I've done everything I've always wanted to do, and I've had a lot of fun. Some of the highlights: I worked on Wall Street, I helped take a company public and I threw one of the biggest VC names in the country out of my office. I've worked with some of the biggest names in the online and offline space, and I've seen the insides of a lot of the biggest companies in the US.
I made my first million the old fashioned way — I worked my butt off. And I've got a lot to show for it, for which I am both humble and grateful. Understand this — I am a successful entrpreneur and I am proud of it.
Why am I sharing all of this with you? I'm getting there.
People always ask me if I have any advice for being successful. They ask if I could name the things I think have contributed the most to my success. I'd like to share my observations from thirty years of business experience. They are applicable both online and offline.
Here are my top ten tips for success:
1. Always make sure all of your emails and phone calls get returned. I make a lot of contacts and requests via email, phone or even in person. I am absolutely shocked at the number of people who don't bother to return the request. It is classless and disrespectful to ignore someone's request, and it makes them angry. Angry people tell other people how you have wronged them. The fewer people out there talking ill about you the better.
When I was at Modem Media I got between 1000 - 3000 emails a day. I was buried in emails. My assistant went in and cleared out emails when she could, forwarding the ones she knew she or one of my underlings could handle. But she left the rest for me. I would spend at least an hour a day returning them. Sometimes all I said was Call so-and-so or Thanks for the heads-up, but most of them got answered. The priority was clients, then managers then normal people. If you're not going to answer correspondence from clients or peers, don't give anyone your email address. Funny thing about most of us…if you have an email address and invite us to use it, we expect an answer. I've written three emails to Darren Rouse at ProBlogger.net. He has not answered a single one. While I think some of his stuff is pretty good, I find his unresponsiveness disappointing and I don't find him as authoritative as I used to.
I sent an email to the President of Staples (the office supply chain) on a Saturday afternoon a few years ago. I got a personal response from him the next day (Sunday), and we resolved my problem with the help of one of his EVPs. If he can respond to one of my emails, so can Darren Rouse.
2. Help anyone who asks. It doesn't matter what it is — if someone asks you to help them and you can do it, do it. Whether it entails rolling up your sleeves, writing a check, giving some valuable time or just answering a question from someone who doesn't know as much as you, suck it up and do it.
3. Always know more than most people about your industry or business. I've always been a technologist, so this has been engrained in me since I was 16. Read about things in your field every day. Go to a seminar or trade show every now and then. Participate in discussions or forums, on or off-line. It will keep you connected to the people in your industry and make you a guru. The Internet is an amazing tool for getting this done.
4. Treat your employees like gold, because they are. In my own businesses my employees get away with a lot. They are well paid, get surprise perks all the time and can come and go as they please. Some take advantage, but they don't last long. Being a jerk to your employees will always come back to bite you. It will also mean that you'll get hosed a few times, but you probably would have anyway.
Make the workplace fun, comfortable and as casual as you can. Show your employees by example how you want them to treat customers and co-workers. They are going to follow your lead. If they hate coming to work it will show in what you produce.
At Modem Media I organized a yearly barbeque in the front parking lot. We had pork, BBQ sauce from Texas and lots of other stuff I'm not going to get into here. It was a small gesture but it went a long way.
5. Acknowledge everyone who helps you advance, especially those who did not gain from it. This is another thing that I am shocked more people haven't caught on to. I said in an earlier post that I regularly comb my log files for people who have social bookmarks pointing to this blog site and send them a quick email thanking them. I stopped counting the number of people who email me back shocked that I would take the time to thank them. Why shouldn't I? They took time out to help promote my blog, and got nothing in return. A thank you acknowledges their time and effort and solidifies them as an ally. Trust me…you need all the allies you can get.
6. Befriend your competitors. This is another one that should be second nature. Yes, you are all competing for customers, but you're all frogs in the same pot of boiling water. I own the biggest wine shop in my hometown. If we don't have something that a customer wants we will call another shop and see if the customer can get it there. It was a shock to both customers and competitors that I would send customers to another store. It say it's good for the customer, so it's good business.
7. Keep your sense of humor…it's huge. My second day at Modem Media I was sent to John Hancock's Boston HQ. Modem had been working on Hancock's online/offline strategy for months. It wasn't finished and there was a lot of tension. After two days me and the head marketing weenie were called on the carpet by a screaming middle manager.
She said You have been disappointing me for two months! and continued reaming us. I waited a few beats and said Excuse me…I have only been disappointng you for a couple of days. Color drained from the marketing weenie's face, but I could tell the client was trying hard to keep from bursting out in laughter.
8. Overdeliver to your customers, let them know you are watching out for their business, and treat them like friends. I spent a lot of time on the Compaq campus in Houston. We were competing with Price Waterhouse for Compaq Direct's technical business and PW had the ear of Compaq's CTO or CFO or some such person.
But I had the trust of the person directly under that exec, and he was the one doing the work. My team was on top of everything, and we covered his back. He knew he could count on us, and he knew that we could help him navigate the jungle. We lost the account for a while, but we still had a retainer for me to fly in once a month to help out. I would fly out there, we would have lunch and I would fly back. Sometimes the conversation was technical, sometimes it was marketing-related and sometimes it was purely personal.
We eventually got the contract back because my guy knew we were part of his success, and he knew he could count on us.
9. Get a hobby, hot tub, motorcycle, drag race car, whatever. You need a transition away from business to something else. Make sure you have one. It will give your mind an opportunity to disengage and allow you to background process all of the stuff you are thinking about. Moving stuff from the conscious mind to the subconscious mind is like exercising using different muscles — it will help get results. I can't tell you how many times I have resolved problems while riding on my motorcycle.
10. Be very careful who you choose to advise you, but have a go-to team, and always defer to someone smarter than you. People mean well, but it takes far less courage to poke holes in someone's idea than it does to accentuate the positive. Keep some solid advisors around you. I have a team of all-stars that includes my wife (very practical), my attorney (one of the best business attorneys in the US), my other attorney (one of my good friends and another practical guy), and my accountant (very serious but very financially adept).
I think I know everything and I will defend my positions viciously. All of my advisors are smarter than me about something, and often they can convince me to go to their side because I remember that.
One last observation — don't give up.
Regardless of the crap you read about getting rich quick, it doesn't happen that way most of the time. Some of us make it look easy, but it isn't. That doesn't mean you can't do it.
Simple Things Randy Travis
You would think it would be easy to get people to admit that they want to be rich and then take action, wouldn't you? But no, people are very worried about firstly admitting they want to be wealthier, and then very fearful of taking action. So, as a Wealth Coach, I usually prefer to talk about Financial Intelligence rather than Wealth Creation.
In order for people to get excited enough to make the leap and join The Money Gym, we have to talk about becoming a millionaire, and the millionaires we have helped create, because most people can't often be bothered for anything less.
Unless there are guaranteed results and they are big and compelling enough, people often don't want to pick up a book turn off the tv, go to workshops and learn anything new, certainly not for anything less than millions. And they want it quick too!
Really, Wealth Creation and Financial Intelligence are very similar animals, but Wealth Creation needs to be underpinned by Financial Intelligence, otherwise the wealth will go the way of the wealth of most lottery or competition winners ? up the Swanee, spent on fast cars, big houses, champagne and very unsuitable companions!
Actually I just described my old age, if you add in long holidays in the caribbean, purple velour shell suits, with lurid hair to match, lots of bling and unfeasibly high gold sandals.
My old age will be funded from what would normally be the kids inheritance - the asset value in my property portfolio. I'll be leaving them an every increasing income producing asset but mortgaged up to the hilt. Less inheritance tax and I get the use of my money while I'm still alive and able to enjoy it.
I'll come back to the kids inheritance later.
How can you train your brain to think in a Financially Intelligent manner? I like to think of Financial Intelligence as a platform on which you build your wealth. And like any platform, it needs to have a sturdy support, which I think of as....The Four Pillars of Financial Intelligence ?.
PILLAR ONE
Pillar One is "Managing Your Mind" where you discover where you are now financially, your family history with money, where your beliefs, behaviours and attitudes to money have often come from.
Then you must look at your abundance versus your scarcity thinking and learn how to monitor that carefully because that old scarcity thinking will pop up when you least expect it.
Whenever you find yourself thinking "I can't afford it" then you need to beware! You are getting into the wrong mind set and closing yourself off to ideas.
Think instead "how could I afford it?"
PILLAR TWO
Pillar Two is "Managing Your Money" and covers budgeting, cashflow management and projections, credit management and debt busting. Knowing the difference between good debt and bad debt (and if you don't know the difference then you need to read "Rich Dad Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki fast!).
Learning how to pay yourself first rather than paying Starbucks, Vodaphone, your local curry house, Sainsburys, Egg, Total Petrol, and the list goes on??
By the way, paying yourself first does not mean spending your money on yourself rather than paying for food, it means taking the money you save from economising there, and investing it in "income producing assets" and then re-investing some at least of the income from those "income producing assets" into more income producting assets.....you get the picture!
PILLAR THREE
Pillar Three is "Make More Money" and this involves the realisation that you should never just rely on your job (JOB = just over broke remember) for your only source of income. I'm not talking about working in a pub or stacking shelves in Tesco's when I'm encouraging you to create other income sources, there are ways to make more money in less time having more fun than these activities would require. Not at all, I wouldn't insult you by suggesting such a thing.
There are many ways to create extra streams of passive income and the beauty of them is, with many of the ways we teach you in The Money Gym, you do the work once and the money rolls in thereafter, while you move on to setting up the next passive income flow.
And then why, when I suggest initially that people create extra streams of PASSIVE income from things like an internet business, rental property, a part time business or the stockmarket, do they tell me "oh, but isn't that really risky?".
NO !!!!
I thinks it's more risky to rely on your income from someone else, especially if you only have just the one stream of income. Not a risk I'm willing to take, that's for sure! I wish I had ?1000 for every time I've been made redundant just because of some whim from the board-room. Some industries are worse than others and you need to look around you at what has been happening in yours recently. Feeling nice and safe? I doubt it?
And relying on just your pension for your income when you retire, when your pension is invested in the stockmarket (a lot of people "in the know" thinks that there's a massive slide coming in the value of shares towards the end of this decade) ....??.that's risky!
PILLAR FOUR
Pillar Four is "Growing Your Money" - learning how to safely and, more importantly, QUICKLY grow your extra income flows to decent sized FURTHER passive streams of income for you. We are not talking about the paltry rates of interest payable by banks and building societies here, oh no. (I laugh out loud when I see the banks launch a 5% interest rate deposit account with such fanfare!)
No, we are talking about investing your money in the "Supermodels" of the Investment World ? vehicles that return a minimum of 20% per annum and then on to the "Big Daddy" which is when you get an infinity return on your investment.
How does this one work? This is where you pull your money out again and you still carry on earning passive income streams on the original investment.
Which means that you can put your pot of cash to work for you again and again and again, creating more and more passive income streams for you and you can see the snowball effect this can create. I have some very good friends that used the same (small) pot of cash to build a property portfolio of over 250 properties, worth ?37 million, within 10 years.
If property is appreciating at an average of 10% per annum (and in our area, historically it's been 14% per annum) you can work out for yourself what passive income THAT portfolio is generating per annum. Well, in my case you can if you have a calculator or a phone!
These are the passive income streams that you will eventually live on, but in the short term they will be re-invested to get the power of compounding ? called by Einstein the "Ninth Wonder Of The World" ? to work for you instead of against you.
Being able to compare various investments ? like for like ? and even compare a property investment to a business investment, and a stock market investment to an investment in an internet business, is a crucial skill we will teach you in the Money Gym.
It's actually very easy and this return on investment calculation can be done on the back of a beer mat in a few minutes (although you may, like me, need a tiny calculator or your phone! I only managed Grade 3 CSE Maths, you see) You need to be able to work out what your return on investment ? your time as well as your money ? will be, in order to work out if an investment is worth getting out of bed for, let alone getting in your car for!
You need to become a Supermodel of the Investment World in fact. Do you like the sound of that? I certainly did when I first realised that it was possible for me.
So if you work on enhancing the Four Pillars of Your Financial Intelligence, then you will build a firm platform for your Wealth Creation activities.
If the Lottery Winners were taught all those things, do you think a few more of them might hang on to their money?
Actually, on that topic, do you know that statistically speaking, you have more chance of an aeroplane landing on you than winning the Lottery? And that the average in the UK is a spend of ?15 a week on the Lottery? If you took that ?15 for one year, and invested it at 20% per annum, it would DEFINITELY be worth ?29,903 in 20 years.
But if you KEPT putting in your ?15 a week it would only take you 11 years to make the same money. And only 30 years to make you ?1.1 million.
With that thought I will leave you and hope that I've managed to get you excited about enhancing your Financial Intelligence with a view to creating real, lasting wealth in your life and that of your loved ones.
Oh, yes, you ARE allowed to share your wealth! What fun!
Both Matt Deangelis & Nicola Cairncross are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Matt Deangelis has sinced written about articles on various topics from Affiliate Programs, Computers and The Internet and Payday Loans. Matt DeAngelis runs . Matt is the former CTO of Modem Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. As a foot soldier in the Internet revolution, Matt devise. Matt Deangelis's top article generates over 12100 views. to your Favourites.
Nicola Cairncross has sinced written about articles on various topics from Finances, Finances and Alternative Medicine. The Money Gym eBook & Club enables bright energetic people to save money, make more money and enhance their financial intelligence. Visit us here today and start your Wealth Creation journey:. Nicola Cairncross's top article generates over 14800 views. to your Favourites.
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