Money Doesn’t Have to Come from the Same Sources You Lost It To
I learned this from Tim Ferris. A few years ago, I bought a car without a title. I paid $4,000 for it and when I when to sell it I couldn’t get more than $1,000 for it. The market price was $3,700, but nobody was willing to pay that much for a car without a title. I wasted three entire weeks trying to get the title for the car. I didn’t want to lose money by selling my car for $1,000. The problem with this line of thinking is that at that moment, I was making about $2,500 per week and because I couldn’t work during the three weeks I spent trying to get my title, I lost a lot more than $1,000.

We make this exact same mistake all the time. We can’t accept a loss. But, we should look at all your revenue streams as a unit and decide where your time is better invested. If you have to lose $1,000 on something to make $2,000 somewhere else, so be it. When I shared this concept with a client of mine last month, she realized that since she was making $50 per hour and hiring someone to clean her house would only cost her $15 per hour, she had to stop cleaning her house and hire someone else to do it.

Eating Left-Overs Is a Great Way to Get Started
I work with an HR consultant who has been in the corporate world for over 20 years and now decided to open her own firm. She ended her relationship with her previous company on excellent terms. The company she used to work for works with companies in the $5M-$20M range, so I told my client to ask this company to send the smaller clients her way. Smaller doesn’t mean worse. She did this and now gets a steady flow of clients without having to do much marketing work. Is there any way you can approach the big fish in your industry and take care of the clients they don’t want to serve?

If You Explain the Why and They Can Figure Out the How, You’re Working with the Right People
Smart people can figure things out if they understand they outcome you expect and why you need what you need. If you find yourself explaining your team how to do what they need to do, you might have the wrong people on the bus. Of course, there’s always the possibility that they’re awesome and you’re a control freak, so I’ll let you judge this one for yourself.

Using Off-the-Shelf Software Is A LOT Better than Building Your Own
There are a few things that can -and usually do- go wrong with custom-built software: it costs more than expected, takes longer than expected and it breaks a lot. The same goes for websites. There are awesome platforms for blogs (WordPress), forums (vBulleting), e-commerce (Volusion and Interspire), photo galleries (any of the LightBox galleries), etc. Try to use off-the-shelf solutions as much as you can. They’ll save you headaches and a lot of money.

Leave Empty Space in Your Schedule
Us, human beings, love the feeling of getting things done. If we were supposed to do 10 things today and we only did five, we won’t feel that great. That’s why we should always leave empty space in our schedules. Unexpected things come up: calls, meetings and problems we need to solve. By leaving some extra space for these unexpected tasks, you’ll be able to finish everything you need to do every day. And, if some days you finish everything by 2pm, either assign a few more things to yourself or reward your productivity by taking some time for yourself.

Who doesn’t have a business idea? Even if you’re happy working for somebody else, I bet you have a business idea that you haven’t ever told anyone about. And, chances are, in a few years (or months) someone will start the business you’ve been dreaming about and that’s when you’ll tell your friends, “I had that same idea two years ago. I knew it would work!” This happened to me so many times! Of course, I can’t start a new business every time I have a new idea because that would draft me away from my current businesses. Some people (like me) have at least one business idea each day. Other people struggle,  spending days, weeks,  months thinking about a great business idea. Why is this?

Don’t Look for the “Perfect” Idea
Look at Starbucks. They didn’t invent coffee; they created a great way to enhance the coffee drinking experience. Look at McDonalds. They didn’t invent burgers; they came up with a way to deliver food fast at a low cost. Look at Zappos. They weren’t the first online shoe store, but through amazing customer service (and free return shipping) they became the largest online shoe store.

These businesses didn’t re-invent the wheel. They found something that could be done better and did it.

Don’t look for the “perfect” idea. There are hundreds of ways you can create a better world and make a lot of money at it.

The “It’s Been Done Before” Myth
Every time someone comes to me and tells me they have an idea for a business that “has never been done before”, I start to worry. There’s a reason some things have never been done before. Let’s say you want to sell a square car. It has never been done before. That doesn’t mean there’s a market for it. Actually, the fact that it has never been done before leads me to think there’s no market for square cars.

But the real problem is when people give up on business ideas because they have been done already. Don’t do this. Going back to the previous examples, coffee existed before Starbucks, burgers existed before McDonalds and shoes existed before Zappos.

So, How Do You Come Up with Great Business Ideas?
The answer is this: “Keep your eyes open for things that you want and can’t get, or things you can’t get in a convenient way.” I’ll give you a few examples:

• A friend of mine used to live in an isolated mountain town the US Postal Service, FedEx and UPS wouldn’t deliver to. They dropped all the packages at a central location in town and people had to drive 15 miles to pick up their mail. Everyone was annoyed with this fact and started saying that they’d be willing to pay a little extra to get the packages delivered to their homes. My friend listened to them and started charging each family $10 a month to pick up their packages and deliver them daily to their homes. He had 200 clients and paid for his college working two hours a day.
• Sara, a woman I know, moved from Costa Rica to the US five years ago. She was craving Costa Rican food and she couldn’t get it anywhere. She then realized that the Latino population in the US is huge and those people missed the food they could get in their countries but wasn’t available in the US. Sara decided to import Latino foods into the US and sell them online. She does over $2M now.
• Last week I got a grill that I had to assemble myself. It was a pain in the butt and made me waste four valuable hours that I could have spent helping my clients. I would have loved to pay someone $50 to put it together for me. That store also had beautiful furniture that I wanted to buy too, but there’s no way I’ll spend two entire days assembling all those tables, chairs, beds and closets. What if someone approached this store and offered them this service for their clients? The store would increase their sales, the clients would be happier and this person would have a business.

The bottom line is this: Every time you’re frustrated about something, think about how you can make it better. Once you automate this process, I guarantee that you’ll get at least one great business idea per day.

Most people don’t like selling. I used to be one of them. However, as entrepreneurs, we need to sell stuff all the time. We just don’t have a choice. So the question is how can we overcome the fear of selling?

Sell a Great Product
This might sound like an obvious answer, but it’s not. Unless you have an amazing product that you really believe in, calling someone to sell it to will always be hard.

Understand What Rejection Really Is
Have you ever walked into a store, a salesperson asked you if they could help in any way and you said, “no, thank you. I’m just looking.”?  This happens all the time. It doesn’t mean you don’t like the salesperson; it just means that at that given time you didn’t need or want that given product. That’s what rejection is. It’s not personal. Some people want your stuff and others don’t. You don’t buy everything that is offered to you, so don’t expect your prospect to do it.

Be an Adviser, not a Seller
A seller would try to sell you something whether or not your need it. An adviser, on the other hand, will answer your questions and make a recommendation based on what he thinks you need. If you think as a seller, you’ll be thinking about the outcome (the sale) and you’ll forget about your customer needs. If you think as an adviser, you’ll realize that your customers have questions and you’re there to help them. This takes a lot of pressure of the buyer’s shoulders because he doesn’t feel you’re trying to sell him anything (believe me, people can smell a seller a mile away).

The funny part is that the harder you try to sell, the fewer sales you’ll make. I know this because I’ve experienced it myself several times. When I started to think of myself as a helper instead of as a seller, my sales increased immediately.

Liberate Yourself from the Outcome
The wrong way to think about sales is this: “If I closed the deal, it was a great call. If I didn’t close it, it was a bad call.” This is not true. Sometimes very motivated buyers will buy from you even when you do a terrible job. Sometimes a client really wants your product but he needs his partner’s approval and that’s why you didn’t close today. Focus on delivering value and helping your clients; sales will follow.

Get Rid of Excuses
We all have the perfect excuses not to call people: “my phone’s reception isn’t good here”, “he’s probably at lunch now”, “it’s the end of the month so I’m sure she’s really busy today”, “I don’t know where I put her phone number”, etc.

What you need to do is identify the excuses you give yourself and do something to eliminate them. For example, if your phone’s reception is not good where you are, you know that you need to be somewhere else (a quiet place with good reception) to call people. You should go there after lunch so lunch excuses can’t stop you. You should get a good phone with unlimited minutes and store all your contacts there.

There you go. Now you have run out of valid excuses. So, start calling your prospects and remember that your mission is to help them. If they need your product, they’ll buy it. Otherwise, they won’t. Either way, calling people is what you think it is. If you think it’s the world’s most awful nightmare, then that’s what’s going to be. If you think talking to others is fun, that’s exactly how you’re going to feel. Now pick up the phone, help some people and have some fun.

After analyzing hundreds of businesses, I realized that there was one indicator that could help me predict which companies were going to succeed and which ones were going to fail better than any other indicator.

Case 1 (On Average, Each of Your Customers Tells Two Friends About You):

1. 100 visitors multiplied by 200% = 200 new visitors.
2. The 200 visitors from Step 1 multiplied by 200% = 400 new visitors.
3. You can keep multiplying by 200% as many times as you want to see how fast your business will grow.

In this case, once you get the ball rolling, your customers and fans will do the rest of the work for you.

Case 2 (Out of Ten Customers, Nine Don’t Tell Anybody About Your Business and One Tells One Friend):
100 visitors multiplied by 10% = 10 new visitors.

10 visitors multiplied by 10% = 1 new visitor.

In this case, the trend decreases over time, meaning that the moment you stop inviting people to your site or store, your business will be on its way to death. The second thing to consider is this: Even if you have the money and time to market to new prospects all the time, at one point you’ll run out of prospects to market to.

So, What’s the Main Difference Between the First and the Second Example?
The first company GETS PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THEM and the second company doesn’t. That’s it. That’s the most important marketing lesson I’ve ever learned. If you’re remarkable, all you need to do is tell a few people about your products and word-of-mouth will do the rest. You won’t be able to stop sales from constantly growing no matter how hard you try. On the other hand, if people don’t talk about your business, you can spend thousands and thousands of dollars in marketing and your business will never take off. You might get some customers, sure, but you have a car without an engine; the moment you stop pushing it, it stops moving forward.

Then, The Question Is, “How Can I Create a Remarkable Business?”
This is my favorite part: you need to be weird. Having a better product at a better price won’t do the trick. When I say weird, I mean different, unique. I’ll give you some examples of companies that did things differently and got the whole world talking about them:

• When Yahoo! was the top search engine, their competitors tried to beat them by having more features and information. Google did something different: they offered LESS: Less clutter, fewer features and more accurate search results.
• Twitter created a new concept in blogging: posts that can’t exceed 140 characters.
• Zappos revolutionized the shoes industry by offering free rush delivery and free returns (they even pay for your postage costs if you need to return or exchange a pair of shoes.)
• Whole Foods offered a central location for premium organic foods like no one else.

So, how will you make your company unique and weird? What will you do to get some raving fans to spread the word about your business? How can you make a difference in the world instead of being just another company in your industry? I promise you that if you take 10 minutes to think about these questions, they’ll be the best 10 minutes you’ll have ever invested.

I believe that discipline is one of the most important skills an entrepreneur needs to have to succeed. After all, there’s no boss telling you to do your job, so without discipline you won’t get anything done.

However, I think that we are somewhat confused about what discipline is. We tend to think that we need to be strong enough to resist all temptations and do all the work we need to do. What I’ve discovered lately is that the best way to be disciplined is to help yourself by removing all possible temptations from the situations where you need to get your work done.

For example, I’m a rugby player and I need to train six times a week. Sometimes I train with my team but twice each week we’re supposed to train on our own. I had been skipping at least 50% of those training sessions. When I talked to my rugby friends about it, it turned out that this had been happening to them too. We made an agreement: instead of training on our own, we’d get together at the park to train. Whoever didn’t show up had to pay the other four of us $20 each. That’s $80 if you miss a practice! In two months, only one of us missed a session.

Here’s the funny part: because we all live in different parts of the city, we need to drive for 30 minutes to get to the park. It’d be much more convenient to train on our own. The problem is, it doesn’t work. We’ve already tried. Most of us are faced with situations like this one every day of our lives and we usually try to convince ourselves that driving 30 minutes to do something you can do in your own neighborhood is stupid and that we should be strong enough to not miss any training session without any extra incentives. You’re a human being; relax, take it easy. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Temptations exist. You can either make it really hard for yourself or manipulate the situations you’re in so things are easier for you.

This is how I manipulated some situations of my life to make things easier for myself:

• I wanted to eat more fruits and less junk food. So, instead of buying both at the grocery store, I only got fruits and no junk food. Now, every time I want junk food I need to drive a whole mile to the closest gas station. I’ve probably reduced my intake of junk food by 90%.
• I used to check my email several times a day and that was killing me. There’s no way to focus on something and be productive if you check your email every five minutes. I decided to tear up a $1 bill every time I checked my email during the day. Six months later, I’m out $3 and I’m 200% more productive. Not bad, huh?
• When I get very stressed out, I start sniffing. This gives me headaches and stomach cramps. I used to think that it’s part of me and I couldn’t change it. Last month I did an experiment: every time I started sniffing, I’d take a 5-minute break from work. The first week of my experiment I was really pissed at myself. I’d work for two minutes, start sniffing, take five minutes off, then work for 30 seconds, start sniffing again, take another five minutes off and so on. I couldn’t get any work done. But little by little I started associating the sniffing with the punishment and I stopped doing it. Now it probably happens once or twice a day, but I don’t have the headaches or stomach cramps anymore.

This post is a little different from my usual Internet marketing posts, but being disciplined is extremely important, and I found a technique that worked for me and wanted to share it with you. I hope it was helpful. Talk to you soon.

A few years ago, I read The 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferris. Every business book I had read before it talked about how to increase revenues and make more money. The 4-Hour Workweek was different. It talked about making ENOUGH money to live the kind of life you want. Interesting, isn’t it? I never thought there was such thing as enough money. I mean, if you can have more, why would you settle for less, right?

About two weeks later I read an interview in which one of the founders of PayPal -a guy worth tens of millions of dollars- was telling how he sold his Porsche Boxster and replaced it with a much more affordable Toyota Prius. He said that when you have a Boxster, you want a Porsche 911, and once you have the 911, you want a Ferrari. Our minds get used to what we have quickly and, all too soon, what we have isn’t enough. He said he wanted to be a Prius guy, not a Ferrari guy.

Think about it: when you’re a Ferrari person, people have huge expectations about you and you have a lot more pressure on your shoulders than a Prius person. If you’re thinking: “that might be true, but a Ferrari will make me much happier than a Prius”, let me share the results of a research performed by Dan Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness.

He measured the happiness levels of two groups of people:

• Recent lottery winners
• Folks who recently lost both legs

A week after the events (winning the lottery or losing their legs), the lottery group was a lot happier than the other group. But, six months after the events, both groups had equal levels of happiness. This is because, after a while, you get used to your new situation, you accept it and it becomes part of your life. In fact, during periods of my life when I was pretty broke, I wasn’t less happy than I am now.

This doesn’t mean that I didn’t work hard to get out of my financial problems. I saw them as a challenge that I wanted to overcome (and I did). But, I learned a few lessons:

• Happiness doesn’t depend on how much money I make. I know countless happy, poor people and unhappy, rich folks. I bet you do, too.
• There are periods in our life when we feel like getting to the next level, and we should. But, there are also periods when we feel happy where we are and we shouldn’t try to get to the next level just because we can. Enjoying the place we are is a very important part of the equation. If you’re not moving forward, it doesn’t mean you’re moving backward; you’re just in one place and having a good time, and this is a great thing to do.
• Make a list of what you want, figure out how much money you need to get it all. You’ll discover that to live the life of your dreams you need a lot less than you thought.
• Don’t wait until you have a lot of money to do what you want. I wanted to have a lot of money to retire for five years and travel around the world. Once I put together a big pile of cash, I started my trip. I discovered two things: 1) traveling was a lot cheaper than I thought. I could have started my trip a few years before. 2) Being retired is boring! After traveling for six months I couldn’t help myself and I started a new business.

Making money can be a lot of fun, but you can be happy no matter how big your bank account is. (Yeah, I know this is corny, but it’s also very true.)

Yesterday, I discovered something really interesting. All the business networking books give you the same advice: help people; they’ll feel they owe you something and will want to return the favor at some point.

I love helping people but I have two problems with this piece of advice:

• When I help people, I like helping them because it’s the right thing to do, because I feel like it or because they need help. I don’t like helping people so they owe me a favor.
• I think that doing what books teach you puts unnecessary pressure on other people. I want others to help me because they want to - not because they owe me.

Because of the two points above, I never did favors for others unless I really felt I wanted to. Yesterday, I was stuck calculating some stuff for a financial report I was putting together (I’m a marketer and finances are not a strength for me.) I called a client of mine who is an accountant and I asked for help. She was thrilled that I asked for help and she solved my problem in a matter of minutes. She actually thanked me for giving her the chance to help me.

I wasn’t very surprised. I believe people love doing things for other people. It makes them feel good about themselves and appreciated.

Later in the day I emailed some of our new clients (the accountant was in this group) asking for testimonials. She was happy to write a testimonial for me. If you’ve read Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely, you’re familiar with the concept of consistency. Just in case you don’t know what this concept is about, this is a brief explanation: people like to act consistently with previous actions. If you ask two groups of people for $5 but you ask one of them for $0.10 before asking for the $5 and they say yes, that group will be more likely to give you the $5 you’re asking for than the group that never said yes to you in the past. That’s why marketers always recommend asking prospects for a tiny commitment and then ask for more instead of asking for all they want at once.

The bottom line is this: because my accountant had agreed to help me earlier in the day, it was easier for her to say yes when I asked for a testimonial. This wasn’t an experiment and I certainly didn’t try to manipulate her. This was a coincidence but reminded me of the concept of consistency. The truth is that I might have gotten a testimonial from her anyway, but consider this: my accountant was very happy that I asked her to help me and told me that I could count on her for whatever I needed. Our relationship became much stronger because I asked for a favor.

Today I started thinking that it could just be an isolated case and I decided to ask more people to help me with different stuff. They were all very happy to hear from me and they felt great when I asked them for the favors I needed. This made me feel good because I like living in a world where people enjoy helping each other and because I discovered a great way to connect deeper with some people and re-connect with folks I hadn’t talk to in a while. I suspect that one of the reasons people like helping you so much is because when you ask for help, you show you’re vulnerable, and that’s something very few people do.

That’s another piece of advice most self-help books give that I decided to ignore: be a superhero, win every time and don’t show any weaknesses.

Last week I needed to cancel a flight I booked on Continental.com. I called them and I got a message that said something along the lines of “we are no longer taking phone calls.” They didn’t give me the option to leave a message or even send an email. The message said I should go to their website and ask my questions to Alex, their “online virtual assistant.” That pissed me off. I love flying Continental, but when I call a company I expect an actual human being to answer the phone.

I finally asked “Alex” my question and I was able to cancel my reservation online, so the experience wasn’t so bad after all. Do you know what really bothered me? That nobody explained to me WHY I had to ask my question to a computer and nobody apologized for the inconvenience. Imagine how different my opinion of Continental would be if the phone message had said this:

“Hi, this is Jeffery Smisek, the CEO of Continental. I am very, very sorry that we can’t take your call. I realize you want to talk to an actual human being instead of listening to a recorded message, so please let me explain why you’re hearing this recording. We do everything we can to keep our costs down so we can pass those savings to you. That means we no longer can take all the calls we get. Let me suggest something: go to our website, click on the Ask Alex link and ask her a question. I’m 99% sure you’ll be very happy with the answer you get. But, if you are not, just email our customer support team at support@continental.com and we’ll get back to you in less than two hours. If your matter is really urgent and you can’t wait two hours, please call 888-999-0000. Thank you!”

What do you think? Would you feel better if companies explained to you why they do the things they do? Wouldn’t it be nice to get some honest, straightforward explanations instead of just more “corporate talk”?

Why Delegating Is So Hard
Most entrepreneurs and managers admit that delegating a task is one of the hardest things they have to do. You’ve heard it before: “if you want it right, you have to do it yourself.”  While that may be true in some cases, just because you’re the best at something doesn’t mean that you need to do it yourself. We all have 24-hour days and if you do everything yourself you’re putting a limit to how big your business can grow.

Focus on the Highest Revenue-Generating Tasks
Let’s say you’re a web designer. If you design all the websites your company is hired to do, you’ll spend almost all your time doing design work and won’t have any free time to get more clients. As a business owner, you should focus on the tasks that generate the highest revenues, and in most cases that is finding new clients. Hire a great designer and work on growing your business.

Hire People that Are Better than You and Let Them Do Their Job
Having great people on your team makes all the difference. If you hire whoever is willing to work for less, forget about delegating; you’ll always have to micromanage them. Hire people that are better than you and let them do their job. But remember: they’re not you. They’ll do things differently and this is not a bad thing. Avoid being a control freak; explain to them the desired outcome and let them choose the path they want to get there. Don’t expect other people to work just like you. That’s not how it works.

Have Realistic Expectations
When people do something for the first time, they almost always make mistakes. Expecting them to do everything perfectly the fist time wouldn’t be realistic. After all, it took you a few weeks or months to do it as well as you do it now. When you need to tell people they made a mistake, start by showing your appreciation for all the great effort they put into something, explain how they can do it better next time and finish by thanking them for doing such great work.

Sometimes we get so carried away by new tools, trends and advice from business gurus that we forget to do the most basic things. Think about it: when was the last time you called one of your customers and asked him about his experience with your company? When you lose a prospect to your competition, do you call her to find out why she didn’t choose you? In this article I share some of the questions I ask my clients - the clients that leave and the prospects that decide to go with our competition.

What You Should Ask Your Clients

• When you decided to hire us, have you considered other options? If so, why did you choose us?
• How satisfied are you with the way you performed in that area? (If they tell you they chose your company because of its customer service, ask them how they would rate your customer service.)
• If we could do one thing different to increase your satisfaction level, what would this be?
• How likely are you to recommend us to your friends and colleagues?

What You Should Ask Leaving Clients

• Why did you decide to stop working with us?
• What could we have done to prevent this?

What You Should Ask Clients that Seemed Interested But Went with Your Competition

• What did you like about our proposal?
• What didn’t you like about it?
• In what areas was the proposal from Company XYZ  better?
• What were the top factors that made you choose Company XYZ over us?

Be Courteous
Remember that these people have better things to do than answer your questions, so ask nicely.  Explain that their input will mean a lot to you and if they agree to answer your questions, don’t be pushy and let them know that they don’t have to answer all your questions if they don’t want. If they help you, send them a thank you letter or a small gift.

Why This Is Important
Think about it: how much could you improve your company if you knew EXACTLY WHY YOUR CLIENTS DO BUSINESS WITH YOU AND WHY OTHERS DON’T? You can spend a few years figuring it out by trial-and-error or pick up the phone and just ask the right people.