like any good relationship. Sure you may start off on the instant attraction but to make the engagement a pattern you’ll have to call the next morning, remember their name and at least remark on a few interesting points of the others life and interests.

Business is no different.

If you want to know how to get new customers you must first learn what it is your current customer likes about you. You wouldn’t go around using the exact same chat up line with every woman or man you met, would you? or do you? How’s it working?

Every strategiest must have an arsenol of weapons to be used in battle. In order to bed more customers, you’re going to have to know what they like. This means testing different chat up lines. It means knowing what works and what doesn’t work by testing, listening and analysing what works. Their’s no sense in tickling their toes if they have an aversion for feet!

So. The point is as follows. No matter what size your company. Take the time to understand what your customer likes about your company, product or service. When you know what they like you can talk about it more. Point it out as something a new customer would like about your product or service. Describe it as benefits current customers enjoy.

It all seems like commone sense right? When’s the last time you highlighted to your customer base those charecteristics that they find valuable in you? You may think they know it. And they may. But they may forget it when a competitor can out do you in a certain area. In addition, they may have a fuzzy overall feeling of why they do business with you rather than a competitor but if you don’t communicate and define exactly why they should continue to do business with you, it may be harder for them to explain exactly to their boss or industry why they are with you over a competitor.

Think of your benefit messages as armor: “Protection”. If you don’t highlight and keep highlighted to your customer the benefits of doing business with you over a competitor it leaves weak positions available for attack by your competitors.

Don’t let the slimmy, wiggly little bastards in! All in good humor.

Finally, use a feedback form. Or use your contact form with the addition of a couple of questions. There is no better time to get some feedback than when the customer is already contacting you. Throw in a couple of questions. Always take every opportunity to learn all you can about your customer base.

How To Know Your Customer

The world is changing very quickly. Blogging, twitter and social media in general is changing the pace at which information is distributed to us. In addition it is reaching us, for the most part without bias. In other words, large corporations, political agendas and the like are not getting the chance to get their dirty hands on the message that is being distributed.

Every company and every person are becoming their very own publisher. They release their own publications on the subjects of their choice.

This is good and bad for companies.

It means that your company message can reach your target market instantly and be measured, but it also means that your target market are much more discerning about what messages they tune to and listen to.

If you want to increase sales for your company you will have to become much more aware of these significant changes within mass communication. Email shots, flyers, adverts on tv and radio are holding much less appeal and demanding far less attention than what they did only a few short years ago. This is because people are relying more on the networks of friends and associates created through social media such as forums etc.

However, for the general consumer, they must continue to be on guard because multinational corporations are learning how to lobby with bloggers and the like just as they have done with governement officials. A few quid and greasy palm go along way in getting someone to advocate certain politics, products, services or ethics. It works like this for much of society. We call this employment.

Nonetheless, there is an opportunity for smaller companies to make leaps in bounds in terms of brand awareness and massive increases in sales leads. The way forward is to create communities where your industry, products or services are discussed, rated, and reviewed. This way you will create valuable content that can be found on the web when your target market comes looking for more information.

Think of your blog as your front window to your shop and think of your content as your sales associate. Now, you wouldn’t expect or want your sales team to rush the customer and start “selling” the features of your products or services as the customer enters the shop would you? No. If your sales team is worth their salt and have been given the right training they will want to get a pleasant introduction to the customer and then proceed to inquire into why the customer has come to the store? What products or services brought them there and what are the current issues / needs for your products or services? and how does the customer expect to benefit from the product or service?

When your sales team has the anwser to these questions, only then can they begin to sell. Likewise your blog must endevour to ask questions, not be afraid to debate the downsides as much as the upsides. When your blog / forum has got dialogue only then can it begin to sell / influence the customer to purchase.

How to increase sales? Create dialogue with good all round content and don’t be afriad to touch on the negatives as much as the positive. Just because you haven’t mentioned the downsides, does not mean that your customer is not thinking about them.

Best of luck!

Cannot stop external hard drive using ‘safely remove hardware’ option

I bought a new hardrive for the business that I am working on. Myself and co worker needed a central place to deposit and retrieve information, in addition to backing up work after the countless times we saved over previous work or a virus attacked and we lost our work.

So we bought a Cyclone 1TB External Hard Drive with some nice advanced features for playing movies etc….

We tried removing the hard drive safetly but it would not work. And when we wanted to view the information on the Hard Drive we found that it was not registered when trying to view it through a telvision screen even though if reconnected to the computer it was available.

The ability to safetly remove the Hard Drive is very important because we did not want to loose any backup informoation we had stored. Countless hours of research, blood, sweat and tears.

I found this site that offers some solutions for you to explore if you have the same problem.

Safetly remove hardware solution

Best of luck.

Improve Your Probability of Success

I set out on my journey for independence and wealth nearly two years ago now. I left a corporate job and decided I was going to do it myself.

Now, I’m lucky, I have access to funding however, I was and still am in the belief that a business must be able to make a profit in it’s early days without debt. This blog was developed with the vision of providing others with a breadcrumb trail of how to obtain wealth, and with that financial wealth. Creating a business with large sums of money does not inspire hope in those who think that they can achieve wealth but just don’t know it yet.

I too had the same problem. I thought I could make, I thought I knew that I could make it, but I didn’t know. How do I know?

I used to let the external pressures of society, family and friends cause disturbance in my energy. I put additional pressure of achieving on my shoulders. I was trying to prove that I could make it. You don’t need to!

I lumped on additional pressure to achieve goals that were months if not years ahead of me. I forgot about the journey! I forgot that everyday is a journey and everyday presents it’s very own hurdles or battles. If we don’t see the destination as a journey in itself we can wake up everyday with a battle on our hands and our journey could feel like an endless war!

Sure, everyday you may be rejected, you may be dismissed, you may be ignored, but remember that bill gates was not always a billionaire, either was Napolean Hill, or Robert Kiyosaki and the endless list of others that have aimed and achieved.

Just know that the door that holds the opportunties for you is waiting for you to open it. You may have to knock on 1,000 doors first just like Thomas Edison or Richard Reed of £120 million annual turnover at Innocent Smoothies.

So, don’t fight yourself. Take time for yourself. Be kind to yourself. Build in fun stuff for yourself. Maintain a bit of a life! Because if you do have to knock on 999 doors it could be a long journey =) act now!

Project Planning 4 Entreprenuers –”Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail”

When in a corporate environment planning is the key to accountability and execution. If things are not planned for they have a tendency to have “unforeseen” possibilities and delays.

Well you’re not a corporation but you may spend more time than needed surfing the web or doing other things. You can wake up in the morning and check mails, surf by accident, and then by lunch time you’re ready to do some work. At this time you have to spend a while catching up where you are on everything and figure the best way forward for the day.

Planning with a planner can save you the time floundering by caching some of the vital planning and analysis already done by you. You don’t have to spend the next morning the same way if you have planned and know exactly where you are and what needs to be completed to keep you on schedule. In other words, you can get up in the morning and continue on the planned path.

I like to use two systems. A general planner that breaks down everything I need to do into sizable chunks of months, weeks or days.
And a another weekly planner for finer details in “Traffic Light System.” Tasks to be completed for the week are in Green, Amber are those task that are in process and I’m awaiting a response etc.. and the Red for tasks completed. I develop the system in a word document or Excel document and then easily move tasks from one area to another.

This should keep you on track and motivated about the items that will continue your progress.

Best of luck all. Plan ahead!

Back Up Your Work

I thought I did not really need a system for this but I am wrong. Files are easily deleted by accident, viruses can ruin your computer and any other number of things can occur that will loose or save over your previous work. If the error lies in the new work that was saved over the older work then you are screwed.

Here’s the system I recommend

Have an external hard drive from day one of your new venture. That includes the research. I mean as soon as you’ve made the decision to start your own company.

On you hard drive create a back up folder. From which one folder from your laptop will be transferred to every two days.

Within the backup folder create two additional folders.

One folder will be labeled “old” and save your data there. The other folder should be labeled “recent.”

I suggest you rename “recent” to “oldV2″ before backing up your work. Then back up to a new folder and name it “recent”

I you do this you will always have two copies of your data. One version two days old and another one day old. This way, if you have saved a error over your most recent backup you won’t be stuck. You’ll have an older version available without the error.

The “old V” can be iterative by just changing the number to 3, 4, 5 and so on.

I recommend you back up your work every day. It seems like a pain but believe me I’ve just lost 2 weeks worth of work by saving an error over my older work and now I’m stuck with the error.

So above is the system I’ve developed to ensure this doesn’t happen to me again. If my business was up and running I would have lost two weeks worth of revenue from a downed website and had the costs of labour of reworking the site.

Understand that this applies to more than a website, a sales presentation, a business plan and so forth..

Best of luck!

Anger: A Silver Lining?

How easy is it to get really pissed off about something?

I often see, in the world, people angered by the smallest of things. Things that seem huge at the time but over the distance of a lifetime are very minute. Maybe one would go as far as to say even non-memorable: An instance in your life where you got really pissed off about something that ruined your day yet 10 years, 5 years, 2 years, a week ago seems now to matter not at all! No real emotional baggage taken with it. Amazing!

So what?

Well, if we can put into perspective our distant future while the action occurs i.e getting pissed off then we maybe able to sooth our emotions. To relax in a traffic jam or to find a learning from accidentally deleting 480 hours worth of solid continuous work!

I say this now because I face the choice of getting pissed off or I can realize that there is an alternative. There is a learning from it all. Various things like. Backing up work in separate locations in the future. Learn about new file recovery technology. Enhanced learning.

Sure I’m still breathing. I’m a freeman. I have choice. I choose happiness.

By the way the technology I am trying at the moment to recover this lost work is

http://www.filehippo.com/download_recuva

Enjoy life.

Yes, You Did Ask For It ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Immediately, you’ll begin reading this, analyzing this text with a preconception affront of your mind, and that concern when listened to frankly and openly, is my friends, ” I’ll tell you, If I asked for it or not ! ! ! ! ! “

Immediately, we put up barriers to protect ourselves. We arm ourselves ready for battle against any opinion put towards us. It’s all very natural.

Well, that is called your conscious. It protects your subconscious from absorbing erroneous information. The subconscious is the real soul of your being. You could imagine the root of the spinal cord being the entrance to the soul. Where one dimension meets another. I’m sure a study of those particular cells and their electromagnetic makeup would throw some interesting light on the subject. But hey, I could be wrong right?

Anyway, your conscious complies with generating the means of supplying the subconscious’s desire.

Your consciousness responds to creating you desires possible, it acts like a on of those things on railways that make trains change track – except a mini one.

Imagine your consciousness as one of these min track changers. And your life, the train.

The mini track changers can change the direction of your life but only a very small degree at a time. It counts on the momentum of your subconscious to carry on propelling your body in that direction.

So, if you wake up one day and ask yourself “how the hell did I get here?” Then it may also be good to also ask “Who the hell is behind the wheel?”

All is not over! Do not fret.

Don’t forget that your direction is carried forward constantly, like a train, and that it does not stop unless something pulls the breaks, for instance death.

You have not arrived where you currently are in life. You are still on the journey. You can still change the mini tracks.

You will soon see that once changed, you will begin to notice it is a slightly different journey. A train does not do U-turns very easily, it would take a decent amount of track to get the train in the opposite direction.

The more mini tracks you can change in your life. The closer you will be in the direction of your choice.

Like my great grandmother used to always say.

“Take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”

Set the alarm to get up a half hour earlier, go on a long walk, or a jog once a week to start. Before you know it, your momentum will care you to the destination in your vision of your future.

Stop smoking one less cigarette per day for a week. Then one more less per day the following week. You’ll eventually get your goal and you may build your confidence along the way.

“Take the first step in faith, you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step”
—–Martin Luther King Jr.

The Engineering of Consent to Purchase

Public Relations and Marketing were born and grown during the WWII. Lessons learned from this time period can be used to develop your business and it’s ability to generate leads for potential consumers, and also to increase the closing ratios ( Sales ) of those potential clients.

We know that during post-war America Frued’s ideas about the unconsciousness mind were true and that control of the masses was completely possible.

Bernay, his nephew, had brought together the government and his principles used to govern mass public behaviour. Freud had believed that deep within all humans there was an atomic bomb awaiting to erupt.

Frued’s daughter Anna had success in developing an altered worldview or world perception through preparing people’s environments in ways that lead to desirable outcomes. What occurred was an altered perception of reality. And constructs that controlled the unguided emotions deep within us that could cause wars and murder.

The thoughts that gave rise to the industry of public relations and their principles developed by Bernay’s were able to change mass perception in just once sweeping act. Paid by the tobacco company, Bernay was able to change women’s perception of smoking cigarettes in a single day and rocket the sales of cigarettes with an entirely new market created over night.

He did it simply by drawing on associations of power with cigarettes and that women can have demonstrate their equality of power to men through cigarettes; therefore, they should smoke cigarettes to demonstrate their new found power. It happened in New York and Barnay drew on an analogy between the Statue of Liberty and her burning torch, with that of the woman’s vision of earning her liberty and equality through the burning torch of the cigarette!

Of course it leads to the conclusion that our realities are realities that have been shaped by the leaders of our society. The laws, regulations, customs are all governed. We are also governed in our beliefs and morals by clergy, church, elders and government. Each of which, are designed to guide the generations coming through and control possible unrest.

Each one of us turns out very much like the other. The beliefs: such as, that we must be courteous, obtain an education before we can earn and income, and obey the laws of social progression. Be in align with what everyone else is doing. Furniture, clothes, cars and political views must all be relevant to those in society around us. We earn our acceptance and sanity this way.

Therefore with some foresight we can create the environments and paths that lead to experiences and outcomes that we choose to go rather than other choosing for us. In other words, self educate, learn the self, learn what conditions are good for your own development and growth and, most importantly, learn to think how the masses think and be able to foresee conditions. Then plan to make the outcome most optimal for your own desires.

In the end, people stand behind these “life” guides and laws.

Do you want to let them guide you or do you want to stand behind your own purpose?

Take this information as personal development guidance and learn how to create your own new worldview perception. Once you can accomplish independent thought through study and practice of truth, then you may be in a position to offer the masses what they want to purchase.

Don’t forget it all comes down to the power of words. Delivering good content that understands the customers need is very important. For ideas of how to publish good content frequently search for persuasive content writing skills.

You may even have the confidence to begin the venture of your dreams.

Consumerism!