Are You Stuck In The ‘Wrong’ Mode For Business Success?

Entrepreneur v.s. Employee tasks – what’s the difference?

Just had one of those days where you were just putting out fires in your business and you feel like throwing in the towel? The reason often is due to the business owner not setting up the right systems to handle the business operations. It’s a mind-set issue you see. The role of the business owner is to eventually remove themselves from the business. Not be the "cog" in the business.

WHY? Answer: A business is more valuable when it can operate profitably, survive and grow and survive without the business owner.

The business owner needs to spend a little time EACH and EVERY day (as much as possible) to work on "Entrepreneurial tasks" and not "Employee tasks". Entrepreneurial tasks like marketing planning and documenting processes (or working with a staff member to document processes) adds significantly more value to a business than $18-$22 per hour employee tasks like making deliveries, filing, bookkeeping, etc.

For more information about which business tasks are entrepreneurial – click here.

What Richard Branson Thinks About The Late Steve Jobs (Apple)

I was very sorry to hear about the recent passing of Steve Jobs (Pixar, Apple).

Showing my age and confessing to be an early techie – I followed the rise of Apple and Microsoft in the early 1980s and was familiar with the intial Apple computers. Then, over the past three decades I read many books on the topic of technology and technology marketing. Steve Jobs was a true genius.

I came across this article by Richard Branson (Virgin) on his thoughts on Steve Jobs, Apple, having passion in business and on management styles. I thought you’d like it too.

(Under the photo is a link to the PDF version – easier to read)

PDF version – click here

Loss Of Walk-by Traffic – Don’t Let This Happen To Your Business!

I’ve been saying it for years… when it comes to marketing – you can’t simply rely on local walk-by or drive-by traffic. You are putting yourself at the mercy of the local conditions – car park changes, local council works, nearby building works, etc.

Here’s proof… have a read of this article in The West Australian newspaper this week…. One retailer has lost his franchise business, others are running at a loss and all had to lay off staff and reduce hours. We certainly feel for these business owners… not a nice thing to happen… but it does unfortunately.

Retailing requires smarter thinking – that’s why you have to look at other ways (strategies) to market and deliver your products to consumers.

Getting Things Done – Bill Glazer Style

As you may know I subscribe to an excellent marketing newsletter from Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer. It’s posted to my office from the USA and it’s filled with very timely marketing and business information. One article describes how Bill Glazer as an entrepreneur gets so much done. Here is his response :

Bill Glazer

I work. I’m willing to put forth the effort to improve my own marketing education in order to achieve the knowledge I require and I implement what I learn. I IMPLEMENT fast. I create to-do lists. I’m a BIG list guy which keeps me on track for what I need to get done and I like to assign dates next to each task. I delegate. I learned this from my management mentor, Vince Zirpoli, who taught me the definition of management is getting things done through others.

That’s great advice, unfortunately so few follow it. Many small business owners TRY to do everything which means THEY are the business and they are also the GOODWILL – it’s not a recipe for success. Being keen to find out what works and what doesn’t, I took the time to personally meet with dozens of wealthy business owners over the past five years – here’s what they had in common :

• They set business goals and targets. And targets for themselves and their staff.
• They allocate at least 2 – 8 hours per week to work ON their business not IN it.
• They take the time to improve their knowledge of marketing and business.
• They create good business systems so the systems support the staff (not the business owner).

It’s not hard to do. It’s more about mindset than anything else!

What’s Basketball Got To Do With Marketing?

A quote from Michael Jordan : "I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is precisely why I succeed." What a great attitude and what a great man! Isn’t fascinating that every great person has this type of winning attitude and ‘mindset’. After all, in sports and in business – no game or venture (or even every marketing campaign) succeeds every time.

Even successful business leaders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Donald Trump have failed with certain ventures (read their biographies to find out what they were). But, these successful business people know that one or two ‘home-runs’ can outweigh ten or more failures and make them very rich.

If something doesn’t work, try and try again. If all possible, seek mentors or experts to achieve goals faster. Our expertise here at Kinetic is ‘Great Business Marketing‘. Whether it’s business-to-business marketing (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) we aim to bring in quality leads (enquiries) into a business at the lowest cost possible.

When it comes to business attitude, we found that the wealthiest business owners have a strong ‘marketing mindset’. They understand that they need to ‘invest’ in order to achieve a ROI. For example, a business owner spends $1,000 on advertising, and brings in sales of $5,000 with a profit of $2,000.

Question is – How often would you run that advertisement? I hope you answered – "As often as possible."

Are You a Marketer or a Shop-Keeper?

Everyone who is successful in business has a mentor (or mentors) and a coach – or should have! Even Bill Gates (once the world’s richest man) had Warren Buffett (the world’s second richest man) as his mentor. One of my mentors is Dan Kennedy. I receive his paid newsletter once a month and it’s a great way to improve my business and marketing knowledge. One of the topics in the newsletter was ‘Are You a Marketer or a Shop-Keeper?‘ As I have recently been talking to a number of small retailers I found this topic to be particularly relevant.

Out of 14 retailers who I spoke to in December, only 4 (28%) understood the importance of constant promotion in a retail store. I was dumbfounded! The other 72% held the belief that doing the same things they were doing (very little) was somehow going to lead to sales increasing in their stores.

I heard that Albert Einstein quoted this definition of insanity … "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

These retailers were silently praying for a few more people to come into the store, that staff won’t call in sick, suppliers won’t increase their prices, no competitors will open a shop nearby, and that the landlord won’t up the rent this year. Dan Kennedy calls this approach ‘passive marketing’ – which actually is doing nothing at all. He said "This person is a shop-keeper and an order taker, sticking up a sign, putting goods on a table, sitting and waiting."

The only way forward is being a marketer – constantly promoting to attract new customers, get them to spend more, and return more often. That’s how businesses really improve cash-flow and increase their value.

The Business Story Behind Monopoly

Hi Mark Fregnan here. I’ve always been interested in start-up business success stories, so here’s another good one…

The Monopoly Book by Maxine Brady

The Setting

The stock market crash of 1929 caused mass unemployment for millions of Americans. For Charles Darrow, the financial problems grew increasingly difficult. Once a salesman of heating and engineering equipment, he spent the early 1930s looking for a job. He’d been feeding himself, his wife, and their son by taking any odd job he could find. He repaired electric irons, did occasional fix-it jobs, even walked dogs – when he could find someone to pay him for his labors.

It wasn’t enough, though. Now his wife was expecting their second child. He had to find a way to make more money.

To fill his idle hours, and help him forget his worries temporarily, Darrow invented things. Some of them were fun; others were probably devised in hopes that they would become profitable. He made jigsaw puzzles; he created a combination bat-and-ball, which was supposed to be used as a beach toy; he designed an improved pad for recording and scoring bridge games. They were interesting diversions, but nobody was willing to pay for them.

Darrow’s problem, of course, was not unique. Many of his friends and family were out of jobs, and were having trouble affording even such necessities as food and shelter. For them, as for most people, the movies, the theater, and any form of entertainment which cost any money at all was too expensive.

So they got together in the evenings and on weekends, when the offices of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration were closed, and they talked. And after the gloomy recital of that day’s particular troubles, the conversation would usually become nostalgic: remember the good old days?

Darrow did. For him and his wife, thinking back to the more prosperous life they had led only a few years before, some of the pleasant memories were of the vacations they had spent at one of their favorite holiday places, a seaside resort in New Jersey called Atlantic City.

The Game

One evening in 1930, Darrow sat down at his kitchen table in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and sketched out some of the street names of Atlantic City on the round piece of oilcloth that covered the table. The streets he chose were all from the same side of the city: between the Inlet and Park Place, along the Boardwalk. When he finished, Darrow was short one name, so he choose Marven Gardens, a section from nearby Margate. Probably unintentionally, he altered the spelling, and it was penciled onto his board as Marvin Gardens.

He included the three railroads that carried the wealthy vacationers to the resort, and the utility companies that serviced them, as well as the parcels of real estate of varying prices. He wanted a fourth railroad to make his board symmetrical, so he added the Short Line: actually it was a freight-carrying bus company that had a depot in Atlantic City. A local paint store gave him free samples of several colors, and he used them to color his game board. A new game began to take form in his mind.

Darrow cut houses and hotels for his little city, using scraps of wooden molding that a lumber yard had discarded. He rounded up stray pieces of cardboard, and typed out title cards for the different properties. The rest of the equipment was fairly easy to acquire: colored buttons for the tokens, a pair of dice, and a lot of play money.

From then on, in the evenings, the Darrows would sit around the kitchen table buying, renting, developing, and selling real estate. They had little enough real cash on hand, yet The Game, as they all referred to it, permitted them to manipulate large sums of money as they engaged in complex negotiations to acquire valuable blocks of property. The simple, almost crude set exerted a continuing fascination and challenge. As friends dropped in to visit, they were invited to join the game. Soon the “Monopoly evenings” became a standard feature at the Darrow home.

Then the friends wanted to take the game home with them. Each night’s winner, a bit heady with his success in the nether reaches of high finance, asked for a set of his own, so that he could show off his financial wizardry. The runner-up, convinced that he could win the next time if he could only hone his skill with a little practice, generally wanted a set too. Darrow had an overabundance of free time, so he began making copies of his board, property cards, and buildings. His delighted friends supplied their own dice and tokens, and often their own package of play money.

But the demand increased, and Darrow increased his output to two handmade sets a day. Selling them for $4 apiece, each set brought him new customers. People kept talking about the new game and playing it with their friends. Through word-of-mouth advertising alone, Darrow sold about one hundred sets, and had orders for many more. But his one-at-a-time production technique simply couldn’t keep up with the demand.

Encouraged by his friends, Darrow decided to test the game outside his personal sphere of acquaintances and friends of friends. He made up a few sets and offered them to department stores in Philadelphia, the nearest city. They sold.

With the knowledge that his game was marketable, he attempted to increase his rate of production. A friend helped out by printing the Monopoly boards and the title cards. Darrow continued to paint in the colors and assemble the sets by hand. This partial automation enabled him to produce six games a day. It wasn’t enough.

Parker Brothers

By 1934, now fully aware that his interesting diversion had turned into a potentially profitable business, Darrow arranged to have the same friend print and package the complete sets. It looked like they had the problem solved, for a little while. Production was finally keeping pace with sales. But they hadn’t reckoned with the Philadelphia sales. Soon, a department store began ordering sets wholesale, in quantities far greater than anything they could accommodate. It became obvious to Darrow that he had only two choices. He could borrow money and plunge wholeheartedly into the game business, or he could sell Monopoly to an established game company. Darrow wrote to Parker Brothers, then as now one of the world’s major game manufacturers and distributors, to see if the company would be interested in producing and marketing the game on a national basis.

Parker brothers had by then been in business for half a century, and had become accustomed to enthusiastic inventors sending in new game creations. Some of the ideas had even proven marketable, but, by and large, the company’s managers tended to trust the creativity of their own staff far more than they did an unproven novice.

Although Parker Brothers thought the basic framework of the game seemed possibly interesting, they handled the game routinely. Various members of the company sat down at their offices in Salem, Massachusetts, to try it out, as they do all prospective games. They played it several times and found that they all enjoyed it. But the company had evolved a set of inviolable ground rules for “family games,” which they held to be mandatory for any game that could be successfully marketed. According to the Parker precept, a family game should last approximately forty-five minutes. Monopoly could go on for hours. Parker also felt that a game should have a specific end, a goal to be achieved. (In their other board games, the players’ tokens progressed around a track until they reached the end – which might be symbolized by a pot of gold, a home port, a jackpot, or even Heaven – and the first player to reach this goal was the winner.) In Monopoly, the players just kept going round and round the board. The only goal was to bankrupt the other players and emerge still solvent yourself. Furthermore, Monopoly’s rules seemed far too complex to the Parker staff; they thought the general game-playing public would be hopelessly confused trying to learn how to handle mortgages, rents, and interest.

After testing the game for several weeks, Parker Brothers made the unanimous decision to reject it. The company wrote and informed Darrow of this decision, explaining that his game contained “fifty-two fundamental errors.” It would never be accepted by the public.

Darrow, of course, was considerably annoyed. He knew very well how people responded to his game. Despite Parker Brothers’ analysis, Monopoly was decidedly marketable. Unfortunately, however, it was far more marketable than Darrow himself; he was still unemployed. Monopoly, it seemed, was virtually his only asset.

Therefore, he went back to his printer friend, ordered the production of five thousand sets, and continued to sell the game locally. But locally included Philadelphia, and the department stores there were soon aware that Darrow was increasing his output. They began placing massive orders for the Christmas season. Darrow now found himself working fourteen hours a day just trying to keep up with the shipping.

With the game now being ordered in wholesale lots, Parker’s sales representatives soon became acutely aware that the Philadelphia stores were expecting huge sales of Monopoly the following Christmas, the traditional game-buying season. Word was quickly passed back to corporate headquarters in Salem, where the issue was deemed worthy of reconsideration. Then, to top things off, a major New York toy and game store, the prestigious F. A. O. Schwarz, bought two hundred sets out of the original five thousand printing.

Shortly afterwards, a friend telephoned Saly Barton (daughter of Parker Brothers’ founder, George Parker) to rave about a wonderful new game she had purchased at F. A. O. Schwarz. It was called Monopoly, and it was hard to come by and in short supply. The friend suggested that Mrs. Barton tell Parker Brothers about it. Sally did. She told her husband, Robert B. M. Barton, who happened to be the president of the company. Curious about a competitor’s product, he purchased a copy of the game at F. A. O. Schwarz, took it home and wound up playing it until 1 A.M. The next day, Barton wrote to Darrow, and three days later they met at Parker Brothers’ New York sales office in the Flatiron Building.

Parker Brothers offered to buy the game outright and give Darrow royalties on all sets sold. The company insisted, though, on making some revisions which would refine the game and clarify the rules. Some of the staff were still concerned about the indefinite playing time, so they agreed to market the original version as long as Darrow permitted them to develop a variation of the game which could be played in less time. This shorter version was to be printed along with the general rules, to give the public an option.

Darrow agreed and the contract was signed. Later, in explaining why he had decided to sell his brainchild, Darrow related his decision to the monetary commitment he would have otherwise had to make in order to keep producing the game himself. “Taking the precepts of Monopoly to heart,” he said, “I did not care to speculate.” Years afterward, commenting on the final offer from Parker Brothers, he wrote: “I gladly accepted and have never regretted that decision.”

The royalties from sales of Monopoly soon made Darrow a millionaire. He retired at the age of forty-six, to become a gentleman farmer in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a world traveler with a particular interest in ancient cities, a motion picture photographer, and a collector of exotic orchid species. In 1970, a few years after Darrow’s death, Atlantic City erected a commemorative plaque in his honor. It stands on the Boardwalk, near the juncture of Park Place.

25 Things You Absolutely Must Do To go From Nothing To Self-Made Millionaire Within The Next 7 Years …

I came across this interesting article by Bob Bly. I have added my comments in italics.

THE 25 PRINCIPLES OF BUSINESS SUCCESS BY BOB BLY:

1. Have a definition of success.
2. Live below your means – with occasional exceptions.

A good book to read about this is the Richest Man In Babylon

3. Learn a money-making skill that will pay you at least twice the national average income.

Currently the national average wage in Australia is $65,000 (March 2010 figures). To earn double this my suggestions for well-paid skills include: Sales, marketing, copywriting, computer programming, public speaking, writing.

4. Improve your level of skill or the demand for your skill until you are paid twice as much — $200,000 a year.
5. Set a financial goal of a liquid net worth of $2 million excluding primary residence by age 50.
6. If you are going to have children, have them young.

Not so sure about this one – I’m 40 now and I enjoy spending time with my young son very much.

7. Assign a dollar value to your time and outsource everything you can, except what you are great at, to people who charge less than your hourly rate.

This is very important! Most small businesses I work with try to do everything themselves and work 60 hours (plus) per week. I usually initiate a program to delegate more low-skill level tasks to other staff (and external contractors).

8. Learn how to negotiate win-win deals.
9. Be a specialist, not a generalist; focus on core skills, markets, areas – three maximum, no more than that.
10. Micro niche
11. Become an information junkie and be sure to read in “adjacent areas”
12. Modelling

Don’t re-invent the wheel. Another word for modelling is mentor. In almost every business situation – someone has been there, done that – find out who they are and learn from them.

13. The Real McCoy Strategy

Not sure what Bob Bly is referring to about ‘The Real McCoy Strategy’ here.

14. Don’t lower price; add value
15. Do things that are important but not urgent
16. Little details count
17. Achieve balance between 4 success factors
18. Attitude of gratitude
19. Understand the best and worst investments you can make
20. Do something you love
21. Stop trading hours for dollars
22. Stop making excuses
23. Understand Robert Gibert’s success formula : SWL + SWL = SW
24. Put it in writing
25. ACTION

Lots of great ideas here – how many of them can you work towards this year?

The Real Reasons Why Small Businesses Fail

Do you know a small business that has failed?

According to a Commonwealth Bank Of Australia survey 80% of new small businesses fail in the first five years. Why is this so?

In his book, Small Business Management, Michael Ames gives the top reasons small businesses fail (in no particular order) :

• Lack of business management experience
• Insufficient capital (money)
• Too much debt in relation to cash-flow
• Poor sales
• Poor location
• Poor inventory management
• Over-investment in fixed assets
• Poor credit arrangements
• Personal use of business funds
• Unexpected growth (sounds like a good problem to have, but too much growth can lead to lower quality product or service, more returns, mistakes, hiring of unsuitable staff, overspending on stock, cash-flow problems, etc)

My thoughts on this that out of the list above ‘Poor Sales’ should be the the top of the list, though I have personally seen business fail for the other reasons too. I would re-arrange and group these reasons for business failure as such :

1) Poor sales. Including poor location.

2) Lack of management experience. Including insufficient capital, too much debt, poor inventory management, over investing in fixed assets, poor credit arrangements, personal use of business funds, unexpected growth.

Both of these two main areas of business failure can be addressed by hiring experts and for the business owner to invest in their own continual business and management training.

Getting Things Done – Time Management Secrets

Once of the most common responses I get from business owners is about time – “How do I get time to work on my marketing?”, “How do I find time to systemise my business?”, “I just don’t have time to think about my strategic plans”

Hundreds of books have been written on the subject of time management and most have good suggestions, tips and ideas. But the simplest way to find out how successful people manage their time is to ‘model’ what they do. I have copied (modelled) my work habits around successful businesses people in my industry and these are ones that I have found to be the most successful:

1) Creating a daily to-do list with 3 top things to be done. Doing your best to complete those 3 tasks – usually by ‘blocking’ out time without interruptions (from staff, no phone calls, reading emails, etc). You are essentially making an appointment with yourself (or have your PA do this for you). Any uncompleted tasks are rolled over to the next day.

2) Creating a 30-day to-do list. These are tasks to be completed this month – you pull your daily top 3 from here.

3) Focusing on high leverage tasks (entrepreneurial), rather than on medium and low leverage tasks (employee).

4) Delegating, training, systemising and giving staff the authority to make decisions on their own – so your business can run without you!

Here is a list of high leverage ‘Entrepreneurial’ business tasks (this is where you should be spending most of your time)

• Strategic planning and vision for the business
• Marketing planning
• Utilising media (press releases, advertising, direct mail, etc)
• Developing business systems (admin, legal, IT, staff, service delivery, supply, marketing, sales, etc)
• Developing information material or products (every business whether wholesale, retail, service or professional services needs these)
• Looking at your products and services and keeping up with trends in your industry
• Working on business uniqueness
• Reviewing financials and ensuring a good return on investment
• Creating Joint Ventures and Strategic Alliances
• Promoting the business – developing presentations and speaking at seminars, trade shows or networking
• Reviewing staff performance, feedback and suggestions and developing staff systems for your General Manager
• Organising customer research or reviewing customer feedback
• Meetings with your ‘Mastermind Group’ – peers in business
• Meetings with your mentor(s)
• Meeting with your ‘top’ staff – financial controller, marketing, sales and general managers (these many be shared roles in a small business)
• Delegation : Staff and outsourcing

Here is a list of medium leverage business tasks

• Sales – that is, YOU making sales
• YOU supplying the services that the business sells (auto servicing, computer servicing, chiropractic care, financial planning, etc)
• YOU supplying products that the business sells (wholesale, retail)

YOUR time spent on the above tasks really isn’t that important for you as the business owner. Everyone has access to the same amount of hours in a day. Performing the above actions will limit your income.

Please note: Sales is crucial to a business – what I’m referring to is you spending a major portion of YOUR time conducting one-on-one sales for products and/or services under $10,000 (you can hire someone to do this for you).

Here is a list of low leverage ‘Employee’ business tasks

Again – you don’t want to be doing these tasks yourself – you want to systemise and hire someone to do them for you.

• Bookkeeping and Accounting
  • Data entry
  • Payroll and staff entitlement records
  • Invoicing
  • Following up outstanding payments (account receivables)
  • Tax preparation
• Inventory
  • Ordering stock
  • Receiving and inventory of stock
  • Stock rotation
• Administration
  • Staff admin
  • Opening the mail
  • Filing
  • Basic computer stuff
• Supervising and training staff (you should be working on staff systems instead)
• Answering the telephone
• Deliveries
• And so on … you get the idea…

The four time management procedures (daily list, 30 day list, high leverage, delegating/systemising) are simple to understand and easy to follow. All it takes is a bit of self-discipline initially and then it will become routine.

If you have staff there may be some resistance to change as they may be used to ‘bugging you’ every time they have a problem – but, don’t ignore them – document their frequent questions and the answers – that way they can consult training or company procedures instead. Soon you will quickly notice how much progress you have made ‘working on your business’ and not ‘in it’.

Creating Wealth by Adding Value!

Make me rich!

Everyone wants to be rich (or at least have a good disposable income). It’s human nature. Often this desire comes out of the ‘frustration’ of the daily grind (the rat race). Getting rich quickly is even more desirable, hence the search for the ‘holy grail’ of being able to create wealth the easy way, but in reality it involves some exchange of ‘value’ for money. This got me thinking – so I grabbed a few books from my personal ‘success’ library.

Here is how wealth is able to be created (in broad terms) by an individual or by a company :

• Creating / Inventing something (e.g. Apple iPod)
• Producing / Manufacturing something (e.g. Apple iPod)
• Improving something (e.g. Newer models)
• Providing a service (e.g. Settlement agent, Financial Planner, etc)
• Repairing / servicing something (e.g. Auto vehicle servicing)
• Selling (e.g. selling own manufactured product)
• Trading (buying and selling)
• Holding something (it becomes more valuable the longer you hold on to it).

Even ‘holding’ onto real estate is adding something .. time (which equates to more demand as the human population increases).

When we provide our knowledge and skills to something we are paid. For example, accounting, bookkeeping, hairdressing, auto servicing to name a few. We are paid in direct relationship too how many people can provide the same thing, the skill and expense required to attain those skills (e.g. medical degrees, etc), and the demand for those skills. How can you do ‘something’ that few other people can do (which is in demand)?

For example, someone that can touch their nose with their tongue might be neat, but how is that going to make them money? (Apart from appearing on television as a novelty).

The big money question is ‘How can I add more value, quicker and easier, and to more people?’

This is one strategy…

Use leverage

The definition of business and financial leverage is using less of your resources (time and money) to create a bigger end result (Return on Investment). Here are some of the ways you can use leverage to obtain a bigger result.

• Your Skills
• Your Knowledge
• Your Money
• Your Time

Some examples may include :

Your Skills

• Employing staff, delegating or outsourcing.
• Applying your skills to bigger projects for a bigger reward
• Creating information products (books, audio and video recordings)
• Creating business systems

Your Knowledge

• Creating information products (books, audio and video recordings)
• Creating business systems

Your Money

• Purchasing income-producing assets
• Utilising media to communicate your marketing message (e.g. advertising, direct mail, email, etc).
• Re-investing in the business (e.g. marketing systems, technology)

Your Time

• LABOUR : Employing staff, delegating or outsourcing.
• TRAINING : Training staff so they can perform their functions well.
• SYSTEMS : Introducing systems to ensure the job is done right the first time and consistently.
• TECHNOLOGY : Using technology (e.g. using video conferencing instead of travelling to a meeting).
• MARKETING : Developing lead generation systems to reduce time spent acquiring leads one-by-one.
• GROUP SELLING :Speaking and selling at seminars rather than speaking to prospects one-on-one.

Hopefully the strategies mentioned above have given you some ideas. You can also have a close look at your chosen business niche or investment area (residential real-estate, commercial real-estate, stocks, etc) and see how other successful business owners or investors have added ‘value’ or used leverage to create wealth. It’s not worth re-inventing the wheel. Find a way to copy what works and improve on it!

Attitudes (Mindset) of Successful People

Most people have a desire to be rich or be successful, yet so few attain prosperity and great wealth. This is something that I have pondered for over twenty years. So, I had a close look at my mentors and other role models like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, Anthony (Tony) Robbins and many others. I observed personal success usually occurs from a number of behavioural patterns and certain ‘attitude’ traits. Here are some of the reasons why many individuals are successful in their field of endeavours.

1] They have a life purpose or vision of what their company or life will be like in the future.

All great accomplishments begin with an idea and a vision. It’s purpose and vision that drives and motivates them.

To help you define your life purpose, click here.

To help you create a vision for your business, click here.

2] They have written down goals.

If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you’re going to get there? I know many people in my own life (including family members) that just ‘float’ along in life without direction.

Studies have shown that written down goals have a higher probability of being achieved.

Try our goal setting forms, click here.

3] A burning desire to succeed.

Think about how competitive it is to be good in a chosen field these days. You WILL encounter set backs and challenges. I like to look at these challenges as a test to see if I’m serious about achieving my goals or not.

This is where written goals help. They will highlight what you have achieved so far and will give you the extra boost to keep going.

Having a good ‘friend’ to talk to when you feel a bit ‘blue’, helps too. Ask them to be your ‘Success Buddy’.

Read about other successful people and what challenges they overcame.

4] The acquisition of specialised knowledge to achieve your goals.

I enjoyed reading about the life story of Henry Ford. He continually learnt more about building motor vehicles, hiring talented people and investing in research.

To achieve your goals you will need to master certain specialized fields or skills, such as book writing, public speaking, writing and publishing press releases, becoming an expert in engine repair, etc.

If you can afford it, hire the best skilled people you can find.

Want a shortcut? Find people that have achieved your goals and just ‘copy’ them. It might cost you a few thousand dollars, but you will reach your goals quicker with lower chance of failure.

Read, watch videos, go to seminars, conduct tests and experiments, observe all you can about your specialisation.

5] Being decisive in nature.

Successful people know how to take advantage of opportunities that come up and they make a decision very quickly. Sometimes the decision will be the wrong one, but not making a decision is really a ‘no’ decision anyway.

Rich people surround themselves with experts who assist in making informed decisions. What ‘experts’ do you have around you?

6] Utilising mentors or being a part of a mastermind group.

As already mentioned in point four and five, surround yourself with experts and also have another group of people who share similar goals as yourself.

I currently meet with my ‘mastermind’ group every week for two hours. We’ve been doing that for over one year now and the benefits are enormous.

The outcome?

There are no guarantees in life (unfortunately), BUT, I have seen (personally) many of my wealthy mentors ‘live’ the attitudes mentioned above and I strongly believe these are some of the main reasons they are so successful. Now, how can you apply them to your journey?