Issue #2027
- WEALTHY: What’s dragging your start-up down? (Charlie Byrne)
- HEALTHY: 9 ways to de-stress your life (Michael Masterson)
- WISE: Lee Iacocca on handling stress
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- How a $10 product can mean more money than a $150 one (Bob Bly)
- When onions and incessant talkers upset the office (Suzanne Richardson)
- It’s Good to Know… about mosquitoes
- Add "harridan" to your vocabulary
Get Business Ideas That No One Else Thinks Of
"I want to start my own business, but I don’t know what to sell."
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You can find at least 100 more powerful methods for developing product ideas in ETR’s Direct Marketing Masters Edition program. If radically increasing your income with a successful home business sounds appealing to you, read more about it here:
- Patrick Coffey
ETR Insider Report: When Quality Is NOT “Job One”
By Charlie Byrne
28 jaws dropped all at once.
“You shouldn’t worry too much about the quality of your product,” Michael Masterson told about two dozen astonished entrepreneurs.
I knew what was coming next, but they didn’t, and for a moment a sense of uneasiness filled the room.
Charlie Byrne here, writing from Michael’s Business-Building Retreat in Palm Beach, Florida. Yesterday morning Michael took a look at some very interesting business growth patterns he’s discovered throughout his career.
He showed the group a sales graph from about 10 different start-ups. It was immediately clear that a start-up often struggles for up to five years to reach the $1 million sales level. But the jump to the next level of $5 million often happens much faster.
So what’s holding back the start-ups?
In many cases, Michael explained, fledgling businesses flounder because the business-builder is focusing on the WRONG thing.
To be successful, of course, you need a good product with solid benefits. But far too often, entrepreneurs obsess about perfecting their product before they’ve even discovered if there’s a good market for their precious baby.
“If you’re not spending 80 percent of your time marketing and selling, you are headed for trouble,” Michael told the Retreat attendees.
“Don’t waste time and money on ‘secondary’ considerations like finding real estate, buying office equipment, stationery, and business cards, hiring employees… and like I said, over-tweaking the product itself.
“Now, when your business hits that $5 million mark, quality should be a top priority. You have money coming in, so you have the time and resources to fine-tune your product. That way you have a bigger edge against your competition, and you’ll have a steady stream of loyal customers who will be eager to buy your back-end.
“But a brand new business should have different concerns. The first and most important consideration of any new business is its fundamental selling proposition. Can you really sell your product/service the way you want at the price you want?”
Michael went on to tell the assembled entrepreneurs the most powerful ways to determine whether their products would be viable in their particular markets.
You’d think that after three days of intense discussions the Retreat attendees would be wearing down. But each day seems to fill them with more energy. You can feel the sizzle as entrepreneurs discover new ways to boost profits, meet new joint venture partners, and implement powerful marketing techniques. We’ve got two more days to go, and lots of ground to cover.
Tomorrow morning, I’ll fill you in on another business-building secret that can help you transform your own business into a profit powerhouse.
[Ed. Note: Over two dozen smart entrepreneurs are taking their business profits to a much higher level at Michael Masterson’s exclusive Business-Building Retreat this week. The fee was high but it’s going to be well worth it for them. If you missed your chance for a personal consultation with Michael, you can see him at this year’s Early to Rise Fall Bootcamp where you’ll get proven strategies for dramatically powering up your marketing… growing your business to tens of millions and beyond… and breaking into one of the most profitable industries around… Sign up for Bootcamp TODAY (last year we completely sold out) and get $200 off.
"In times of great stress or adversity, it's always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive."
Lee Iacocca
Feeling Better and Achieving More by Fighting Stress
By Michael Masterson
Stress. It's not good for business.
According to a survey of 800,000 workers in over 300 companies, the number of employees calling in sick because of stress tripled from 1996 to 2000. In fact, an estimated 1 million workers are absent every day due to stress.
About two out of three of the workers in the survey said that workplace stress had caused difficulties, and more than 10 percent described those difficulties as having a major effect on their jobs. About one in five respondents said they had quit a previous position because of job stress, and nearly one in four have been driven to tears by it.
Okay, so you're not going to cry. But you can't lead a happy, healthy, and productive life when you're feeling crummy. You can't work well. You can't be creative. And you can't enjoy the company of others.
So if you're feeling stressed right about now... what are you going to do about it?
Looking back through the ETR archives, I see that I've written about this subject before. One of those essays put the question in a broader and more philosophical frame: Why is it, I asked, that so many people, so much of the time, are downright miserable?
Is it the existential situation - the psychological default program that kicks in when we realize we are alone? Is it the result of thinking we are alone when we are not? Or is it merely the result of too much work and not enough sleep?
Short answer: all of the above.
You can't avoid getting into a funk now and then. However, you can learn to recognize the onset of a bad mood and get yourself out of it before it ruins your day (or your life).
I should know. I'm a moody bastard. If I could gather up all the time I've spent fretting, frowning, grousing, and/or complaining, I'd have enough to become a physician and open my own emergency clinic. (Now that would cheer me up!)
Grumping around is not only wasteful, it's limiting and potentially destructive. When you feel bad, you lack the emotional strength to try new things or overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Because your energy is low, you tend to spend time on very ordinary chores, the kind of work that will ensure the same old ho-hum life.
I once read a book on optimism and pessimism that made the case that the difference between feeling sad and clinical depression is not one of kind but of degree. If that is true, two conjectures come immediately to mind:
1. Moodiness should be actively combated, because moodiness can lead to despair.
2. Despair is an extreme form of moodiness, and so some of the techniques that eliminate moodiness can cure clinical depression.
Versions of despair - cynicism, anger, and fear - have no place in your business or personal life. If you let them in, you will fail to strive or give up too easily - and those habits will cost you.
Bad feelings are usually triggered by stress - some external event that creates a feeling of emotional discomfort. To lead a psychologically comfortable life (free of unnecessary stress and open to happiness and other good things), you must learn to recognize stress in its early stages and do something to reduce it.
Avoiding a bad mood is much like avoiding a common headache: If you can feel it coming on early enough and get some aspirin into your system, you'll never be in pain. But if you wait till the pain is planted in your head, you'll have a difficult time getting rid of it.
One way to deal with stress is to eliminate the external cause. If, for example, a new client is a royal pain, figure out how to deal with him or pass him off to a competitor. If a new set of regulations is making your routine work difficult, master them and they'll cease to give you stress.
Another, sometimes more practical, way to defeat stress is to change the way you react to it. As Viktor Frankl pointed out in his classic book Man's Search for Meaning, it is impossible to control the external circumstances of our lives. We must accept what comes to us with equanimity, but we do not have to accept the way we respond.
Frankl argues that if you see a purpose in your role in life, you'll have a much easier time avoiding the stress of not knowing what to do. Two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius said, "If you are distressed by anything internal, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to the view you have of that thing. How you view anything is a power you can revoke at any moment."
That said, here are 9 ways that I have found to de-stress my life:
1. Forgive yourself for feeling bad. Depending on your biology, your upbringing, and your circumstances, you may feel blue rarely, sometimes, or often. Accept it as normal.
2. Count your blessings.
3. Take a nap. You'd be surprised by how often you can make yourself feel better simply by taking a 10-minute catnap.
4. Make sure you are getting enough sleep at night. This will not only keep your stress levels in check, it will improve your overall health. And remember this: The sleep you get before midnight is twice as good as the sleep you get afterward. ("Early to bed, early to rise... .")
5. Take regular stress breaks. If you work as hard as I do, you will be forever on the verge of a nervous breakdown unless you schedule at least two (and preferably three or four) stress breaks every working day. If you have good control over your daily schedule, you can plan those breaks between tasks. Ideally, you'll want a five-minute break every 90 to 120 minutes.
If you think you are too busy to take stress breaks, you really, REALLY need to do it. If you have no problem with the idea, you don't have enough stress in your life because you are not working hard enough. (Get to work!)
A stress break is not a stress break unless:
* You get at least 10 feet away from your desk.
* You are completely distracted by it.
* It lasts at least five minutes.
* It relaxes you.
* It energizes you.
6. Cut out the crap food. Sugar and starch are poisons. Be aware of how they affect your mood.
7. Spend as much time as you can with upbeat people. Moody people are often helpful, productive, and inspiring - but they can be an emotional drag. If your life is full of moody energy-sappers, refresh with positive friends.
8. Exercise. For many people (me included), the kind of short-duration, high-intensity exercise we recommend in ETR to improve your heart, lungs, and waistline reduces stress too. For other people, doing something like walking, biking at a medium pace, or swimming slowly is more calming when they're feeling under pressure.
9. Play. Be cognizant of which forms of play reduce stress and which add to it. Golfing is mostly, from what I've seen, a stress producer. So are most competitive sports. Yes, they're fun if you have a competitive nature... but they don't reduce stress.
Let's see. What can you do right now - while you're sitting there at your desk - to make yourself feel better and in greater control of your life? Try this - something that always works for me whenever I'm feeling overwhelmed by my workload (which is often):
Compose a list of your five most pressing incomplete jobs. Break down each job into specific tasks that can be accomplished in an hour or less. Arrange those tasks in order of priority. Then, choose one. Just one. Put everything else out of your mind and get to work on it. Immediately. No excuses.
That's what I just did by writing this essay. And now that I've done it, I'm one essay closer to catching up on my backlog than I was an hour ago.
I think I'll use this energy to write another one.
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A Wide Range of Prices Means More Customers
By Bob Bly
Recently, I sent an inquiry to a well-known and successful marketer who specializes in selling information on how to make money as a speaker. But I didn't end up buying anything from him, because the only alternatives he offered were a large cassette album or a one-year newsletter subscription. Both are fairly expensive... and I'm not ready to make that kind of commitment to the subject.
Different buyers have different perceptions of what information is worth and what they are willing to pay for it. That's why you will get more sales by offering a number of different products reflecting a broad range of prices.
Dr. Jeffrey Lant, who sells business-development products and services, has prices ranging from $4 for a report to $4,800 for a consulting service. My front-end product is a $12 book. My back end consists of a series of $7 and $8 reports, a second book for $20, and a six-tape cassette album for $49.95.
You'll find that most buyers will prefer to sample your information with a lower-priced product, such as a book, single cassette, or inexpensive manual in the $10 to $50 range.
[Ed. Note: Bob Bly is the editor of ETR's Direct Marketing Masters Edition, a program to help you start your own successful direct-mail business. Sign up for Bob's e-zine, The Direct Response Letter www.bly.com/reports.]
Unscrew Your Life: How to Deal With an Annoying Coworker
By Suzanne Richardson
What if your coworker moved your desk an inch to the left every time you went to the bathroom… put your stapler in a wiggling Jell-O mold… or got the rest of the office to call you by the wrong name all day? Even if you don’t have master trickster Jim Halpert (of NBC’s The Office fame) sitting next to you, chances are you have to deal with at least one equally aggravating coworker every day. And when it’s happening to you, it’s not so funny.
What can you do – aside from quitting your job – but sit there and seethe?
First and foremost, don’t get angry. According to Barbara Gray, director of Penn State’s Center for Research in Conflict and Negotiation, you should take a deep breath and then talk with your coworker – calmly and rationally – about what each of you needs in order to share the same work space. If the bad feelings increase rather than subside, ask a neutral third party (someone in your Human Resources Department, perhaps) to help you come to an agreement.
Robert Kelley, adjunct professor of organizational behavior at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that some annoying coworkers don’t even know they’re creating a problem. It could be the secretary who eats raw onions at her desk or the junior manager who launches into a long discussion about his band every time he sees you at the water cooler. Kelley’s recommendation is to be tactful, but honest and open about your feelings.
MaryEllen Tribby, ETR’s publisher, notes that there’s a difference between big offices and small offices. In a small office like ETR’s (with 20 or fewer people), occasional head-butting can usually be resolved one-on-one. In a larger office, where personal conflicts are even more likely, minor problems (like noise or odor issues) can be handled the same way. "However," MaryEllen says, "issues that prevent someone from doing their job or any kind of harassment should be reported to Human Resources and a senior member of the company."
"One of the biggest mistakes a manager can make," MaryEllen adds, "is to keep an employee who causes trouble. I once had to fire someone who just couldn’t get along with the rest of the team. While he was good at his job and did it well, the problems he caused were simply not worth it."
[Ed. Note: Now you can outfox, outwit, outmaneuver, outthink, and outsmart all of life's most annoying people and situations, every time. Just pick up your free copy of ETR's Unscrew Yourself e-book and get 223 pages of our most practical insider information.]
It’s Good to Know: About Mosquitoes
* The world’s deadliest animal is the female Anopheles mosquito. A carrier of malaria, this insect kills more than 1,000,000 people each year.
* There are about 144,000 mosquitoes for every person on earth.
* Mosquito repellent doesn’t repel mosquitoes. It blocks their sensors so they don’t know you are there.
(Source: Smithsonian National Zoological Park and That’s a Fact Jack! A New Collection of Utterly Useless Information by Harry Bright)
Do You Need To Start Out Small?
If you don’t have an Internet business yet, or if your company is smaller than $1 million then you need something different… something that lets you start off small.
One man I know turned $10 into over $500,000. How’s that for starting small!
- Patrick Coffey
Word to the Wise: Harridan
A "harridan" (HARE-uh-din) – from the French for "worn-out horse" – is a scolding (even vicious) old woman.
Example (as used by Angela Carter in Shaking a Leg: "With the insight of hindsight, I’d have liked to have been able to protect my mother from the domineering old harridan, with her rough tongue and primitive sense of justice, but I did not see it like that, then."
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007
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